Editorial

Abstract

Residing at the intersection of design and the sciences, the discipline of architecture continues to provide profound examples of transdisciplinary research which redefine how humans solve complex, global problems. Always in a constant dialectic between the pulls of the empirical (performance, optimization, and empiricism) and the ephemeral (intentionally unique, sublime, and visceral), architectural research provides a culture of inquiry dependent on an ever evolving, transdisciplinary set of problem solving methodologies. While architectural researchers’ methods for the most part are tied to science, they often also tend to occupy the space of the other, or the nonscientific. Additionally, with the recent rise of computational design within the design disciplines, researchers must bridge beyond the known, and address the sciences of the artificial, the virtual, and the evermore post-Fordist physical. This special issue,Means, Methods, Machines and Making in Architecture, features research purposefully acknowledging or taking a position about sciences as an intrinsic or extrinsic aspect of its outcomes. We have sought out work that explores and exploits the nexus of the digital, social, and physical worlds in the context of design and architecture. Each of the papers in the special issue takes a position about empiricism in architecture even as it elevates architectural sciences in both its pure and impure creation of means, methods, machines and artifacts. In their paper, ‘Beyond Geometric Complexity,’ the authors, Dr Evangelos Pantazis and Dr David Jason Gerber, set out on the ambitious task to define the term complexity, understand its historic context and devise a holistic theoretical framework for decomposing and analysing it through a systemic approach as applied to the field of architectural design. The authors begin by introducing the reader to the topic of complexity through the lens of contemporary tall building designs, but quickly move away from the issue of geometry to address issues of cyber-physical systems embodied in such large structures. They attribute this rise in complexity to the adoption of computational design and analysis methods that allow the organization of large amounts of data. However, they clarify that unlike the scientific fields of biology and physics, the field of architectural design thinking remains largely unaffected by these newdigital paradigms. That is, while computationalmethods are used to analyse a building’s performance and aid in managing the vast streamsof dataneeded to realize it physically, the actual design of the building remains largely insulated from these computationalmethods.More specifically, they argue that while other systems operate under a bottom-up generative and adaptive paradigm, architectural design thinking remains a topdown reductive processwhere over-arching simplified decisions are made in the early design stages and system complexity only grows with time when solving the sub-parts of the system. The authors argue that this has resulted in architecture that addresses complexity only diagrammatically and focusesmainly on its relationship with geometry. The paper is organized in five sections startingwith a bibliographic researchmethodology based on a query of keywords related to complexity. The authors employed Google’s Ngram Viewer to search keywords in books published from 1910 to 2010 and then augmented the results with a searchofmore contemporarydatabases (e.g. CUMINCAD). They observed a clear increase in the use of the term within the architecture field starting in the 1990s – coinciding with the rise in the use of computational tools. In the next section, they focus on sources of complexity such as nature and living organisms and delineate some of the underlying assumptions of complexity such as the ability to divide an entity into component parts and that phenomena can be studied objectively. The authors then present a taxonomy of complexity based on levels that include general systems theory, self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, and adaptation. They conclude that building design is shaped by temporal issues, the exchange of information, entropy, and uncertainty. In the fourth section, the authors discuss a holistic digital design approach for managing building complexity based on theories of nonlinear systems. In their concluding remarks, the authors address the inevitable need to maintain a designer’s creativity while avoiding simplification by proposing that computational tools need tobe thought of not as meremachines for theproductionof architecture, but as apprentices that are given a set of specifications and goals to explore large and possibly complex solution spaces and generate proposals that can thenbe evaluatedby themaster craftsperson (i.e. the designer). Over the past several decades, the architectural design process and its potential for generating complex geometrical solutions have been exponentially expanded through the rapid development and implementation of algorithmic tool sets such as cellular growth algorithms, differential growth algorithms as well as recursive subdivisions. Although these tools have afforded designers a new level of control over the design/ optimization/ and production processes, Cristoph Klemmt points out in his article ‘Discretization of Cellular Growth Simulations for Construction’ that because of their complexity and high cost of production,most proposals remain either unbuilt, manifested as small 3D prints, or as small installations. To remove these constraints, Klemmt proposes moving beyond evolutionary form finding algorithms, to an integrated parametric system which allows for the designed point-cloud derived form to be reconfigured into a voxel-based geometry, allowing for large-scale fabrication of artifacts from simple materials aggregated through discrete assemblies. From algorithm to a series of finished prototypes, Klemmt’s article describes a design novel methodology for the voxelization of complex forms into easily realizable full-scale architectural artifacts. Organized into six sections, the