Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design
Patrik Schumacher, London 2008
Published in: AD Architectural Design - Digital Cities, Vol 79, No 4, July/August 2009,
guest editor: Neil Leach, general editor: Helen Castle
Abstract:
Though parametricism has its roots in the digital animation techniques of the mid-1990s, it has only fully emerged in recent years with the development of advanced parametric design systems. Parametricism has become the dominant, single style for avant-garde practice today. It is particularly suited to large-scale urbanism as exemplified by a series of competition-winning master-plans by Zaha Hadid Architects.
There is a global convergence in recent avant-garde architecture that justifies the enunciation of a new style: Parametricism. The style is rooted in digital animation techniques. Its latest refinements are based on advanced parametric design systems and scripting techniques. This style has been developed over the last 15 years and is now claiming hegemony within avant-garde architecture. It succeeds modernism as a new long wave of systematic innovation. The style finally closes the transitional period of uncertainty that was engendered by the crisis of modernism and that was marked by a series of short lived episodes including Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, and Minimalism.
Parametricism is the great new style after modernism. The new style claims relevance on all scales from architecture and interior design to large scale urban design. The larger the scale of the project the more pronounced is parametricism’s superior capacity to articulate programmatic complexity. The urbanist potential of parametricism has been explored in a three year research agenda at the AADRL - Parametric Urbanism – and demonstrated by a series of competition winning masterplans by Zaha Hadid Architects.
Zaha Hadid Archiects, Kartal-Pendik Masterplan, Istanbul, Turkey, 2006
Fabric study. The urban fabric comprises both cross towers and perimeter blocks. The image shows the morphological range of the perimeter block type. Blocks are split into four quadrants allowing for a secondary, pedestrian path system. At certain network crossing points the block system is assimilated to the tower system: each block sponsors one of the quadrants to form a pseudo tower around a network crossing point.
One North Masterplan, Network – Fabric – Buildings, Singapore, Zaha Hadid Architects 2001-2003
Fabric and network. This masterplan for a new mixed-used urban business district in Singapore was the first of a series of radical masterplans that led to the concept of parametric urbanism and then to the general concept of parametricism.
I. Parametricism as Style
Avant-garde architecture and urbanism are going through a cycle of innovative adaptation – retooling and adapting the discipline to the demands of the socio-economic era of post-fordism. The mass society that was characterized by a universal consumption standard has evolved into the heterogenous society of the multitude, marked by a proliferating life-style and career differentiation. Architecture and urbanism are called upon to organize and articulate the increased complexity of post-fordist society.
Contemporary avant-garde architecture and urbanism is addressing this societal demand via a rich panoply of parametric design techniques. However, we are confronted with a new style rather than just with a new set of techniques. The techniques in questions – the employment of animation, simulation and form-finding tools, as well as parametric modelling and scripting - have inspired a new collective movement with radically new ambitions and values. This has lead to many new, systematically connected design problems that are being worked on competitively within a global network of design researchers.1 Over and above aesthetic recognisability, it is this wide-spread, long-term consistency of shared design ambitions/problems that justifies the enunciation of a style in the sense of an epochal phenomenon.2 We propose to call this style: Parametricism.
Parametricism is a mature style. There has been talk about “continuous differentiation”3, versioning, iteration and mass customization etc. for quite a while within the architectural avant-garde discourse.
Recently we witnessed an accelerated, cumulative build up of virtuosity, resolution and refinement, facilitated by the attendant development of parametric design tools and scripts that allow the precise formulation and execution of intricate correlations between elements and subsystems. The shared concepts, computational techniques, formal repertoires, and tectonic logics that characterize this work are crystallizing into a solid new hegemonic paradigm for architecture.
Parametricism emerges from the creative exploitation of parametric design systems in view of articulating increasingly complex social processes and institutions. The parametric design tools themselves cannot account for this profound shift in style from modernism to parametricism. This is evidenced by the fact that late modernist architects are employing parametric tools in ways which result in the maintenance of a modernist aesthetics, i.e. using parametric modelling to inconspicuously absorb complexity. The parametricist sensibility pushes in the opposite direction and aims for a maximal emphasis on conspicuous differentiation and the visual amplification differentiating logics. Aesthetically it is the elegance4 of ordered complexity and the sense of seamless fluidity, akin to natural systems, that is the hallmark of parametricism.
II. Styles as Design Research Programmes
Avant-garde styles might be interpreted and evaluated in analogy to new scientific paradigms, affording a new conceptual framework, and formulating new aims, methods and values. Thus a new direction for concerted research work is established.5 My thesis is therefore: Styles are design research programmes.6
Innovation in architecture proceeds via the progression of styles so understood. This implies the alternation between periods of cumulative advancement within a style and revolutionary periods of transition between styles. Styles represent cycles of innovation, gathering the design research efforts into a collective endeavor. Stable self-identity is here as much a necessary precondition of evolution as it is in the case of organic life. To hold on to the new principles in the face of difficulties is crucial for the chance of eventual success. This is incompatible with an understanding of styles as transient fashions. Basic principles and methodologies need to be preserved and defended with tenacity in the face of initial difficulties and setbacks. Each style has its hard core of principles and a characteristic way of tackling design problems/tasks.
The programme/style consists of methodological rules: some tell us what paths of research to avoid (negative heuristics), and others what paths to pursue (positive heuristics). The negative heuristics formulates strictures that prevent the relapse into old patterns that are not fully consistent with the core, and the positive heuristics offers guiding principles and preferred techniques that allow the work to fast-forward in one direction.
III. Defining Heuristics and Pertinent Agendas
The defining heuristics of parametricism are fully reflected in the taboos and dogmas of contemporary avant-gared design culture:
Negative heuristics (taboos): avoid rigid geometric primitives like squares, triangles and circles, avoid simple repetition of elements, avoid juxtaposition of unrelated elements or systems.
Positive heuristics (dogmas): consider all forms to be parametrically malleable, differentiate gradually (at variant rates), inflect and correlate systematically.
The current stage of advancement within parametricism relates as much to the continuous advancement of the attendant computational design processes as it is due to the designer’s realization of the unique formal and organizational opportunities that are afforded by these processes. Parametricism can only exist via the continuous advancement and sophisticated appropriation of computational geometry. Finally, computationally advanced design techniques like scripting (in Mel-script or Rhino-script) and parametric modeling (with tools like GC or DP) are becoming a pervasive reality. Today it is impossible to compete within the contemporary avant-garde scene without mastering and advancing these techniques. However, the advancement of techniques should go hand in hand with the formulation of further ambitions and agendas. The following 5 agendas are to inject new aspects into the parametric paradigm and to push parametricism further:
1.Parametric Inter-articulation of Sub-systems:
The ambition is to move from single system differentiation – e.g. a swarm of façade components - to the scripted association of multiple subsystems – envelope, structure, internal subdivision, navigation void. The differentiation in any one systems is correlated with differentions in the other systems.6.
2.Parametric Accentuation:
The ambition is to enhance the overall sense of organic integration through correlations that favour deviation amplification rather than compensatory adaptations. The associated system should accentuate the initial differentiation. Thus a far richer articulation can be achieved and more orienting visual information can be made available.
3.Parametric Figuration7:
We propose that complex configurations that are latent with multiple readings can be constructed as a parametric model with extremely figuration-sensitive variables. Parametric variations trigger “gestalt-catastrophes”, i.e. the quantitative modification of these parameters trigger qualitative shifts in the perceived configuration. Beyond object parameters, ambient parameters and observer parameters have to be integrated into the parametric system.
4.Parametric Responsiveness8:
Urban and architectural environments receive an inbuilt kinetic capacity that allows those environments to reconfigure and adapt themselves in response to prevalent occupation patterns. The real time registration of use-patterns drives the real time kinetic adaptation. The built environment thus acquires responsive agency at different time scales.
5.Parametric Urbanism9 - Deep Relationality:
The assumption is that the urban massing describes a swarm-formation of many buildings whereby lawful continuities cohere this manifold of buildings. The systematic modulation of morphologies produces powerful urban effects and facilitates field orientation. Our ambition is deep relationality, i.e. to integrate the building morphology - all the way to the detailed tectonic articulation and the interior organisation. Parametric Urbanism might involve parametric accentuation, parametric figuration, and parametric responsiveness as registers to fulfill its ambition of deep relationality.
IV. Parametricist vs. Modernist Urbanism
Le Corbusier’s first theoretical statement on Urbanism starts with a eulogy of the straight line and the right angle as means by which man conquers nature. The first two paragraphs of The City of Tomorrow contrast man’s way with the pack-donkey’s way:
“Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zig-zags in order to avoid larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.”10 Le Corbusier admires the urban order of the Romans and rejects our sentimental attachment to the picturesque irregularity of the medieval cities: “The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing.”11 Le Corbusier insists that “the house, the street, the town … should be ordered; … if they are not ordered, they oppose themselves to us.”12 Le Corbusier’s limitation is not his insistence upon order but his limited concept of order in terms of classical geometry. Complexity theory in general, and the research of Frei Otto13 in particular, have since taught us to recognize, measure and simulate the complex patterns that emerge from processes of self-organisation. Phenomena like the “donkey’s path” and the urban patterns resulting from unplanned settlement processes can now be analyzed and appreciated in terms of their underlying logic and rationality, i.e. in terms of their hidden regularity and related performative power.
Le Corbusier realized that although “nature presents itself to us as a chaos … the spirit which animates Nature is a spirit of order ”14. However, his understanding of nature’s order was limited by the science of his day. Today we can reveal the complex order of those apparently chaotic patterns by means of simulating their lawful “material computation”.
Our parametricist sensibility gives more credit to the “pack-donkey’s path” as a form of recursive material computation than to the simplicity of clear geometries that can be imposed in one sweeping move.
Frei Otto’s pioneering work on natural structures included work on settlement patterns. He starts with the distinction/relation of occupying and connecting as the two fundamental processes that are involved in all processes of urbanisation.15 His analysis of existing patterns was paralleled by analogue experiments modelling crucial features of the settlement process. He distinguished distancing and attractive occupations. For distancing occupation he used magnets floating in water and for attractive occupation he used floating polystyrene chips. A more complex model integrates both distancing and attractive occupation whereby the polystyrene chips cluster around the floating magnetic needles that maintain distance among themselves16. The result closely resembles the typical settlement patterns found in our real urban landscapes.
