Jan 12, 07:44 pm
Article on Skyscrapers (part 3) published: Space Odyssey 2010: Form Follows Growth
Skyscraper (part 3): Space Odyssey 2010: Form Follows Growth
George Katodrytis
The article was published in 2A (Architecture and Art) magazine, December 2006
Digital and Structural Morphology
High-rise building form can be generated by parametric and algorithmic design process of complex geometries. Parametric design consists of a set of variables and a series of relations that define a form. This form can be manipulated by altering specific parameters able to automatically adjust building data. In a parallel algorithmic universe, the modeling machine creates a new abstraction. The emphasis of the exploration is on morphological complexity. Nevertheless, the generation of high-rise concepts and forms still remains an intuitive process.
The new digital approach to architectural design is based on computational concepts such as topological space, isomorphic surfaces, and parametric skin design. Architecture is recasting itself, becoming – in part – an experimental investigation of topological geometries.
The employment of the genetic design strategies develops autonomous architectural concepts, which replace the traditional hierarchical processes of production. This morphogenetic process includes pattern, repetition and permutations.
The effect of digital media in the design of skyscrapers is enormous. Early sketches can now be seamlessly processed as three-dimensional digital models of structural efficiency, and translated as output data for fabrication of the various components.
New curtain wall design derived from the digital process and advanced CAD, adopts algorithms and parametric modeling techniques. These are based on genetic algorithms with parametric attributes.
A common approach is to define a building envelope in terms of a series of parametrically defined elements such as the structural ribs. Some forms are curvilinear, non-planar and irregularly shaped, yet precise. Furthermore, some approaches that involve rule structures seek to generate designs via various forms of growth and/or repetition algorithms. Additionally, there are approaches that seemingly abandon any kind of formal approach to shape generation but that seek to allow designers to “discover” meaningful shapes that exist within more complex geometrical patterns. Most of the approaches using formal shape-identification algorithms require specially written computational algorithms. Architects can now use advanced software to breed new forms rather than specifically design them.
Algorithms are based on non-linear wave function that through parametric differentiation organizers vectors of density. Can we then talk about fabricating of dense and large skyscrapers, employing poly-directional structural networks?
Moving beyond the design of an envelope alone, only spatial relationships may incorporate another layer, that of interiority, by “weaving” in one (enclosure) into the other (interior). There are two levels of complexity: that of weaving of the skin and that of the volume. A skyscraper then should not be seen as an object made of two separate entities, structure and skin, but as a hybrid fusion between these two.
In weaving, the linear fluidity of wrapped objects creates exciting visual forms. A repeated line gives the forms an organic and often mystical quality. Because of the predictability of a wrapped surface, their generation lends itself to scripting and procedural methods using wrapping algorithm. One can imagine a solid shape being “mummified” or wrapped at various layers.
The new space is the outcome of the synthesis between space-oriented and structure-oriented models, developing self-regulatory patterns in which potentialities are regulated by the developing structure itself. These techniques result in the simulation of evolutionary and environment based three-dimensional structures and surfaces. The new research in architecture involves structural morphology and generative modeling of architectural form. The design process now has even now turned from the mimetic into one of growth, based on given data (directions or restrictions). Algorithmic structure represents abstract patterns that are not necessarily associated with experience or perception. Algorithmic processes result from events that are often neither observable nor predictable and seem to be highly intuitive. In this sense, algorithmic processes become a vehicle for exploration that extends beyond the limits of perception.
Algorithmic Architecture employs methods for creating new architectural morphologies. By using scripting languages and working with codes it is possible to create vertical forms through methods analogous to the evolution of intelligent life: emergent behavior and self-organizing systems. It pursues various methods through which the role of the designer can shift from “space programming” to “programming space”. What the new scripts and codes can achieve is conceptual broad gestures at the beginning, and precision later on, only when the underlying geometric relationships have been defined and tested. This is an ideal process in any design, starting form broad ideas and gestures, which are then developed in detail. Beyond CAD tools and the interface of even advanced modeling software, this requires new methods. These new tools should be open-ended and programmable. As parameters change so do the variety and topological permutations. Well-established and used scripts are those that generate what is called weaves and braids. Given the specific surface or volume, they achieve an interconnected-ness of elements for bracing and strength, like continuous materials. Structurally, both tension and compression are in a new set of relationship; more a network of structural matrix. Weaves are based on parameters for surface topology description, density, and number of strands or threads. They can adopt a helicoidal or crosshatch pattern.
The computer simulation of evolutionary processes is already a well-established technique for the study of biological dynamics. This is based on mimesis and on evolutionary simulations to breed new forms rather than specifically design them. This unpredictability of the new, like an outcome of a design process, makes genetic algorithms useful visualization tools.
The tendency towards architectural autonomy might be understood as a moment of an overall societal process of differentiation. Traditionally, architecture and good design were inseparably connected with a society and with harmony. The new algorithmic evolutionary conditions give architecture an autopoiesis. The autopoietic system as a complex, historically evolving system always uses time and involves series of events in its “responses”, so that simple, predictable one-to-one correlations between environmental impacts and system responses are out of the question. Recent developments in digital technology expose a degree of autonomy that architectural discourse has established by differentiating itself from the immediacy of everyday talk about buildings, and thus the complexity of the discursive detour, which mediates a particular impact/response, should grow with the overall complexity of society.
What is important about the morphogenetic model is the degree to which it allows for a coexistence of various forces, engendering an autogenetic, autopoietic and mimetic system. Autopoietic systems produce theories of complex self-organization that nevertheless can become problematic. Self-organization or autopoiesis is thus impossible without the necessary random influx of external forces. In the case of a skyscraper, urban programs, environmental parameters, and structural tension can be introduced as forces in a dynamic field capable to infect an outcome that will be the most efficient.
One example of fusing surface and structure is the production of weaves, a tool that generates woven meshes. This script uses a grammar capable of describing and generating woven strands to a user-defined surface. It allows the user to explore patterns that can be either used to generate the building morphology or be applied to a shape established by other parameters.
The architectural process is now evolutionary and intuitive.
Can such projects actually be built? That question will be answered through the same technological construct that allowed its design process. Complex formal architectures can, and will be, facilitated by the logic used in the software to visualize them. The terminology of isoparm, Nurbs and SubDivisions, are infecting (and altering) the construction process, and the future of the skyscraper will inevitably depend upon them.
Form follows growth
A complete re-thinking of skyscraper iconography is taking place. The stacked plate approach has the added components of motion-like forms: figurative expressions, complexity, theatrical, capricious and deformed, whereby form follows deformation.
The skyscraper is the principal component of the urban transformation of many Gulf and Asian cities. It is often invested with grand aspirations, constructing the requisite image of progress and modernity. In doing so, the new structures tend toward the exuberant and the spectacular, employing decorative motifs and lighting, turning buildings into stage sets. The skyscraper is built spectacle. Today, technological innovations that first enabled the skyscraper in curtain wall technology and integrated lighting are now allowing the skyscraper to transform into multimedia communication apparatus. The contemporary skyscraper is choreographed, not designed. It distinguishes itself from its surroundings by its stature, form, and effect. The new skyscrapers act as urban landmarks, but also as urban phenomena – they are architecture as built spectacle.
To generate its biomorphic structure and vaguely unpredictable contours of the mega-structure one can map the city’s market economy forces using fluid dynamics software and produced a complex diagram. The building is thus designed to fit into its dynamically constructed context.
In most of the Gulf and Asian cities, one of the lasting impressions you take back is of the city’s congested streetscape and markets. People sell everything, everywhere. To stretch the urban marketplace vertically, growing a new, upward layering of the city maybe a new possibility.
The early science fiction vision of skyscrapers is now almost a reality. At some point fabric technology will develop self-healing biotextiles that function like an epidermis: self-repairing, self-cleaning, semi-porous membranes that will be used as supercladding over segmented structural materials. In practice, this means that buildings will merge with other buildings and/or landscape at their edges. Other fabrics with very high tensile integrity and specified rigidity will be formed in place on a balloon-like last, such that hollow, rigid, yet very strong structures can be set in place between more firmly anchored supports. Imagine a cross between the structural integrity of a honeycomb and the linear internal complexities of an anthill. Tubular spaces with no predetermined arrangement. Neighborhoods would form and reform, people would experience shifting alliances and separations on an ongoing basis.
Ground-based structures would not necessarily shift, but new labyrinths of circulation could develop, change, and disappear in response to social demands. Floors would become obsolete. Rather, we would have to make distinctions based on contiguous spaces, or devise a sub-neighborhood category equivalent to the street.
Epilogue
The new skyscraper will not be designed by extrusion and repetition, but by evolution and variation. Some of these ideas will have to be worked out structurally, earlier on: Without the structural engineering and distributions of stress, a virtual building will not evolve as a building.
During the last five years there has been an abundance of new concepts and techniques
triggered partly by some of the proposals for Ground Zero in New York and the recent explosion of high-rise construction in China. Now the focus has turned to Dubai. The current ambition of Dubai is to build its own monumental skyline: a new high-rise hysteria. This corresponds to the photogenic (camera-friendly) and telegenic (satellite-friendly) images of the city’s mega-projects. The contemporary metro-global city creates its spectacle with buildings that relate more to the sky than to the ground.
The skyscrapers of downtown and suburbia are now axonometric figures in a virtual reality, as if displayed in a Computer Aided Design interface. The oblique view of extruded spikes, lays out a city as elaborate as that of a Persian carpet. It’s how an X-ray looks, crystal clear and transparent. It is how we imagine the military sees the monochromatic world when surveilling it at night. It is as if the digital board of the processor has been blown out of proportion, the higher you go the more prestige you gain, obstructing each other’s view. Yet gazing out of the window of the 150th floor remains the most intense and solitude act so far that this century of buildings has offered.
Images above: Highrise proposal, Business Bay, Dubai, by George Katodrytis and M3AR.
Images below: Studies for a parametric 3D envelope for a highrisei, by George Katodrytis.
Filed under: PUBLISHED-ARTICLES+ Texts-CITY