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Title
Year
Virtual Systems – Actual Objects: Rendition of Morphosis ' Compositional Principles in the mid 1980s
2018
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Medley I/II
2018
Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s Clockwork
2018
Le squelette de la Maison du Peuple : hypothèse de restitution 3D
2017
Espaces de processus/Espaces d'analyse. Description graphique de mécanismes géométriques compositionnels et représentationnels. Los Angeles dans les années 1980 : morceaux choisis
2017
Jean Prouvé - 3D short movies
2016
Caractérisation de formes architecturales. Une approche expérimentale intégrant complexité et intelligibilité des représentations numériques
2016
Study and Rendition of Jean-Baptiste Hourlier's projection drawings
2016
Architectural Analysis & Computer Process IV
2016
Morphosis Drawings and Models in the Mid 1980s: Graphic Description of Graphic Thinking
2016
Architectural Analysis & Computer Process III
2015
Architecture « résolument » numérique : Paradigm Shift vs. paradigme albertien ?
2015
Immeuble Bessonneau à Casablanca - Hypothèse de restitution de l’état originel
2015
Reduce to Understand: a Challenge for Analysis and Three-dimensional Documentation of Architecture
2015
Analyse architecturale, modélisation 3D et narration filmique : un regard original sur quelques objets corbuséens
2015
Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand - Representation as Instrument
2015
Architectural Analysis & Computer Process II
2014
Education in Architectural Analysis through Hybrid Graphic Means: a Setup for Critical Thinking
2014
Architectural Analysis & Computer Process I
2013
Aménagement du Hall des Beaux-Arts par Lucien-Jacques Baucher
2013
Baucher-Blondel-Filiponne - 3D short movies
2012
La complexité inhérente aux modèles numériques et le paradigme de la représentation architecturale - Brèves considérations sur les pratiques contemporaines
2012
Jacques Dupuis & Albert Bontridder - 3D short movies
2011
Photomodélisation de la Maison de Verre de Paul-Amaury Michel
2010
Van Buuren House Orthophotographic Survey
2009
Al Taybeh 3D Photogrammetric Survey
2008
Architectural analysis and relevance of digital representation techniques - An educational experiment
2007
Peter Eisenman's Houses I to X
2002
EXPLORER: A Procedural Modeler Based on Architectural Knowledge
1997
POV-Ray: architectural analysis and computer rendering
1995

Emergence of pre-digital algorithmic design

Author(s): Denis Derycke

Contribution to the book Architectural Design Instruments (Edited by Sébastien Bourbonnais) from the collection Conditions of Appearance, Modes of Appropriation and Reconfigurations of Practices, London: ISTE & Wiley Editors.
Published in English & French

Abstract:
In the mid-1990s, digital technology, 3D software and algorithmic design took center stage internationally. A certain avant-garde explored new formal and spatial registers through the generation of architectural proposals resulting, no longer from a work of modeling or sculpting the form, but from the combination of parameters automatically composing the geometry within 3D programs, sometimes emanating from the field of animated cinema. This new approach had an impact, not only on the form, but also brought multiplicity and unexpectedness in the architectural configurations thus generated. Growing exponentially, the computing power of computers contributed greatly to making this new territory of experimentation possible. Before the appearance of 3D modeling software and even the generalization of digital computation , some architects had already begun to shift the stakes of design, from the architectural object, to the process likely to produce it. Influenced by structuralist thought, such an approach could be observed in many fields of creation from the 1950s onwards, and took different turns depending on the times and places where it was developed. Towards the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, some architects, mainly American, developed design processes that anticipated the digital approach that would characterize the 1990s. Although totally based on analog graphic tools, these processes demonstrated a type of system capable of generating architectural objects of a very complex formal register. According to their authors, these objects were not the direct result of their imagination, but from the composition process established beforehand. Beginning with a few elements of context, this chapter proposes – after a passage through the work of the New Yorker Peter Eisenman – to observe graphic documents and conceptual artifacts of some projects from the 1980s of the Californian group Morphosis, of which Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi were the principal associates at that time. The aim is to examine how the approach of these architects was intrinsically systemic while being based on analog graphic tools, and thus prefigured the digital algorithmic approach that emerged in the decade that followed.

Link to the book's introduction