Author Description

FLUX: Architecture in a Parametric Landscape focuses on the emerging field of advanced digital design. In the last two decades of architectural practice, new digital technologies have evolved from being simply representational tools invested in the depiction of existing models of architectural space to becoming significant performative machines that have transformed the ways in which we both conceive and configure space and material. These tools for design, simulation, and fabrication, have enabled the emergence of new digital diagrams and parametric landscapes--often emulating genetic and iterative dynamic evolutionary processes--that are not only radically changing the ways in which we integrate disparate types of information into the design process, but are also significantly altering the methodological strategies that we use for design, fabrication and construction. That our current models of space are far more continuous, variant and complex, is specifically a result of the tools we are using to produce them, an inevitable byproduct of the ever-expanding capacities of digital computation and related fabrication technologies as these intersect with theoretical trajectories that long ago dismantled the social, functional and technological truths of the early part of the 20th century. After the early digital explosion of the 1990's, new forms of rigor and production have entered into the field of architecture, supporting the emergence of parametric and building information modeling and the enhanced use of computational geometry and scripting that together represent the second critical wave of digital design practices. No longer importing and (mis)using the tools of other disciplines, architects have begun to develop their own suite of sophisticated tools and processes in the pursuit of an architecture that is integrated across the disciplines as well as formally and performatively complex. This shift can be seen in the very make up of leading design firms and inst