this spawns off a discussion I had with a former colleague.
I showed him the link to a series of lectures on parametric design, thinking he might be interested, he replied:"these ideas are stuck in 1998"...
he's one of the most talented architects I know, used to be in decoi, and has taught me a whole lot, and I was kinda stunned by the fact that he considered parametric design as "old news".
so...what's your source for innovation? what are the websites, publications, architects, that you look up to find out what's the most advanced architecture around?
Perhaps in the rush to implement BIM and parametricism, the avantgarde have been lost or remained out of sight.
One thig for sure is that the continual cycle of adoption of processes from other disciplines feeding into architecture allows for making but not meaning. It is hard to relate to a structure built on numbers.
The first name that pops into my head when I think of avantgarde is R&Sie.
The boogey down Bartlett in a 'so-retro-it's-cool-again' kind of way, maybe. Pretty sure 'autonomy' was the avantgarde in the 60's and 70's.
Personally, I dont think there is a true avantgarde at the moment. At least in the sense that critics can point to as a theme or movement. Sure, there's a lot of good young firms doing good young work, but as far as a thematic connection... if I had to choose it might be the re-new-found interest in infrastructure and interconnections with other disciplines. For example the theme of PA30 and the WPA 2.0 competitions. But that might also be a stretch.
o no. R&Sie is no avantgarde. If anything, he is stuck in the '60.
It would be a real avantgarde if they had provided a new "social narrative' he talks so much about but failing that, an obsession with code seems to have replace any trace of intent.
Unfortunately this is actually something much more general.
I am more curious of what would happen if more would think in terms of "architecture fiction" as Kazys Varnelis suggests.
Perhaps my preconception is the result of a confusion of the new - there has been alot of new forms recently, but not new architecture. Gold is currently the in vogue colour.
And architecture is nothing if not fiction, is it not?
perhaps I am the one with preconceptions, and take it as you wish, as it comes from having wasted some time in school on this.
I fear of waking up one day and finding out that everything we used to know will have been taken over by one discipline or another and that they are better and faster.
some a&d issues propose "avant-guarde" work and themes, but it all seems to be stuff seen before...mophogenetic, biologically inspired structures, neil spiller...
I haven't looked at the bartlett in a while, and the AADRL site hasn't been updated this year it seems.
I guess BIM and parametrics really fucked the avant guarde up...it used to be their realm and now all the big commercial guys are using them, KPF and Fosters started employing all the good architects/coders around, kidnapping them from their basements and giving them offices and suits and money.
I am starting to think that any JDS project in all its gimmicky glory could be more avant guarde than any xerophytarch rendering.
now-a-days you see biomorphic structures and scripting exercises are coming from second and third year undergrads. That's probably why it's uninteresting - the grand-gesture stuff seems superficial and a bit like child's-play because now this stuff is just another design tool that's been integrated into our arsenal.
these forms were new and shocking a decade ago - now we know that we can make them pretty easily - the question is how do we incorporate this stuff into something more meaningful. it's not enough these days to just create these forms and be excited by them in and of themselves and the process that created them.
i think shop would be reluctant to call themselves avant-garde, as most on the parametric ship reject that term all together as a way of separating old-school theory driven design from production driven design.
within the context of 1969, the term "pragmatic avant-garde" is an oxymoron, no?
as michael speaks would say, the avante-garde need a manifesto. designers today need no such thing.
I would like to believe avant grade is pretty dead.
But it really isn't. And yet it is.
The premise of avant garde is much the reactionary deconstruction of formal (should say ruling?) European society due to the atrocity of WWI and the widespread use of mechanized warfare.
The idea is simply that it is humans no longer fighting humans. It is humans using machines to fights other machines being operated by humans.
Machines are and were the great savior of the classes. They brought material wealth to everyone and radically transformed class structures... why would someone radically transform the benevolence of the industrial era into a variety of malevolence that makes medieval torture seem justifiable?
Avant garde and modernism was precisely this... a protest of the social class system that had lead up to the creation that is the horror of the 20th century.
But what is kind of remotely humorous-- that after all the cardinals, bureaucrats, viscounts, dukes, lords and ladies have been displaced, we in the 21st century now have a "ruling" class using modernism (and all its forms) as status symbol. In a sense, the former middle class is now lining its various deformed mansions and palaces with abstracted and vague art that was essentially created to protest that exact lifestyle.
Never a bigger depiction of "irony."
But while the middle and lower classes put themselves on the back, they were the ones who created the monstrosities of the 20th century. They disposed former, "gentle" society. They refuse to fight on the front lines in wars. They refuse to adhere to concepts of fairness and grace.
They used nationalism, socialism, communism and all forms of "-ism" to push out old society.
So, really, with the way the 20th century has played out... the only way avant garde can move forward would be to move backwards-- that is to revive formal society, in all of its ornateness and powdered wigs, and take it to new extremes.
actually, i think AA's diploma studios present a broader and more intuitively sporadic avant look than its post graduate programs that operate on a developmental basis. below is my own half whimsical categorization under general titles. note that i have only filed the units that have an explicit computational design agenda as an end under the first title, rather than those that might use computational design as a means to an end.
dip 1,14 Material-Morphological systems and Computational design
dip 2,3,10,14 Urbanism, Politics and City-Making: urban-political ecologies/territories (critical of capitalism)
dip 5,9,11 'Aestheticological': computational/material phenomenologies and architectural fictions.
dip 7 (Re)Activism: post-disaster program-led architecture
dip 4,8, 12 Infrastructural and Topo-geographical (Re)Territorialization
dip 15 Modernism, History and Technologies
i recall more previous units (5 years back or so) being digitally concerned. also, there is more of a leftist sensibility now whereas before there was all that obsessing over brand-space and hyper capitalism and so on. just a quick sketch
there's this whole ridiculous game of trying to be more cutting-edge than everyone else instead of actually putting in the hard work to solve important problems. it's just silly tail-chasing:
- 'oh parametric stuff isn't cool any more, all the cool kids are phenomenological'
- 'pfft, phenomenological? how last week. today the blogosphere is abuzz with augmented reality!'
- 'yawn. tired old AR. i'm all about technological ecologies'
... and on and on, reinforcing the idea that the way to get ahead is to tell everyone else they're behind.
instead of asking 'how can i be avant-garde', perhaps we should be asking 'what are the most important problems in architectural theory and practice, and why aren't I working on them?'.
I agree, the work of the avant-garde today should be about addressing problems. The key problem to me is two-fold: decreased power of the profession coupled with increasing shifting of risk to architects without adequate compensation.
For those of you who work in contract management, you will recognise that construction is not about building: it is about managing and pricing risk and feeding the machine.
Architects are soft touches because they have little choice. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of architects, they are interchangeable in a project.
The key problem to me is two-fold: decreased power of the profession coupled with increasing shifting of risk to architects without adequate compensation.
For those of you who work in contract management, you will recognise that construction is not about building: it is about managing and pricing risk and feeding the machine.
Wouldnt it be a lot easier to solve our problems if we were showing any interest in solving the problems of others?
Most of the time I see architects bending backwards to accomodate the requests and whims of clients and contractors. I think this is part of the problem.
That is not to say that a course of belligerence should be adopted. Its about recognising where you are in a relationship, where you stand in relation to others and what real power you have to negotiate with.
I'd argue that architects' power has been whittled down to levels that are tenous at best.
the avant garde has never been about addressing current problems. granted that current problems dictate the mindset within which it germinates, but its aim does not seem to me to focus on the analytical pragmatics of solution-finding or professionalism as much as it is the wide ranging (iaesthetical/symbolic, social, political...etc) re-imagination/re-idealism of the discipline. if anything, that you ask the ever changing boundaries of the discipline to focus on the most banal (simply because you really cite it in its 'problem addressing' banality) testifies not to the impracticality of current architecture to address problems (problems that might not even be its prerogative) but to the proclivity to render architecture a symbolic sediment of this period's desperation. behind the pragmatic lingo is a longing for an architecural proletariat revolution of mere functionalism which we know might lead to a dark dictatorship of starkness. the "bottom line" (finding solutions) becomes an alibi to assassinate divergence and proliferation of opinion. very defensively post-crisis.
ie you are not looking for an Avant garde....you are looking for an Après-garde.
Definition accepted. My argument is this: what is the point of the avant-garde when whatever processes or dscoveries created are filtered down to a profession powerless to enact them?
I'm suggesting that there is urgent work required on readdressing power and risk issues, and that this is not necessarily confined to the pragmatics of professional practice.
i agree with fondue. i think the term avant-garde has very a specific historical context, and is not just a loose term to describe progressive thinking or projections about where the profession should go(not to say these projections aren't warranted, just not exactly what we're talking about).
for me, the term is born out of critical theory and class struggle to resist the current dogma. this includes thinking beyond just problem-solving and creating things that there is not yet a capitalist demand for.
fondue, you jumped to conclusions about what I meant by solving problems. there was absolutely no implication of a technical, functionalist, pragmatic, or analytic agenda. who am i to tell anyone what the problems of architecture they should be working on are? they might be issues of professional credibility, like they are for diabase, or they might revolve around attempts to re-image architecture wholesale, or expose a particular politic or spatiality, or undermine the very concept of architecture if you want. all i'm saying is we should be working on those things, not being preoccupied with who's more avant-garde than who.
i don't know why you felt like insulting me by calling me banal, or telling me i'm trying to assassinate divergence or control opinion.
dot, i agree avant-garde has those historical connotations, but the original poster's question seemed more generally about architectural newness.
fondue's point I believe is that the avantgarde is primarily about seduction and secondarily about offering real alternative.
I'd take a walking city any day over a rotating skyscraper. or a vertical garden for that matter.
I agree with agfa8x - my first thoughts are on a particular problem, that of power and control, and how some architects like SHop [or however it goes] are reaching beyond traditional practice by taking on some aspects of fabrication and constrution in-house.
Buy hey, I was in Greg Lynn's office in 2002 where I saw him fabricating his Alessi Coffee and tea set prototype on his own 3 axis drill out the back. Its not new, only rare.
Perhaps there is not a clear delineation of ideas from the avant-gard through to the masses.
agfa8x;
i wasn't calling you banal and i wasn't insulting you. forcing the humdrum core of our profession onto its virtual envelope and endowing it with a defensive role makes for an avant garde of banality, that is not avant garde but (thanks ckl for the correction) an arrière-garde. your person is not the topic.
perhaps, rather than project the semblance of the avant-garde on anything that seems to "address current problems", we might venture that the avant-garde is currrently dormant in this climate. the world is still reeling from the shock. the avant gardes of the immideate past now seem hubristic and tainted in retrospect.
its sadly striking that just before the crisis, many archinectors were professing how potent architecture's role was in forming society and how they really should inform planners and politicians ....and after the crisis, how many of the same are expressing its inherent impotency and conceding the power of societal formation to planners, politicians and so on.
i must have misunderstood. perhaps i should reiterate that i don't see the term 'problem' as implying any kind of professionally-oriented master discourse, nor necessarily even the existence of anything resembling a solution. Problematisation itself might be the aim. If the word 'problem' has banal connotations for you, feel free to disregard it. I intend it to convey the sense of a dissatisfaction of some kind, conjoined with the willingness to probe that dissatisfaction. This problematisation is altogether different from the novelty hunting I associate with the term 'avant-garde' in the present.
Interesting turn of conversation.
The issue seems to be between ag as pure speculation, removed from the "problem solving" whichever the problem, and an approach that considers an aim to speculation.
Almost as if one was concearned with the development of tool, the function of which can only be precisely defined once they are ready and in use, and the other was preoccupied with the definition of methodologies (that, yes, can be defined as tools too).
My initial question was more practical, as in, where to look for news, newness, new approaches and tools, new ideas and fantastical newbies...but I enjoy the "race for a definition" approach this thread has taken
disagree-parametric design relies on algebraically-computed form that is generated though mental algorithms/rhino/maya/programmatic scripts. parametric design is absolutely congruent with technology (from pencil to a computer )...a prominent critique of parametric design is that is driven by the tool, not merely represented by it....
when everyone has access to powerful software, its kinda of inevitable that their designed products will resemble the forms that that software favors, hence visual fatigue. how many infrastructural/hahid-ist civic buildings have you seen in studios/crits/proposals?
where's the avantgarde?
this spawns off a discussion I had with a former colleague.
I showed him the link to a series of lectures on parametric design, thinking he might be interested, he replied:"these ideas are stuck in 1998"...
he's one of the most talented architects I know, used to be in decoi, and has taught me a whole lot, and I was kinda stunned by the fact that he considered parametric design as "old news".
so...what's your source for innovation? what are the websites, publications, architects, that you look up to find out what's the most advanced architecture around?
the work coming out of the bartlett?
i'd agree. the bartlett.
marcos novak
There is no avantgarde at the moment.
Perhaps in the rush to implement BIM and parametricism, the avantgarde have been lost or remained out of sight.
One thig for sure is that the continual cycle of adoption of processes from other disciplines feeding into architecture allows for making but not meaning. It is hard to relate to a structure built on numbers.
The first name that pops into my head when I think of avantgarde is R&Sie.
The boogey down Bartlett in a 'so-retro-it's-cool-again' kind of way, maybe. Pretty sure 'autonomy' was the avantgarde in the 60's and 70's.
Personally, I dont think there is a true avantgarde at the moment. At least in the sense that critics can point to as a theme or movement. Sure, there's a lot of good young firms doing good young work, but as far as a thematic connection... if I had to choose it might be the re-new-found interest in infrastructure and interconnections with other disciplines. For example the theme of PA30 and the WPA 2.0 competitions. But that might also be a stretch.
o no. R&Sie is no avantgarde. If anything, he is stuck in the '60.
It would be a real avantgarde if they had provided a new "social narrative' he talks so much about but failing that, an obsession with code seems to have replace any trace of intent.
Unfortunately this is actually something much more general.
I am more curious of what would happen if more would think in terms of "architecture fiction" as Kazys Varnelis suggests.
Perhaps my preconception is the result of a confusion of the new - there has been alot of new forms recently, but not new architecture. Gold is currently the in vogue colour.
And architecture is nothing if not fiction, is it not?
I fear for architecture really.
It's probably where my motivation and sense of self-worth of.... stuck in a void between two alternative reality.
That or a minority stole it.
perhaps I am the one with preconceptions, and take it as you wish, as it comes from having wasted some time in school on this.
I fear of waking up one day and finding out that everything we used to know will have been taken over by one discipline or another and that they are better and faster.
cameron sinclair/afh is avant garde.
Perhaps there is a more pragmatic avantgarde - like shop and other architects/fabricators
when i saw the thread title, the first thing that came to mind was:
'fixing my latte at starbucks...'
"avant garde" is a dead term, just like "urban" its so not fashion foward
some a&d issues propose "avant-guarde" work and themes, but it all seems to be stuff seen before...mophogenetic, biologically inspired structures, neil spiller...
I haven't looked at the bartlett in a while, and the AADRL site hasn't been updated this year it seems.
I guess BIM and parametrics really fucked the avant guarde up...it used to be their realm and now all the big commercial guys are using them, KPF and Fosters started employing all the good architects/coders around, kidnapping them from their basements and giving them offices and suits and money.
I am starting to think that any JDS project in all its gimmicky glory could be more avant guarde than any xerophytarch rendering.
"mophogenetic"
laughing at my own typos.
the avant garde is in my sketchbook
A more appropriate term for today's situation would be the après-garde
garde-fou?
now-a-days you see biomorphic structures and scripting exercises are coming from second and third year undergrads. That's probably why it's uninteresting - the grand-gesture stuff seems superficial and a bit like child's-play because now this stuff is just another design tool that's been integrated into our arsenal.
these forms were new and shocking a decade ago - now we know that we can make them pretty easily - the question is how do we incorporate this stuff into something more meaningful. it's not enough these days to just create these forms and be excited by them in and of themselves and the process that created them.
diabase,
i think shop would be reluctant to call themselves avant-garde, as most on the parametric ship reject that term all together as a way of separating old-school theory driven design from production driven design.
within the context of 1969, the term "pragmatic avant-garde" is an oxymoron, no?
as michael speaks would say, the avante-garde need a manifesto. designers today need no such thing.
I would like to believe avant grade is pretty dead.
But it really isn't. And yet it is.
The premise of avant garde is much the reactionary deconstruction of formal (should say ruling?) European society due to the atrocity of WWI and the widespread use of mechanized warfare.
The idea is simply that it is humans no longer fighting humans. It is humans using machines to fights other machines being operated by humans.
Machines are and were the great savior of the classes. They brought material wealth to everyone and radically transformed class structures... why would someone radically transform the benevolence of the industrial era into a variety of malevolence that makes medieval torture seem justifiable?
Avant garde and modernism was precisely this... a protest of the social class system that had lead up to the creation that is the horror of the 20th century.
But what is kind of remotely humorous-- that after all the cardinals, bureaucrats, viscounts, dukes, lords and ladies have been displaced, we in the 21st century now have a "ruling" class using modernism (and all its forms) as status symbol. In a sense, the former middle class is now lining its various deformed mansions and palaces with abstracted and vague art that was essentially created to protest that exact lifestyle.
Never a bigger depiction of "irony."
But while the middle and lower classes put themselves on the back, they were the ones who created the monstrosities of the 20th century. They disposed former, "gentle" society. They refuse to fight on the front lines in wars. They refuse to adhere to concepts of fairness and grace.
They used nationalism, socialism, communism and all forms of "-ism" to push out old society.
So, really, with the way the 20th century has played out... the only way avant garde can move forward would be to move backwards-- that is to revive formal society, in all of its ornateness and powdered wigs, and take it to new extremes.
actually, i think AA's diploma studios present a broader and more intuitively sporadic avant look than its post graduate programs that operate on a developmental basis. below is my own half whimsical categorization under general titles. note that i have only filed the units that have an explicit computational design agenda as an end under the first title, rather than those that might use computational design as a means to an end.
dip 1,14 Material-Morphological systems and Computational design
dip 2,3,10,14 Urbanism, Politics and City-Making: urban-political ecologies/territories (critical of capitalism)
dip 5,9,11 'Aestheticological': computational/material phenomenologies and architectural fictions.
dip 7 (Re)Activism: post-disaster program-led architecture
dip 4,8, 12 Infrastructural and Topo-geographical (Re)Territorialization
dip 15 Modernism, History and Technologies
i recall more previous units (5 years back or so) being digitally concerned. also, there is more of a leftist sensibility now whereas before there was all that obsessing over brand-space and hyper capitalism and so on. just a quick sketch
oops, imagine away the "(critical of capitalism)" bit. that only applies to one or two units.
there's this whole ridiculous game of trying to be more cutting-edge than everyone else instead of actually putting in the hard work to solve important problems. it's just silly tail-chasing:
- 'oh parametric stuff isn't cool any more, all the cool kids are phenomenological'
- 'pfft, phenomenological? how last week. today the blogosphere is abuzz with augmented reality!'
- 'yawn. tired old AR. i'm all about technological ecologies'
... and on and on, reinforcing the idea that the way to get ahead is to tell everyone else they're behind.
instead of asking 'how can i be avant-garde', perhaps we should be asking 'what are the most important problems in architectural theory and practice, and why aren't I working on them?'.
I agree, the work of the avant-garde today should be about addressing problems. The key problem to me is two-fold: decreased power of the profession coupled with increasing shifting of risk to architects without adequate compensation.
For those of you who work in contract management, you will recognise that construction is not about building: it is about managing and pricing risk and feeding the machine.
Architects are soft touches because they have little choice. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of architects, they are interchangeable in a project.
Thank you agfa8x and diabase for turning my thoughts into words.
For those of you who work in contract management, you will recognise that construction is not about building: it is about managing and pricing risk and feeding the machine.
Wouldnt it be a lot easier to solve our problems if we were showing any interest in solving the problems of others?
oe,
Most of the time I see architects bending backwards to accomodate the requests and whims of clients and contractors. I think this is part of the problem.
That is not to say that a course of belligerence should be adopted. Its about recognising where you are in a relationship, where you stand in relation to others and what real power you have to negotiate with.
I'd argue that architects' power has been whittled down to levels that are tenous at best.
Yea,.. I guess. yea. Were fucked.
diabase and co
the avant garde has never been about addressing current problems. granted that current problems dictate the mindset within which it germinates, but its aim does not seem to me to focus on the analytical pragmatics of solution-finding or professionalism as much as it is the wide ranging (iaesthetical/symbolic, social, political...etc) re-imagination/re-idealism of the discipline. if anything, that you ask the ever changing boundaries of the discipline to focus on the most banal (simply because you really cite it in its 'problem addressing' banality) testifies not to the impracticality of current architecture to address problems (problems that might not even be its prerogative) but to the proclivity to render architecture a symbolic sediment of this period's desperation. behind the pragmatic lingo is a longing for an architecural proletariat revolution of mere functionalism which we know might lead to a dark dictatorship of starkness. the "bottom line" (finding solutions) becomes an alibi to assassinate divergence and proliferation of opinion. very defensively post-crisis.
ie you are not looking for an Avant garde....you are looking for an Après-garde.
F+FY,
Definition accepted. My argument is this: what is the point of the avant-garde when whatever processes or dscoveries created are filtered down to a profession powerless to enact them?
I'm suggesting that there is urgent work required on readdressing power and risk issues, and that this is not necessarily confined to the pragmatics of professional practice.
avant garde is such a funny way to think of the cutting edge!
i agree with fondue. i think the term avant-garde has very a specific historical context, and is not just a loose term to describe progressive thinking or projections about where the profession should go(not to say these projections aren't warranted, just not exactly what we're talking about).
for me, the term is born out of critical theory and class struggle to resist the current dogma. this includes thinking beyond just problem-solving and creating things that there is not yet a capitalist demand for.
fondue, you jumped to conclusions about what I meant by solving problems. there was absolutely no implication of a technical, functionalist, pragmatic, or analytic agenda. who am i to tell anyone what the problems of architecture they should be working on are? they might be issues of professional credibility, like they are for diabase, or they might revolve around attempts to re-image architecture wholesale, or expose a particular politic or spatiality, or undermine the very concept of architecture if you want. all i'm saying is we should be working on those things, not being preoccupied with who's more avant-garde than who.
i don't know why you felt like insulting me by calling me banal, or telling me i'm trying to assassinate divergence or control opinion.
dot, i agree avant-garde has those historical connotations, but the original poster's question seemed more generally about architectural newness.
arriere garde rather than apres-garde
fondue's point I believe is that the avantgarde is primarily about seduction and secondarily about offering real alternative.
I'd take a walking city any day over a rotating skyscraper. or a vertical garden for that matter.
I agree with agfa8x - my first thoughts are on a particular problem, that of power and control, and how some architects like SHop [or however it goes] are reaching beyond traditional practice by taking on some aspects of fabrication and constrution in-house.
Buy hey, I was in Greg Lynn's office in 2002 where I saw him fabricating his Alessi Coffee and tea set prototype on his own 3 axis drill out the back. Its not new, only rare.
Perhaps there is not a clear delineation of ideas from the avant-gard through to the masses.
In any case, we don't have alot of names here...
Aranda Lasch?
Thomas Heatherwick?
Dominic Stevens?
i dont know
agfa8x;
i wasn't calling you banal and i wasn't insulting you. forcing the humdrum core of our profession onto its virtual envelope and endowing it with a defensive role makes for an avant garde of banality, that is not avant garde but (thanks ckl for the correction) an arrière-garde. your person is not the topic.
perhaps, rather than project the semblance of the avant-garde on anything that seems to "address current problems", we might venture that the avant-garde is currrently dormant in this climate. the world is still reeling from the shock. the avant gardes of the immideate past now seem hubristic and tainted in retrospect.
its sadly striking that just before the crisis, many archinectors were professing how potent architecture's role was in forming society and how they really should inform planners and politicians ....and after the crisis, how many of the same are expressing its inherent impotency and conceding the power of societal formation to planners, politicians and so on.
i must have misunderstood. perhaps i should reiterate that i don't see the term 'problem' as implying any kind of professionally-oriented master discourse, nor necessarily even the existence of anything resembling a solution. Problematisation itself might be the aim. If the word 'problem' has banal connotations for you, feel free to disregard it. I intend it to convey the sense of a dissatisfaction of some kind, conjoined with the willingness to probe that dissatisfaction. This problematisation is altogether different from the novelty hunting I associate with the term 'avant-garde' in the present.
avante garde is OUT! trolling is IN!
Where?
Get a notion or idea
that most will resist,
and chances are
that it's avant garde.
Interesting turn of conversation.
The issue seems to be between ag as pure speculation, removed from the "problem solving" whichever the problem, and an approach that considers an aim to speculation.
Almost as if one was concearned with the development of tool, the function of which can only be precisely defined once they are ready and in use, and the other was preoccupied with the definition of methodologies (that, yes, can be defined as tools too).
My initial question was more practical, as in, where to look for news, newness, new approaches and tools, new ideas and fantastical newbies...but I enjoy the "race for a definition" approach this thread has taken
"on parametric design (...) he replied:"these ideas are stuck in 1998"..."
love it...hit the nail right in the head!!!
yeah, the guy is a genius. really.
how can anything be "avant-garde" when its principal driver/means is incredibly available to the masses (rhino's price point: $995)
oOo a vote for the apres-garde
ala the films of James O. Incandenza?
It's the mindset, not the tool.
disagree-parametric design relies on algebraically-computed form that is generated though mental algorithms/rhino/maya/programmatic scripts. parametric design is absolutely congruent with technology (from pencil to a computer )...a prominent critique of parametric design is that is driven by the tool, not merely represented by it....
when everyone has access to powerful software, its kinda of inevitable that their designed products will resemble the forms that that software favors, hence visual fatigue. how many infrastructural/hahid-ist civic buildings have you seen in studios/crits/proposals?
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