AUTHORS: Lila PanahiKazemi, Andrea Rossi

Published in Architectural Ecologies: Code, Culture and Technology at the Convergence, as special issue of SYSTEMA: Connecting Matter, Life, Culture and Technology

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to propose a new perspective on the role of computational tools in architecture, and through this, to outline a model of architectural knowledge which is not closed into itself, but rather open to the contingencies of real world. By displaying the problematics generated by the adoption of concepts such as self-organization and emergence, which have posed the designer as an outsider of the design process itself (Sanchez, 2013), and focusing instead on the idea of architecture as decision-making process (Shaviro, 2009), it proposes to reconsider the possibilities for the autonomy of the discipline within its socio-political context (Zizek, 2014) (Bey, 1985). This would requires a shift in the ways of adoption of computational tools in architecture, shifting them from the generation of self-referential complexity to the definition of ecologies of interaction where the intricate relationship which architecture is called to build can be clarified, tested and understood. This could also suggest the possibility to use programming, understood as craft (Michalatos, Kaijma 2008), as basis to create novel ways of communication both within architecture profession as well as between the profession and its outside, following the idea of the architect as “incompetent master”, and allowing the introduction of new perspectives and new actors within the design process itself.

FULL PAPER HERE