5 innovative prototypes resulted on the 29th July, the last day of the Dynamic Fields, dedicated to advanced architecture and organized in Bucharest, Romania by the computational design school Parametrica [digi fab school]. The workshop benefited of the presence of Patrik Schumacher, Director of Zaha Hadid Architects, founder of AA Design Research Lab London and one of the most important figures in the world of computational design. The workshop’s purpose was the understanding of how the advancement of digital technology is helping architects respond to the complexity of the environment surrounding them.
Thanks to Parametrica [digi fab school], we were able to interview Mr. Schumacher and find out more about parametric design, user behaviour modeling techniques and parametric semiology.
INSPIRATIONIST: You are a fervent supporter of parametric design. Could you tell us some reasons why you think it is so important as a new style and for the future of architecture?
Patrick Schumacher: Yes, it is very important. First of all, what attracts young architects is simply the fact that it is so different, so original, the only really, truly new and original style of architecture today. But we need to understand why it is so superior, what it is so important, what makes it more productive, and that’s mainly the capacity to create more complex arrangements where more different elements, different kinds of spaces, different functions can come together and can fit into complex types, which have, maybe, an odd geometry and this style allows the architecture to adapt to these complex conditions, and also, particulary complex internal relations, while at the same time, also creating a recognizable unity, you can recognize what belongs together, what leads to where, rather than in traditional architecture where if you put too many different things together, it will look like garbage, it will become a bit odd. But here, in one place, you have the capacity to create a more complex order which is also more legible.
I: You argue that all society’s problems are communication problems and that, obviously, communication increases productivity: do you believe that such workshops as ‘Dynamic Fields’ [which are based on communicative interaction], contribute to solving these problems and increase productivity/creativity?
P.S. : Yes, I mean, in two ways, on one hand: of course, this kind of events are communicative events, they’re professional communication, expert communication and educational communication, they’re bringing people from different countries together, that’s very typical. So that’s just an example of contemporary life: international conferences, workshops, that happens all the time, I’m in a different city every week. But at the same time, what they’re working on is parametric architecture, a new kind of architecture, which in the end could deliver the spaces in which we can communicate better because you can find each other quicker. The workshop has different situations, it’s not just one big room where one person speaks, not just a symmetric wall, it has to have many different situations, more things working together. They assemble to a larger group, then they brake it apart into very small pieces, they have individual work, little group work. Then we have somebody saying something to the whole group, so the situation changes, very dynamic. That’s typical for today, we didn’t make this fifty years ago. And so, we could imagine a space for this workshop. Now they’re working in an outdoors. That is possible, but I can imagine a concentric building which designed according to parametric principles is automatically dynamically adaptable, could be a more productive environment for this kind of workshops. That also allows a visibility of the workshop to the outside. Maybe not giving them some old building could have allowed more people to communicate effectively, so it’s a good example of the kind of social scenarios we need to accommodate in contemporary architecture.
We need a lot of brainstorming today. It’s really different from the modernist era where you had some research and development, but much more modern art executing and plan which would not change for, sometimes, 10 years, 15 years. They do exactly the same thing. There was a lack of communication, but more vision of labor and putting people in places where they can concentrate on what they should be doing. Now we need to update and correct what we do, often we need to communicate much more, we have research and development much quicker, every year we have to do something different, that’s why we need more communicative good environment.
So the workshops help as an example of what we all need, there are not only workshops in architecture, there are workshops in medicine, there are workshops in the legal profession, business, conferences, all aspects of life are like this and they all need contemporary spaces which make that possible, and they need to be located in a city which makes that easier.
I: Your conference revolves around the idea of parametric semiology. What does this concept imply and how does parametricism interact with it?
P.S. : That’s a new idea I formulated, which I think is coherent with what I’ve been talking about: the societal function of architecture being the framing of social interaction and communication, and architecture is a form of communication. So that implies that a good environment needs to be developed like a semiological system, semiotic system. It needs to be developed as a semiotic code so that you can read the environment and understand the information it presents, what is happening where, where in time, but it also needs to be decoded and deliberately laid out to make distinctions in order to orient. So the idea is that a good environment is a system of semification or language and under the auspices of parametricism, because you could also have a semiotic good environment under post-modernism, that’s when the idea first arrived, and the parametricism, it is a more fluid language which has not only distinction, but also gradient, and in between it has more versatility, so it’s a specific new way of thinking of the environment, of the semiotic system, I call it parametric semiology. Also, there’s a new way of studying this, and studying this is called crowd modelling, where we now study how people would actually occupy spaces, how they would gather and move through spaces and how they would interact according to the spaces they’re in, and we can model the so-called agent-space-modelling, we are modelling crowds as a collection of agents, individual agents are given dispositions or rules of behavior which change, and they change from one place to another and as the agent moves into a certain space they all change the behavior, so the behavior is always coordinated between the actors, because they all need to understand where they are and what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s the way a good environment offers function for the language, it coordinates people to actions, behaviors, cause when you enter a certain space, from the outside to the inside, or from the public street into a private courtyard, you have to change the way you behave, you have to recognize somebody else in the space, which in the public space you can ignore, and in the private space you have to approach, you have to greet, you have to communicate, there’s a code, always, and then when you move in, you always know where you are and what demands that environment makes on your behavior. We don’t necessarily talk about it, we don’t even think of it anymore, it’s intuitive, but if somebody doesn’t do it, it becomes way obvious. It is expected, and it’s otherwise really disturbing, cause we all rely on a good environment, coordinating and co-opting, bringing everybody on the same page all the time. We notice where we are because we know where we come from, but also, the environment places in order the position of this space related to other spaces, gives us a clue, but also what it looks like, the field, the pallet, the furnishing, the atmosphere, the way it was designed. So that’s a general phenomenon which I can usually only work with intuitively, but I’m making a more conscious and explicit project and I did the research on this, and hopefully, later on in the professional world, we can also be more strategic in creating this kind of language.
I: Are there any other fields, besides architecture, which you think could benefit from parametric design or in which it could make a significant impact?
P.S. : In all. Design, starting with urbanism and urban design, which we already have been working on for a long time under the slogan ‘parametric urbanism’. Of course, architecture, and also interior design for sure, but we also apply it in furniture design, in creating different types of furniture, very fluid, where the furniture pieces can be changed from one type to another, but we can also apply it to product design and fashion design, also in graphic design, particularly animated interaction design and on the web. You have some hint already if you look at the Mac. Intel sells operating systems that way. It is also important that these things are gradient, that they swell up slowly, that when a window disappears you see where it goes. I mean, these features are already parametric. Interface design, so all design aspects. What I mean by design is everything that has to do with appearance, everything that has an interface. I’m not talking about engineering design so much. That’s what it’s hidden, the technical function, I’m talking about what is visible and what becomes a communication. Fashion becomes a communication, the product becomes a communication, the screen, the interface of your website is a communication. That’s design, design has to do with the appearance of things, the visual appearance, with communication and engineering, it has to do with the technical functionality, there’s a strong relation, but it’s different. We collaborate with engineers and we rely on them also using parametric tools, but they don’t think in terms of style, they think in terms of efficiency and technical operation but they are using sometimes similar tools for the structures. They also similarly operate with gradient and their structural skeletons. We like and we work with that, and we like it for, not only for reasons of efficiency, but for reasons of articulating the space, the structure.
I: You also argue that organization is one of the basic functions of architecture and you research user behaviour modeling techniques that can lead to complex forms of organization. Can you name one of these techniques and what did it lead to?
P.S. : What is nice is that there are some tools, like Softimage for instance, or some plug-ins from Maya like Miarmy which are developed for game modelling. In game modelling, you need to populate your scene with agents or with other creatures, and the way we now work, you don’t want to key-frame or animate every character, you need to make different behaviors, so they’re roaming around autonomously, and then we have to shoot them, but they’re actually agents. This technique is very important because it would take too long to kind of predetermine every little detail. They’re just autonomous agents, you have the rules, and they just roam around, which is very effective. So these tools we can use, and we use them to start simulating behavior. Then we want to make more articulated creatures, from people, who are walking, sitting, moving, recognizing each other, and using Softimage in Maya. And what we are modelling is little situations for instance, things like a workshop, things like a foyer and there are people moving around maybe, sitting down casually in a lounge area or they go to a reception desk. Or we’re doing little things like a party, people come in, there’s a cocktail, there’s a stand up table, and maybe there’s a dining table, so they don’t need to move around at the table, and there’s a little lecture. So little scenarios you can try to simulate, and the actors react to anything that’s there, so they recognize entrances, they recognize ceiling configurations. The objects in the distance may become attractive, or certain furniture around which they gather, or the guests gather in the center of the space. That’s something, the way we try out, we can test out how we could configure the crowd by means of the clues which a crowd is reacting to and the clues are actually what we are in the end designing as architects, we are designing the frame and we are watching what the crowds are doing, so it’s an indirect crowd management system and that’s the thinking when we model like this and we design like this, and that’s exactly what we should be thinking of, just for this, just for the social purpose, not to stare at and be beautiful, the purpose is to create social situations.
Photo credit © Magda Gheorghe Photography for Inspirationist
Inspirationist Exclusive: Interview with Patrik Schumacher - Director Zaha Hadid Architects
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