Material Computation Higher Integration In Morphogenetic Design Architectural Design 03042012 Profile 216 Achim Menges by Achim Menges 9780470973301, 0470973307 instant download after payment.

Since the earliest years of Modernism, machine-aided fabrication has represented the Holy Grail of architecture: a means of exerting greater design control over the construction process and reducing the costs and obstacles that are part and parcel of the conventional building process. By the late 1990s, the onset of CAD-CAM and CNC milling, personified by the high-profile employment of CATIA at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) by Frank Gehry, fuelled a whole new pipeline of architectural visions; in his Embryological House Project (2000), for instance, Greg Lynn charismatically conjured up a future in which series of branded homes could be designed and customised like trainers. Though this fantasy is yet to be realised with quite this ease of delivery, architecture schools worldwide have taken up the gauntlet, competing on the size of their laser-cutting and milling machines – with robots now frequently making a guest appearance. This title of 3 shifts the entire focus for thinking about the production of architecture as one that is entirely technologically focused. Though new technologies such as the employment of industrial robots in the place of computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines open up the possibilities for architectural exploration per se (see Achim Menges and Tobias Schwinn on ‘Manufacturing Reciprocities’, pp118–25), they do not alone in themselves provide the raison d’être or drive for the ideas and research propagated in Material Computation. For Menges, the greatest potential lies in computation’s power to provide a better understanding of material behaviour and characteristics and then, in turn, to inform the organisation of matter and form in design. For him, ‘compute’ is very much a verb rather than a noun, referring to the processing of information, which is as applicable to natural as it is to artificial systems. His 3 Reader, Computational Design Thinking (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), edited with Sean Ahlquist ...