anchor
No Snake in the Garden of Material Ecology (yet)
Bruce Sterling on Neri Oxman:
"An antelope is graceful and beautiful because clumsy antelopes get shredded and devoured by predators. You don't have any such thing, as it hasn't been invented."
Abitare
7 Comments
765, what about this quote from right before yours.
"Biomorphic algorithms radiate a weird beauty, yet they're certainly not ecologies. Because ecologies have quality control: ecologies have natural selection."
Are buildings suppose to be ecologies? Or simply exhibit/apply ecological functions?
Ultimately though i think his fundamental poitn is accurate. If it becomes all about fabrication and/via algorithms, will it be controlled? Will one be able to criticise it, as he writes don't kid youself "everyone will be doing it.".....
Well: consider Modern architecture. At first there was no agreed-upon set of criteria by which to make aesthetic judgements of that work; most people just thought it looked weird and new. As the work became more common, it became easy to see when one building was "better" than another, though scale, proportion, etc. - all the old school criteria, but adjusted to work with the proportions that were now available via tube steel columns, for example.
I'm guessing even when everyone is algorhythm-ing (purposely misspelled to prove my point) we'll be able to figure out who i doing it well and who is doing it poorly - and out criteria will develop as the possibilities do.
some of the sections of the Verb Boogazine: Natures are good examples of this stuff.
almost without fail, when people who are working with these tools talk about their process, there is an assumption that, by virtue of the form being derived from an algorithm, it has an a priori legitimacy. there is an effort to subtract the judgment of the designer, and refer back to the scientific authority of the algorithm. which is complete bullshit obviously, as the judgment of the designer is the only selection pressure in the process -- the only thing that privileges this algorithmic output over that one. I have no doubt that one day we'll be using them meaningfully, but from what I've seen so far they are little more than a way of generating formal complexity on the cheap, and cloaking one's uneasiness with the untethered, arbitrary aspects of design judgment in the popular esteem of science...
Hmm, interesting and very good point, subtect. So by using an algorithm to determine my kitchen layout, I wouldn't feel that queasy nervousness that always happens when I show a client a layout for the first time?
Seriously, it's the "untethered, arbitrary aspects" that differentiate a good designer from a great one, isn't it?
re: your kitchen layout. yes apparently-- in the book I mentioned, there's a guy who laid out a hair salon using an algorithm... can't really think of any other reason he would have done that...
re:"Seriously, it's the "untethered, arbitrary aspects" that differentiate a good designer from a great one, isn't it?"
it's the "then what?" gehry talks about here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/13
not a great interview, but worth it just for that bit...
Subtect....
So true. It is as if the mathematical origination gives some immediate and unquestioned "legitimacy" while also it could be argued taking away the agency (Gehry's then what) from the designer...
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