The utopian love affair
Zaha Hadid, Frank O Gehry, Bjarke Ingels, Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas are all architects who hail from different parts of the world with starkly different philosophies. But what binds them all is their prolific work that is a manifestation of their urge to look beyond the ordinary for meaningful solutions to breaking away from traditional architecture. They are all renowned for their extensive use of technology in their design.
The commissioner of US patent office, Charles H. Duell once infamously said in 1899,
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
If only he’d lived to see what the world has today, he’d probably laugh at himself. The 70s and 80s may have dreamt of flying cars in the future, but we’ve had more pressing tasks at hand. A lot of what exists today was unfathomable lesser than two decades ago. The pace at which these developments happen only accelerates every day.
The development of newer technology has a direct impact on the built environment. Industrialization brought about a revolution in the way buildings are built. Steel and concrete altered the typology of buildings altogether. The invention of lift permanently altered the face of earth, sparking off a vertical race across the globe in which humans created towers higher and taller than ever before standing as a testimony to the advancement of human civilization’s eternal war against the odds.
Architecture has long reached realms beyond imagination in terms of using technology in the design process. Powered by the post-modernist school of thought which encourages in finding meaning in form beyond the function, in architecture beyond basics, we have today a beautiful marriage of computation and architecture with the products of the marriage being complex design processes such as parametric architecture and evolutionary algorithm that are modelled on tools that can generate thousands of solutions for the same problem based on the requirements of the architect.
While the pen and paper mode is still the preferred choice of an architect for their conceptualization, the processes in-between conceptualization and realization have gone through tremendous change. Initially resisted by the design community at large, due to the misconception that machines would make architects and builders redundant in the future, computational architecture has gained momentum among the design community due to the endless possibilities it offers.
Inquiring into the way abstract ideas and the needs of the buildings are merged into design, computational architecture promises unique solutions that aren’t impossible and unfathomable to the human architect. The advantage it offers is the ability to refrain from reinventing the wheel since it hasn’t been conditioned to any memory of space, and the unparalleled human speed which allows the time spent on modelling and other mundane tasks to be spent on improving the design.
While the design process is not the only aspect that has been revolutionized, the construction industry has come up with solutions to meet the demands of architects, creating systems that enable the direct implementation of these ideas such as 3d printing and coded assembly that simplifies the execution of a seemingly complex design.
Industry 4.0, as it is collectively called is a reflection of the digital era we live in. It might not be as fancy as flying cars, but to be able to have machines that serve the human thought process, and to be able to 3d print these ideas into buildings fit for human habitation, is a decent start to a future in which such technology becomes a commonplace commodity.