Architecture has ben constantly renovating itself in the last few years, not just for what regards projects based on futuristic visions, utopias and dystopias, but also in terms of tools for professionals. Parametric design has for example become a key architectural process, even though some of us - architecture students included - struggle at times to understand what this concept means.
The volume Parametrico Nostrano (in Italian) by Giovanni Corbellini and Cecilia Morassi (published by LetteraVentidue) tries to make things easy by analysing this word through the results of a workshop entitled "Progetti automatici" (Automatic Projects) organised last year in Gorizia by Giovanni Corbellini.
The one week workshop featured projects by four different architectural practices - Aion, Co-de-iT (Computational Design Italia), Disguincio&co and EcoLogicStudio - that involved different groups of students and young graduates.
Each practice launched a different project - explained in the volume through texts, diagrams and images - to inspire the students and introduce them to parametric design.
Aion started with paper, scissors and glue, and asked the students to create geometric figures with paper before moving onto the screen. The architectural practice highlighted in this way the importance of deciding where you want to get with your project before moving onto the digital medium.
From a visual point of view Aion's paper experiments - based on three themes, ribbons, surfaces and volumes - are extremely inspiring also for fashion and interior designers.
Co-de-IT moved from controlling the possibilities offered by parametric design and, focusing on the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino, looked at the concepts of genotype and phenotype.
Students were asked to build a modular component characterised by a set of rules (a sort of genetic code) and install it on a surface manifesting peculiar characteristics dictated by the interaction of the same initial set of rules with the geometrical properties of the specific environment surrounding it.
Developing a system based on the rediscovered turtle geometry (that at the moment is a recurrent and constant obsession in certain fields...), Disguincio&co, focused on 4D and on the time variable, conceiving a building as a virtual organism in continuous evolution. Students planned a small pavilion using these principles and adding generative values to the parameters to examine the interactions and the adaptability of different elements.
The workshop participants were divided in different groups for EcoLogicStudio project: the latter analysed the processing of landscape occupation by human beings and allowed the students to work on digital representations, recreating them through structures made with yarns.
The book also features a series of essays by the different architectural practices involved in the workshop. The last text by Giovanni Corbellini is particularly interesting since it looks at parametric design as a tool that opens up new possibilities for what regards planning and embraces the complexity of continuous variation, that is often translated in biomimetic curvilinear and fluid shapes. While wondering in which ways parametric design has introduced changes in conceiving and communicating a project, Corbellini highlights that architecture has been challenged to face various modern contradictions and has generated in recent years fascinating structures such as Philip Beesley's formations or experimental speculations like R&Sie(n)'s biomorphic urban structures capable of altering and modifying themselves in accordance with the needs of human beings.
The merit of this book (written in an accessible language) stands in showing that it is vitally important to introduce young people to new systems even in the very early stages of their architectural studies. Such introduction will allow them to come up with more radical solutions in future, but will also help them developing a critical mind open to reinterpreting technological innovations in a less desenchanted and idealistic key.
Image credits:
All images courtesy of LetteraVentidue
1. Parametrico Nostrano, book cover from Disguincio&co website
2. and 3. Ribbon and Surface projects, Aion workshop
4. Group C project, Co-de-IT workshop
5. DOME, experimental and didactic construction yard in collaboration with Aion. Francesco Lopes, 2011.
6. Co-de-iT, "Convoluted Inferences - fovea’s secret garden", installation at the Migz Festival, Moscow, 2011.
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