Formative Complexity: Population Study

In my previous post, I explained the traits with which I will analyze my study population of architectural details, drawn from the buildings shown below.


My original taxonomic analysis reveals a wide array of expressed specifics across the breadth of my investive realm --- indeed, the variability in my sample population is almost too much to understand using the phylogenetic representation from the last post. In an effort to more carefully unpack my analytic system, I simulated the movement of each project through a three-dimensional Cartesian grid described by the three genes within each of the investigative quadrants. One of the axes (corresponding to the Z-axis) I defined as the major axis, the traits which act as positive and negative belonging to the gene most defining of the investigative quadrant; the other two directions (X- and Y-axes) are the other two genes, less significant but still important. The projects flow through this constructed realm, with the built location of the project on each analyzed gene indicated by the terminal point’s x, y and z values.

Expression Animation: FORCE

Formative Complexity: Expressed Traits in Architectural Details

“The most important issue facing architects…is how to construct a viable, progressive project capable of incorporating the innovative design research of the past decades into a productive new model of practice. This would be a form of practice committed to public legibility, to the active engagement of new technologies, and to creative means of implementation. It would be an experimental practice that takes as its object not self-referential theories but real problems — the difficult moments when architecture takes its place in the world.” (Stan Allen, with Frampton + Foster, The New Architectural Pragmatism — Stocktaking, 117)

It is the claim of my thesis that the architectural detail contains embedded information about the cohort which produced it, clothed in the material realities inherent to architectural production; that organizational typologies have ramifications in the arenas of physical construction and material joinery; and that the progressive project Allen et. al. discuss might be fostered by uncovering and responding to the points of expressive failure observed in existing modes of practice.

I firmly believe that organizational trends, at their most virulent, threaten architecture’s ability to envision its resultant object, and so undermine the very utility of our profession. Certain formats estrange the architect entirely from the empirical realities of the material world; it is this remove which can render the design process destructively autonomous and ultimately unnecessary as other professions take on large parts of the architect’s work.

At the other extreme, I believe that the design firm could act as a highly reflexive reifying organism which reliably dampens and re-distributes what De Landa would refer to as friction --- that is, anything which “interferes with the implementation of a tactical or strategic plan” --- in such a way that the final object re-presents its genesis. A designed representation of the modern world’s structural complexity would render the networked reality of our lives in material tectonics.