Emergence of pre-digital algorithmic design
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.
