The fast and intensive
evolution that technology
has experienced at the end of the 20th century has produced important
transformations in our daily and work habits.
In the specific
field of architecture, a new "digital" world seems to have been
born which is offering
the architect the possibility of bending, twisting and deforming the
space on the computer screen, making
possible in a later step to implement these changes in real
life. A new world characterized by the effects of continuity
and rupture, in which new hybrid theories, between the biological and the
technological, make their appearance challenging
the traditional conception of design. They are links of a long
chain that seems to need physical-mathematical laws to explain their theories.
With the opening
of the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, designed by architect Frank Ghery in
1997, a new stage opened up in the way of making architecture. Using CATIA, a
software for the design of fighter aircraft he became "the first architect who, through the use of
digital technology, had made it possible to build a formally complex
building". Soon, leading architecture studios around the world included among their resources a myriad of second-generation
digital tools to be used helping creative expression and design management.
Based on new
methods of thought, the “Guggenheim effect” as Helio Piñon called it, had
impacted on the emergence of novel forms: an architecture with coded
protocols that is made through
new technologies, that is to say a
4D architecture which implies a
world of forms reduced to bits.
It was the beginning of an
architecture with a germinal spatial expression that flows in a continuous process of change and
transformation towards its
final physical concretion. This is an
architecture of digital models produced through a wide range of technological tools:
parametric systems, genetic algorithms, CAD / CAM technologies, which allow
resources to be optimized in a logical way, beyond graphic construction or
exclusively conceptual discourse.
Based on these
assumptions, this work aims to examine the ideas of the digital
morphogenesis to be used
in the project as a new way of seeing, thinking and making architecture.
In this field, this research is based on the
hypothesis that a new paradigm is emerging in the way in which architecture is
conceived. Thinking that
even today, as James Stelle points out, does not have deep and consistent
studies. For this reason, it is proposed, through the analysis of certain
cases, to show the weight of biological
and digital issues in the practice of the contemporary architect.
Considering nowadays situation with quite diffuse disciplinary boundaries, some affirm that digital morphogenesis is the new
architectural avant-garde, others that it is a passing formalistic fashion that
in a very short time will be forgotten. To what extent does such a framework
constitute a new paradigm is it still a subject under discussion.
"Scientific revolution" or "anomaly"? This dichotomy
presents shows an open field that to certain extent is the subject of this
research whose limits and consequences are unpredictable.
