Reading 1: Digital Morphogenesis

Reading 1:Digital Morphogenesis Emile LeJeune
ADGM 320



Only in the past two decades out of the enormous spectrum of time architecture has been around has design started to shift from physical design method and representation to almost exclusively digital processes for some prominent firms. This change has brought many new methods of designing from computational processes. From digitally influenced development, many unique projects that break the bounds of traditional architecture practiced in the past.

The danger of this shift is that design may be derived from arbitrary sources and evolve only within the limitations of a program's sparse functions. Without well-informed design, architecture can transform into worthless manipulation of numbers without relevance to the project in question. Digital design should rely on using the power available in modeling programs to create groundbreaking schemes rather than just 'playing with shapes.'

As long as designers are aware of these pitfalls and avoid them, digital design is a potent tool for creating dynamic architecture that doesn't start with a plan drawing and grows from the base to become a static object. Digital design allows for manipulation of forms with the ability to immediately see the results and implications of changes.

Architecture in the past has relied on Euclidean geometries as inspiration for traditional form in design. A sort of vernacular in a sense that all architecture derives influence from regardless of the true cultural vernacular. Digital design partly uses Euclidean geometries to manipulate, but also gives the possibility of mathematically based non-euclidean geometries.

Design cannot solely rely on one method, it must rely on multiple tools, both digital and physical to create a well-informed and soundly based scheme. Digital tools are just that, tools, not design factories.