Computer Aided Architectural Design Futures 2005

Constructing Complexity (p. 41)

MITCHELL William J.
School of Architecture and Planning, MIT, USA
Keywords: assembly, complexity, construction, fabrication, uniformity, variety

Abstract:
Buildings were once materialized drawings, but now, increasingly, they are materialized digital information – designed and documented on computer-aided design systems, fabricated with digitally controlled machinery, and assembled on site with the assistance of digital positioning and placement equipment. Within the framework of digitally mediated design and construction we can precisely quantify the design content and the t construction content of a project, and go on to define t complexity as the ratio of added design content to added construction content.

This paper develops the definitions of design content, construction content, and complexity, and explores the formal, functional, and economic consequences of varying the levels of complexity of projects. It argues that the emerging architecture of the digital era is characterized by high levels of complexity, and that this enables more sensitive and inflected response to the exigencies of site, program, and expressive intention than was generally possible within the framework of industrial modernism.

Perhaps you have wondered why the shapes of buildings seem to be getting more complex. Conceivably, it could be nothing more profound than an arbitrary flicker of architectural fashion. But it is worth asking whether the difference between, say, Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim and the characteristically rectangular slabs and towers of the late twentieth century is due to something more fundamental?

Does the curved shape of London’s Swiss Re Building, the twisted profile of New York’s proposed Freedom Tower, or the non-repetitive roof structure of the British Museum courtyard represent some significant change in the conditions of production of architecture?

The shift, I suggest, is a direct outcome of new conditions created by the digital revolution. Buildings were once materialized drawings, but now, increasingly, they are materialized digital information – designed with the help of computer-aided design systems, fabricated by means of digitally controlled machinery, put together on site with the assistance of digital layout and positioning devices, and generally inseparable from flows of information through global computer networks.

Many architects have simply exploited digital technology to reduce the time and cost of producing buildings in the conventionally modernist mode, much as architects of the early industrial revolution took advantage of mass-production to inexpensively proliferate the ornament that had previously been created by craftsmen. But others have recognized that the digital revolution has opened up new domains of architectural form for exploration, and they have seized the opportunity to produce projects that break the old rules.

To see precisely how new formal possibilities emerge from the interplay of information and materiality, we need to do some numbers. It will be helpful to begin with a homely example that should be familiar to anyone who has ever operated a computer graphics or computer-aided design system. Consider the task of inputting a circle.

You need to give a circle command and specify three numbers – usually an xcoordinate, a y-coordinate, and a radius, though Euclid tells us that there are other, equivalent ways to convey the same information.