Algorithmic Architecture

July 31st, 2008 link to (permalink)

An algorithmic design for a Hotel in Wellington, New Zealand, generated in Max Script. This is the first genuinely new movement in architecture that I have seen in the 20 years since I began.

Modern buildings are designed rather like crystals, they are a repetition of components (periodic). Natural things, however, including DNA and medieval towns are more like aperiodic crystals, with variable repetition. To create these structures, requires an algorithm rather than a single equation (that was the premise of Stephen Wolfram’s self-published tome, ‘A New Kind of Science’). Whether this is a new kind of science is debatable, however, it is certainly a new kind of architecture.

Here is a roundup of some other algorithmic architecture on another of my sites, ‘oobject’.

tags: architecture

3 responses so far »

Steve Nordquist : Sep 3, 2008 at 11:11 pm

It’s as if you’re saying patterns are fundamentally new in design, which amn’t. Telling your computer to kill itself by rendering everything at some outset is kind of new, and getting metadata to stick to autogenerated ’solutions’ so that the plan and floorplan views work is new as in 1992 MaxStudio stuff realized in 2004 (hey, your cubes up and stopped rotating!) and the nice artsy citation thing kind of has fail stuck to it, erm….you YouTube Design Wonkabee. Crank 10,000 of these though, and you’ll have a bit of consideration to your credit; maybe a decent paper and better videos.
Hagen Das : Oct 31, 2008 at 1:48 am

Steve (above) is a douche.
admin : Oct 31, 2008 at 9:32 am

@Hagen. Well it does sound like he hasn’t ever worked in an architect’s office.