DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE - A SENSUAL RATIONALITY

INDIAN ARCHITECT & BUILDER - NOVEMBER 2007

“The limit of the pencil is the limit of the pencil but the limit of the software is the limit what can be done with it and we don’t
know yet.”
- Andrew Benjamin, Lecture at University of Technology,Sydney.

“The box is dead,” they proclaimed. In their 1999 publication, Move – a trilogy of books entitled imagination, Effects and
Techniques – van Berkel and Bos (she is an art historian, but increasingly participates in design decisions) posed two
questions:
How could they create effective contemporary organisational structures, and use contemporary media in a way that new
architectural effects were produced?

Less than ten years ago the architectural practice, Morphosis led by Thom Mayne still produced buildings in largely the
same way that it had done for twenty years, convepts began as initial sketches, which led to the production of hard-line
drawings and from there larger and more detailed study models and technical drawings were produced by hand. Recently,
however, Morphosis abandoned its well documented modes of working in favor of a largely digital process of production,
and Mayne and his office currently build their drawings within the domain of the computer. Physical models usually follow
from virtual models.

In recent years digitally employed techniques in architectural practice have helped to impel to eminence an aesthetic di-
mension for architecture and have re-returned it to a sensuality undervalued in Modernist and Postmodernist building.
To explain this more explicitly, the digital domain in architecture design allows us to explore and realize qualities such as
‘elegance’ which has been largely absent from the discourse of architecture. The departure from a pure formalist agenda
Is achieved as internal process are embodied as elegant qualities in architectural productions.

The focus of this article will be to understand the definition of ‘digital’ through philosophical references as interpreted by
Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Philosophy in his recent paper termed Surface Effects and its connection to presentation
and production of architecture and design using advanced modeling software such as Maya and Rhino.

Surface Effects talks about the digital tool set in regard to an established set of evolving architectural concerns and how the
advent of digital technologies is affecting the architecture profession.
What makes the paper so profound is Andrew’s journey back to history via Loos, Semper and Borromini establishing the
history of the surface in architecture and then predicting forward again to locate the revised interest in surface as given by
digital technology as a logical development in that history.

“We have today moved to a conception of the digital not as a representational device but as a design device.“
- Andrew Benjamin Lecture at University of Technology,Sydney

Digital design has freed the conventional notion and imagining of space. The digital revolution has profoundly affected
architecture at all stages right from the concept evolution to the design and execution of buildings.

“It is no coincidence that the recent evolution of architectural education towards the digital is also reflected in a paradigm
shift occurring in contemporary architectural research and practice. “
- Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect and theorist, has neatly coined this situation the ‘Box vs. Blob’ battle.(Koolhaas 2004: 70)

Today architects are grappling to negotiate the transition of configuring buildings from a set of prefab components to the
fluid forms of non-Cartesian geometry in 3D studio Max or Maya.

So what does Digital Architecture actually really mean for our houses, workplaces, public spaces and cities?

In a McLuhanite logic, the medium, or representation, through which architectural design is communicated is never neutral.
Designing - as a process of thinking, sketching and documenting spatial possibilities, is not independent from the medium
within which it occurs. For example, one might briefly consider the bold strokes of Mies van der Rohe’s charcoal stick, the
primary-color sketches of Le Corbusier and the renderings of Frank Lloyd Wright, with respect to their built work: The Sea-
gram Building, Unité d’Habitation and Falling Water respectively. In doing so, it is evident that the preferred design ‘tools’
of each architect bear strong relationship with the architectonic qualities of their buildings and spaces. If we apply this logic
today, where the tools for manipulating space now exist as software commands operating within a virtual domain.

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What shall the corresponding architecture be?

Over the last decade, architects - like many creative professionals - have taken advantage of increasing computing
processing power allied with cost-effective, advanced software programs. Whilst 2D-CAD (Computer Aided Design) has
existed for some time in the form of a ‘drawing board replacement’, the emergence of Digital Architecture is largely due an
appropriation of 3D modeling and animation software developed for the gaming and entertainment industries. However,
where most gaming environments seem to be satisfied with simulacra of ‘real’ world building stock, Digital Architects have
taken up the challenge of defining a new spatial aesthetics pertinent to the Information Age.

“ In the pre-digital domain ‘technique’ was no more than that which realized a pre-determined effect and the last thing
education should be concerned with is getting students to realize pre-determined effects. “
- Andrew Benjamin Lecture at University of Technology,Sydney.

In the digital domain ‘technique’ in a generalized sense involves the relationship between the immateriality of the software
and materiality of the product ie. Design.

Some of the well known practices whose work has had a profound impact and influence by using digital design tools are
Zaha Hadid Architects and UN Studio.

Diagram for Mercedes Benz Museum, Stuttgart

Mercedes Benz Museum, Stuttgart by UNStudio
by Unstudio

The chief techniques used by UN Studio over the last few years have been hybridization, mediation and diagrams.
It seems that UN Studio are increasingly testing spatial and experiential possibilities through dynamic parametric model-
ling in which corrections can be made within
five seconds.

The Mercedes Benz Museum at Stuttgart is not only a statement of contemporary architecture but is a fitting example of
having put the digital design process squarely on the map.
Here Ben Van Berkel has worked with a diagram that contains all the requirements of the project. It is a vector that ac-
companies him throughout the entire design process, indicating everything from spatial organisation and structural design
down to the smallest detail. The system creates a self-sustaining 3D model from the architectural drawings, and generates
services, volumes and openings.

Unlike those who use digital architecture merely for aesthetic research UN Studio sees the computer as a means of im-
aginatively managing a mathematical model without being forced by formal pre-determined solutions.

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Zaha Hadid Architects in the recent years have been using the digital tool to realize the ambition towards a new organic
language where the series of projects seek for an increasingly organic approach to the articulation of space and form.

One of the first projects to use 3D tools is the Center for Contemporary Arts at Rome which was initially composed of 2D
splines and then crucially lifted into 3D (in 3Ds Max),where the integration between the primary levels was elaborated by
means of voids, galleries and ramps.

Contemporary Arts Centre, Rome by Zaha Hadid Architects

Interestingly the existence of shared software platforms like Maya, Rhino and 3DS Max can exist as much in a school of
graphic design and fashion as they can in a school of architecture or an architectural practice. The commonality here is
the shared software platforms and the difference is where those platforms lead.
As a result one can run design studios collectively with students of fashion and architecture. This allows an overlapping
amongst designers. The digital allows these connections which didn’t exist 10 years ago and are made available for us
because of the move to the question of the digital.

Today we interpret and judge painting within the era of the photographic image. To given an example to support this,
recently the National Research Council(NRC),Canada undertook a 3D examination of the masterpiece using highly ad-
vanced equipment consisting of cameras and scanners.

The patented triangulation-based NRC 3-D laser scanner scans a low power white laser spot over the complete surface
of the painting - obverse and reverse - and produces a high resolution archival quality 3-D digital model or record of both
the shape and color of the object’s surface.
The primary advantage of using a high-resolution optical 3-D laser scanner for recording a work of art such as the Mona
Lisa is that it records a very accurate archival quality record or “3-D Digital Model” of the shape as well as the color of the
object. This record can be used to make very accurate measurements of the shape of the object, to monitor change over
time, it can be studied for art historical and conservation applications and used to prepare an interactive 3-D display

Using the digital as a design tool we now perceive things differently, we design differently and evaluate images differently.
This line of thinking is also carried on to architectural projects which have in them, digital processes that stretch from
concept to execution stage.

Andrew Benjamin says that the computer is today being used not as a representational tool but as a design tool that
hinges on the linkage between the immaterial and the material.
Here the potentiality within software which is inherently immaterial evolves the material, which is the product ie.design.
In other words, the insistent materiality that marks the language of equipment has to incorporate the complex immateriality
of software. The immaterial which has potentiality, which is the work of software has an effect on the material ie. production
of 3d meshes and NURBS surfaces of the building.

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The locus of potentiality for us now is not the humanistic gesture of imagination but the locus of invention that now occurs
with the shift from pencil to software and in that shift students and architects are discovering potentials that no one knew
existed. It therefore triggers an investigation of ‘potentiality’ outside the locus of a pre-determined image.
- Andrew Benjamin, Lecture at UTS

Therefore scripting in software is such that one cannot predict what’s going to emerge or be discovered and as far as the
process is outside the domain of a pre-determined image and the series of results are probed, what is being undertaken
is research.

A key feature of Digital Architecture is its inability to be represented by the language of traditional architectural drawings:
plans, sections and elevations. In their place, 3D photomontage/ diagrams and time based mappings constitute the design
by means of a process.

This transition in representation by using digital tools necessitates a new design methodology that is broadly defined by
the limitations of the software application.

Architects and designers need to accept the challenges posed by the digital toolkit and devise appropriate techniques
and mechanisms to exploit these challenges so as to move forward and re-define the notion of pre-digital space to newer
perceptions and experiences of space as seen on our computers.

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