Introduction + Digital Morphogenesis

In terms of the becoming part of the digital age, architecture saw its first major transition during the industrialization of the 19^th century. For the first time, architects challenged not just how we design buildings, but also how we construct them by means of steel and glass. The Eiffel Tower by Gustave Eiffel and the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton, both originally received scrutiny for their designs because the embodied this technological spirit of the Industrial Revolution instead of the intellectual ideals that were held at the time. In hindsight, however, we know that these two architects were way ahead of their time designing what we, over 100 years later, have come to know as skyscrapers.

Today, digital design in architecture has a slightly different meaning. We are still using the latest technology to assist with the design and build aspects of architecture; however we are not so necessarily focused on the material the buildings will eventually be made out of. Instead, we look at the form of the buildings. We challenge ourselves to come up with more and more complex curves, surfaces, and shapes in an effort to broaden our cultural and design discourse. We no longer first consider the simple platonic solids in our design. Rather we look at the program and consider what forms might embody it the best.

With the introduction of computer aided design (CAD) and Computer aided manufacturing (CAM) into the studio environment, architects have been able to create “hypersurfaces” a term coined by Stephen Perrella. A hypersurface is one that smoothly combines with any other form to create a complex curve, without any fold lines or hard edges. These surfaces are accomplished by using a relatively new form of CAD that uses three dimensions when designing. NURBS editing, or non-uniform rational b-splines, allows us as architects to design both more organic as well as more mathematically complex forms to be used as or within buildings. With NURBS, shapes such as a torus, a Mobius strip and a Klein bottle can be easily modeled and manipulated. This is due to the control points that are apart of every NURB curve.

However, architects were not the first to use this technology in design. We, in fact, borrowed it from the ship building industry. For the obvious reasons of needing to have fluid, smooth forms for ship hulls, NURBS lends itself effortlessly to that profession. This is only the latest part of a long line of borrowing that architects have partaken in. it has always been in our nature to push the envelop of design by integrating new materials, methods, and processes from other industries.