This is a guest post written by Andrew Armstrong, an architecture and design enthusiast, business owner, and digital marketing strategist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of UC Berkeley in 2003, Andrew enjoys Cal Football games, and chasing around his toddler son with his wife. Follow him on Twitter.
Confined Only By the Limits of Your Imagination
Architectural designs have been traditionally been limited by technology (or a lack thereof) as much as the vision and abilities of the architect. Historically, architects have been somewhat limited in the capacity to draft complex geometry, and designs using curves, spirals, or other shapes that could not be rendered via a straightedge or compass. Even with advanced computer-aided drawing tools, trying to draft multiple plans utilizing complex geometric shapes was extremely time-consuming.
Today, thanks to innovations in the field of generative architecture and design, architects can harness the power of computing to almost instantaneously generate multiple versions of a floor plan based on pre-determined size, energy, layout, and other rules in addition to geometric preferences.
Creating a Building Rather than Designing It
In the early 20th century, perhaps the most visionary architect of the time was Frank Lloyd Wright, whose designs were based upon moving past the traditional limitations of architecture through a philosophy of organic architecture. But his designs were also incredibly difficult to achieve, as his goal was not simply to design a building, but to design a building almost as though it were living; creating a building rather than designing it. This was an abandonment of a basic principle of plotting the structure first and then making determinations on how to make it fit the space.
Instead, using Wright’s final work as an example, the Marin County Civic Center makes use of a “mall” pattern to maximize the use of natural lighting during the usual functional hours of government. The structures created through organic architecture are almost a form of architectural pragmatism, to make the structure fit the area in which it is constructed and to make the interior reflect its use.
A Multitude of Possible Solutions
Organic architecture continued after Wright’s passing, but as a process it has always fundamentally been very complex. However today, with generative architecture and the use of associative and parametric modeling software programs, the complexity of this process is massively reduced.
Whereas an architect of the 20th century would have always faced the difficulty of manually drafting each variation of the structure they envisioned, generative design now allows an architect to focus on the project’s vision, and the program does the rest. As opposed to figuring out how precisely to create and draw out the “malls” of the Marin County Civic Center, a designer can now describe what is trying to be achieved with respect to natural lighting into the system, and then let the system provide a multitude of possible solutions.
These solutions can themselves be altered and modified, allowing for the creation of structural designs in minutes that might have taken even the most capable of architects days or weeks. Because computing elements of the design now allows for the breaking of the overarching structure into components, which are themselves already defined, even using complex geometric patterns such as Guggenheim spirals can be possible across multiple design variations. In short, generative architecture moves the architect from having to do the work of design to the work of structural vision and functionality.
Generative Architecture for Small Firms
All this sounds fine and well for the architect ready to try their hand, except smaller firms might find that a limitation due to the pricing of programs which can start at anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 for a license.
However, open-source solutions are now emerging which can achieve similar tasks. An example is Dynamo, which can be downloaded for free, and is now part of the Autodesk Dynamo Suite. As an increasing number of free, open-source software (FOSS) solutions continue to develop and mature, the overall price of these tools should drop even further, turning what was once a luxury reserved only for large firms into a much more accessible architectural tool.
And of course, when that happens, architecture will be someplace it’s never been, in a realm where the architect’s responsibilities shift away from the mundane to more of the creative. As Phil Bernstein, VP of Strategic Industry Relations for Autodesk opined on the Line//Shape//Space publication, through generative architecture, designers will be able to focus now on the more important parts of the process.
“Rote (and often mundane) tasks like how the pipes run through a building or the number of windows and skylights to achieve LEED certification can be automated. What an opportunity to focus less on the tedious and, instead, open design minds—all with the added benefits of time and cost savings, too.”
In the end, disruptive change is what we can expect from the future as technologies become more accessible and generative architecture enters the mainstream.
How will that play out to the small firm architect?
Hopefully, by making the design process more creative and inspiring. By being able to instruct a software program to calculate dozens of layout options for various requirements, the architect will be able to focus on how the building interacts with its environment and the aesthetics. An architect’s designs will only be confined by the limits of their imagination.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock / Sean Pavone
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