Feature

If you were to believe the critics, those who gathered together beneath the lofty, gilt edged ceilings of the San Francisco Palace Hotel last April make up the key proponents of a new architectural ideology of algorithmic abstraction and wilful form-making, all of whom share an almost cult-like belief in the transformative power of the digital. The event? The annual gathering of the Smart Geometry Group, an organisation established in 2001 to explore the potential of computation and the computer as an intelligent aid to design in the built environment, with a particular emphasis on what has come to be known as parametric design.

The aspersion of course is unwarranted, although having spent several days in attendance at the conference, I can see why those involved in the field of parametrics have developed a somewhat cult-like reputation – the attendees speak a language that would be entirely unfamiliar to most laypeople, and even most architects, peppered as it is with references to scripting, algorithms and esoteric geometric formulae. The conference itself is actually the culmination of nearly a week of workshops and training focused around parametric digital design tools, primarily Bentley Systems’ Generative Components (Bentley Systems are the major sponsor of the group, and use the conference and the Group itself as something of a testing ground for their parametric tool), and the limited places available at the workshops are hotly contested for by specialists from around the world, students and practitioners both. The resultant attendees could be described as leaders in their field, and the conference is undeniably a gathering of brilliant minds – while others whiled away their teenage years playing video games, these people were the kids busy designing them.

Likewise, it wasn’t difficult to detect a definite hint of idealism in the rhetoric surrounding the conference, but while the language of “performance” and “optimisation” was fairly commonplace, it was also noticeably absent from several of the presentations. So too was the self-indulgence epitomised by the “shapely highrises” (as RMIT’s Mark Burry wryly described them) so often conflated with parametric design and digital architecture. If the Smart Geometry Group could be accused of being somewhat zealous proponents of the digital, the sentiment behind the formation of both the group and the conference itself is in some respects a remarkably selfless and altruistic one. The group was established by its founding directors Lars Hesselgren of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, J Parrish of Arup Sport and Hugh Whitehead of Foster + Partners as what was essentially intended to be a forum for the exchange of knowledge and ideas around digital design methodologies. Perhaps as a result of this, egos seemed to take a back seat in the presentations to ideas and problem solving.

This was certainly not your typical architectural show and tell, wherein beautifully realised and impossibly rarefied architectural objects are presented for bragging rights and adulation. Projects that were presented were done so overwhelmingly to illustrate the discovery of some new methodology or process, or perhaps a unique application of a digital design tool not previously explored. The emphasis, then, seemed to be overwhelmingly on systems, so to speak, rather than the architectural object, or indeed the designer themselves. In fact it was the altogether much more selfless concept of collaboration that was the recurring theme throughout many of the conference presentations. The Architectural Association’s Brett Steele based his entire address around the idea of the network based design studio, and how digital technologies were accentuating the importance of the team to the design process. Indeed, as Steele described in an interview with AR (see over), the network has become such a dominant paradigm that he believes it is ironically in danger of becoming reified as a “new kind of object of architectural fascination”. Certainly, Foster + Partners’ Martha Tsigkari did nothing to dispel this latent potential in her presentation, in which she described the building of design information systems as the new architectonics. Using her own role at Foster + Partners as an example, Tsigkari outlined what she saw as the burgeoning growth of a new kind of architect who was both scripter, development manager and a creator of integral systems – ultimately a “chef”, the one individual in the team with sufficient oversight across the entire process to be able to coordinate the increasingly complex and multifarious components of the average architectural project into a successful design.

One of the great strengths of parametric software tools such as GC is their potential for multidisciplinary application – the conference is something of a multidisciplinary affair itself, with representation from architects, mechanical and structural engineers and, to a lesser extent, software developers. The Smart Geometry Group draws its membership from among both the architectural and engineering fraternities, and much of the conference was devoted to exploring how the collaborative potential of these relationships could be managed better within the design process, or how greater input from all of the stakeholders and key contributors to a design could be facilitated earlier on. Steve Sanderson of CASE Inc (formerly of the architectural practice ShoP) saw the potential of the technology as specifically related to what he described as this “Co” paradigm of “computation, co-generation and collaboration”.