Diagramming Complexity. Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture

“…Contemporary digital designers strive to generate their projects in a way consistent with this new reality, with its continuous fields and forces that generate motion. Form, in this approach, is not to appear as determined from outside, like a figure cast in a mould. It should rather be shaped by those often invisible fields and forces that constitute the true context of the project. This entails accepting their intrinsic complexity. Intimately linked to properties like nonlinearity and emergence, complexity represents a keyword for contemporary physical and biological sciences. Complexity, as opposed to the straightforwardness claimed by modernity, has become also a leitmotiv of contemporary architecture. It implies a multiplicity that is supposed to reflect on architecture. In accordance with the orientations suggested by Greg Lynn in “Folding Architecture”, form is no longer obliged to present itself as a deeply unified composition; it may very well remain an assemblage of sequences that are inflected by their mutual presence. Of course modern architecture used juxtaposition. But the collision of semiautonomous volumes was supposed to find its counterpart in a deeper unity achieved through their interactions. Digital architecture will often proceed to the contrary by interlocking parts using soft transitions, while refusing to submit the result to the requirements of a superior level of coherence…”
Del capítulo “Diagramming Complexity”
Antoine Picon. Digital Culture in Architecture, an introduction for the design professions
Basel, 2010, Birkhauser