Architecture: [Digital] Robustness

Projects by Patterns

After more than a decade since the advent of the computer as a generative tool within design studios and offices, it seems rather unproductive and almost a cliché to speak today about the value and impact of digital design.

However, due to its pervasive influence, the contemporary state and definition of form within and outside the boundaries of the discipline of architecture has reached a state of refinement never seen before. For instance, the increasing capacity and preference of certain contemporary architects to fully articulate the generic has given rise to a form of universal, abstract formalism that seems to be totally out of rhythm with the life of the body and its environment. Moreover, given this approach’s infinite trust in the formal effects [and not the distribution logics] of some form of repetition, default articulation has become, to put it simply, no longer cool or aesthetically pleasing but a sort of formal weakness.

In contrast, [digital] robustness implies the possibility of a [an architectural] body full of strength and flavor. A vigorous formal model attractive due of its capacity to retain mass, withstand load, and express stability over time. Nevertheless, the robust also implies a latent potential for overall cohesion and material density. Why then internal or external variability of any sort would be seen as something occurring outside of the robust? Or the appearance of solid mass would be associated to uniform weight? Or the interest in continuity would be incarnated in homogeneity?

PATTERNS, Fake Plastic Trees / Vertical Garden Competition, 2006

In the context of complexity, it could be said that a robust system is one that has demonstrated enough vitality so as to recover gracefully from a whole range of outstanding inputs and situations in a given material environment or local context. Throughout architectural history, robustness came to be associated with work whose monolithic properties prevail over any other of its qualities [i.e. some expressionist and modernist work done in concrete would fall under this category]. However, there may be another, a more contemporary form of digital robustness that is neither just based on the image of the materially, formally or structurally monolithic nor is formally disaggregated by default into infinitely small and hyper complex micro components. A new kind of robustness [in architecture], a vitalist and non reductive one, a formally sensitive and full of [material] flavors, a real robustness; constitutes undoubtedly one of the less explored and most formally stimulating possibilities within contemporary design practice.

While powerful modeling tools exist now virtually everywhere, techniques and their customized specific deployment with the expected aim of producing novel effects and emergent sensations are not that easily found. While tools are all about potential quantity, techniques and sensations are all about actual qualities. Therefore, to talk about digital design today is not to merely suggest that certain palette of tools and techniques is being used, but rather means to fully comprehend the inherently new sensibility that is being developed as a consequence and that is having widespread effects on the discipline and practice of architecture.

PATTERNS, 8747 Boutique, 2006

By its qualitative and inventive use in offices such as PATTERNS, Xefirotarch, servo, RuyKlein, or Aranda Lash to name a few, digital design continues to produce new effects, affects and sensations in the context of architecture. However, its focus is no longer on the early fascination with computer images plugged by slick, unarticulated, and immaterial surfaces. Instead, the most advanced work being produced today aspires to a new robustness, a formalism of rich materialities and gradient tectonics capable of engendering and substantiate sensations.

The material presented here intends to elucidate some of these qualities by means of specific projects.

Welcome to the new robustness. Whether the effect is initiated through top-down logics of geometric modulation and surface subdivision, or is the outcome of a bottom-up approach based on algorithmic operations of growth where units aggregate in a non-linear manner.

PATTERNS is an architecture office based in California (USA)