"No real historical space (…) is ever univocal but always multiple and intertwined. This multiplicity and embeddedness, combined with the critical presence of a “thick” time, allows for the open-ended interactions of parts – the hybridizations, blendings, and conflicts – that effectively destroy a structure’s determinism and feed its wildness." Sanford Kwinter
Modern and Post-Modern architectural discourse of the past 40 years has focused on form and programme respectively as the driver of architectural formations. However, notions of space, spatial organisation and ordering have been a mere by-product of these investigations, rarely an exploration of their own, despite their core-relevance in any architectural undertaking. Computational Design Thinking and its direct implementation through algorithmic scripting techniques, on the other hand, has taken the production of architecture from the drawn to the generated, intimately linking the physically operational with the digitally computed. This has, hence, shifted the way we produce, perceive of and possibly operate within architecture.
The aim of the seminar is to initiate a discourse on algorithmic space in the form of a three day workshop. We will start exploring spatial ordering systems within the paradigm of computation and computational techniques. Core theoretical texts of both Computational Design Thinking and Spatial Ordering Systems will be introduced and discussed. These will be implemented in a set of brief scripting exercises.
The seminar is a pre-requisite for participating in the ICD/IRGE Design Project in the summer semester 2012.
Scripting knowledge in either VB Script, Python or Processing is a pre-requisite or else participation in the 2.2.2 Computerbasiertes Entwerfen II: Algorithmic Geometry seminar is recommended. The seminar will be taught in English.