THE CONVERGENCE OF ANALOGUE AND DIGITALARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRESENTATION

GROHE DIALOGUE TRENDS THESIS TYPOLOGIES, 19TH OCTOBER 2017 BANKING HALL, LONDON

He has established a reputation for achieving high environmental standards with contemporary materials and construction techniques, pioneering the concept of a double external skin at the RWE tower in Essen and winning the Six Star accolade in the Australian Green Star programme for the 139m tall One Bligh Street in Sydney. He discussed two projects, Stuttgart Railway Station and the 350,000 sq m Marina One in Singapore.

Two powerful mentors, Ingenhoven explained helped him to understand how architecture can contribute to modern society. From Buckminster Fuller he picked up the idea of ‘spaceship earth… looking at the planet as a spaceship with limited resources’ many of which have already been consumed or allocated to places where they are not needed or cannot be used efficiently. The second mentor was the pioneer of lightweight structures Frei Otto whose numerous projects include the gossamer-thin webs of the Munich Olympic Stadium. The discipline of searching for minimum weight in objects like hang gliders results in a particular form of beauty, which often comes from ‘not doing too much’. Otto, Ingenhoven reminded the audience, often complained that

architects try to do more than necessary.It is hard to think of a greater contrast than the massive stone forms and textures of the early 20th century Stuttgart Railway Station designed by Paul Bonatz. As part of a huge infrastructure project Ingenhoven was appointed to extend it in 1997. Digital design tools were then still in their infancy, but he wanted to draw out the contrast between Bonatz’s work and his own by creating a lightweight structure and bringing light into 100m by 450m space.

Ingenhoven envisaged a ‘structure as natural as a shell’ in being ideally and efficiently suited to its purpose. The led to a long period of ‘form-finding’ using – in the absence of advanced digital systems – every kind of tool to solve the issues’. These tools or techniques included drawing and model-making.

Having decided to make a single but multiply-curved roof with holes to let light in across the entire area, Ingenhoven and his team had to discover a form that exactly follows how the forces travel through it. That established the form with the least material, most efficient structure and lightest mass.

GROHE’s ‘trends, thesis, typology’ programme of dialogues came to London on October

19, when architects Christoph Ingenhoven and Patrik Schumacher, now head of Zaha

Hadid Architects, gave their views on ‘Architecture in the age of digital representation’.

The programme is part of GROHE’s strategy to support architects, in this case by pitching

two leading practitioners together and invite them to describe how they use digital tools in

their respective practices, and to explore contradictions and overlaps.

This fits with GROHE’s recent embrace of digital technologies in rethinking how it

operates and introducing new products and services, including digital controls to monitor

water usage and detect leaks before they cause extensive damage. It aims to change how

people think about, use and enjoy water, from showering through drinking and cooking

to hygiene. As a result of these initiatives Fortune magazine included GROHE as the only

company to feature in its list of 50 who are changing the world.

To explore how architects, seek to change the world by using digital technologies, GROHE

posed several questions to Ingenhoven and Schumacher. These include the effects of

digitalisation on the way buildings are designed, what these means for defining the

disciplines of design and architecture today, and the impact of structural change, and the

impact architecture can have in the world.

Patrik SchumacherChristoph Ingenhoven

Ingenhoven spoke first. Born in 1960, he studied at Aachen and Düsseldorf Universities before starting his own firm in 1985, now known as Ingenhoven Architects and with offices in Düsseldorf, Zurich, Sydney and California.

Drawings expressed the vision, but models developed it into a practical proposition. Initially they were very simple, membranes representing the roof resting on simple supports. Plaster was then added to the membranes to resemble the characteristics of concrete, and through numerous iterations the most appropriate form defined. Ingenhoven also used ‘hanging’ models where weights are added to simulate the real loads and where the stresses are and whether the structure deflects too far. Gaudi used the same technique to understand how the forces would run in his designs for Sagrada Familia.

These analogue methods, slow and imprecise though they may be, were adequate for the purpose. They provided a basis for engineers Buro Happold to calculate the structure, and to work out how to light, glaze and provide fire protection. During the course of the project though digital tools began to catch up with the architect’s vision. Finite element analysis, for instance helped to rationalise the actions of the 28 different columns and, as Ingenhoven put it, to make real what had started as an idea, even a dream.

It is due for completion in 2021, nearly a quarter of a century after design work started, a schedule that almost certainly would have been shorter with the most modern digital tools. But the handmade models have a lingering visceral quality which may help to underpin the seductive, undulating park-like roof that Ingenhoven hopes will be result.

If Stuttgart shows how digital tools developed in parallel with the design, at Ingenhoven’s second project, Marina One, now under construction, they were applied from the start. But in trying to conceive a building of this scale with homes for 3000 and where 20000 people will work, he looked back to nature showing an image of a delicate if rough image of a chimpanzee perching precariously on tree branch. These animals, he explained, build a new home every day, and so have pared

their needs down to the minimum. Humans may have more sophisticated needs, but referring to buildings like Mies’ Farnsworth House, Charles and Rae Eames’ own house in Los Angeles and houses by Albert Frey, he argued, also show use the least possible materials to create special ‘relationships to landscape’.

The question at Marina One was how to infuse these sensibilities in a ‘tropical mega city’, with all the complexity and structural, political and social difficulties that cities have. The most important goal, Ingenhoven explained, is to make people feel comfortable, modifying the climate, protecting them from solar glare and heat, and catching the breeze.

The result is a diaphanous spherical shape with a base for retail and public spaces, and the residential areas above. Working with landscape architects Gustafson Porter and Bowman they have designed a garden on every level, exploiting the rapid plant growth in the tropics and contributing to a comfortable environment – and giving the equivalent of 125 per cent of the site’s ground area to green space, easily exceeding Singapore’s stringent design code requirement for 100 per cent. Energy consumption is bombed, as Marina One used 37 per cent of what is considered state-of-the-art for developments of this sort.

Much of this achievement is due to digital tools. ‘They don’t mean we don’t need drawings’, Ingenhoven explains, but they do allow rapid iterations and testing of different shapes and features which would take far too long with analogue methods. So what look like unfamiliar, futuristic shapes can be shown to be highly efficient structures and well-tuned to human comfort, even in unclement climates. This helps at large scale, to define the overall shape and optimise it for wind and shade, and at more intimate scale of façade details where frames and individual elements can be refined to give optimum performance.

After these three components the next stage of parametricism is tectonism. By integrating technique into the process it adds more rigour which manifests itself as a ‘stylistic heightening’, where engineering and fabrication contribute to form-finding. The components designed in this way play essential roles, but this ‘stylistic heightening’ refines them to a ideal form for their function, which also gives visual expression to that function. So tectonism dovetails both the perfecting of technique and design’s ability to communication. This, Schumacher claims, is a new phase in architectural semiology.

In proposing that parametricism is a style for the 21st century Schumacher drinks deep at the well of German art historical theory, and the influence of three contributors to it in particular can be detected. The first is Karl Botticher who in the 1840s conducted archaeological research into ancient Mesopotamian buildings in attempting to discover the ‘origins’ of architecture. Second is the architect Gottfried Semper who drew partly on Botticher in his endeavours to theorise the relationship between construction technique, material and visual expression. Finally comes the historian Heinrich Wolfflin, who differentiated styles by visual characteristics and argued that the evolution from one style to another depended on the zeitgeist.

What this style gives, should it be adopted, is ‘unity back to the complexity of life’. Tectonism ‘articulates and orchestrates a system of signification’ and designs ‘a semiological network of contradiction and similarity’.

Opening the discussion Paul Finch commented that both architects’ work was extraordinary, but extraordinarily different. Ingenhoven stressed that he works with both analogue and digital means, ‘I don’t want [digital] tools to take over control of the brain’.

For Schumacher digital tools are the most appropriate methods of cultural production ‘at the cutting edge of our civilisation’. The complexity of modern life demands complex conceptual techniques and by bringing them together clears the way towards physical environments that align with other processes, such as the ‘soft grid’ of Manhattan, or human neurology and biology.

But, Paul Finch asked, do you still need an ‘eye’ – an intuitive visual feel – to make sense of the billions of iterations which come from digital tools? ‘I often tell my staff to turn the computer off’ answered Ingenhoven, ‘because it restricts real interactions. The more digital the world becomes the more I look for an analogue place’. Schumacher continued, ‘we also bring criteria to bear’ on the possibilities that digital tools present, but those tools ‘give us more time to do so’ and ‘so increase our capacities’.

At last, said Finch, there was agreement – ‘it has to be the architect who decides’.

When that spatial order ‘communicates’ through semiotics – visual symbols like thresholds – it helps ‘free agents’ (otherwise known as humans) to self-select into particular forms of order.

Order in architecture is a longstanding interest. Born in 1961, he studied philosophy, mathematics and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart and London, joining Zaha Hadid’s office while a student at the Architectural Association (AA) in 1988. He continued his academic career by founding the Design Research Laboratory at the AA in 1996, received a PhD from Klagenfurt University in 1999, and more recently has held the John Portman Chair at Harvard’s GSD. But his primarily activity is in practice. He became Hadid’s partner in 2003 and co-designer of all the projects from then on, winning numerous accolades such as the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for Maxxi in Rome, Italy’s national museum for contemporary art. His influence underlies the growth of Zaha Hadid Architects to a 400-strong global practice, and since Hadid’s death in 2016 he has led the firm.

This experience led him to reject Modernism and the rigid forms of order it imposed in projects like Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ infused more variety into the types of order with which architects could work, as reflected in deconstructivism and post modernism. But early in her career his longstanding partner Zaha Hadid began to see how she could ‘fuse together intersecting elements’ of buildings and cities that had previously been kept

rigidly apart. Initially her vision was conveyed through paintings but with the emergence of digital design tools it became apparent, to Schumacher, that a new order could be brought into existence. He calls this parametricism.

Parametricism starts with three distinct components, foldism, blobism and swarmism. Foldism marks the point where ‘architecture became digital’ – rather than the orthogonal orthodoxies of wall, floor and ceiling, surfaces could continually warp and fold, taking on characteristics of these conventions but breaking out of the rigid ‘box’ they imply. Zaha Hadid Architects’ Shanghai Culture Centre demonstrates the hallmark of foldism with its ‘continually evolving spatial condition’. These developments open the possibility and obligations of ‘making complexity legible’.

Blobism, explained Schumacher, is another tool. Its principle role is to ‘design focus and domain’, with changing amorphous shapes responding to each other and thereby creating conditions that depend on more than one component that have the capacity to change.

Swarmism takes this into the realm of urbanism. It ties into and affects its own context or, as Schumacher put it, a ‘free space of swarming elements creates spaces and figures’. These places may be ephemeral but they derive from many substances.

Patrik Schumacher’s answer to the question ‘what is digital architecture today?’ is to stress how digital tools can help design to communicate as well as to meet functional needs. Social order needs spatial order, he argued with various value-laden images as evidence.

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