What is Architecture? This has been answered in countless different ways in the past and could perhaps be boiled down to ‘the added value of buildings.’ Architecture essentially deals with what isn’t tangible in a building. It cannot be smelled or touched. It can, perhaps, be photographed, but only rarely seen. But it can most definitely be drawn.
Everything from organizational bubble diagrams through rough sketches and windowsill details is covered by the seemingly omnipresent umbrella of architecture, and yet its materialization is another realm altogether. Engineers, technicians and builders give architecture its shape. Paradoxically, with its embodiment, the architecture ceases to be itself, but becomes a building. This transformation is accompanied by a shift to very banal issues such as water-tightness, access rights, etc. At this stage only a fraction of Architecture still remains and is often only legible to specialized individuals; most commonly architects and occasionally tourists.
It could therefore be argued that Architecture is a purely virtual art form. A wall is a wall, but a drawing can virtually represent just about anything. A typical plan-section-elevation package is in itself nothing but arbitrary lines on paper drawn in one of a variety of techniques. Its value and meaning is not in the lines themselves, but in their virtual potential as a future building.
However, even if the plans are followed by the utmost diligence and the resulting structure embodies the envisaged building as closely as at all possible, there is an inescapable divide between the original set of plans and the resulting physical embodiment.
Essentially, there is nothing un-virtual about architecture.
Moreover, there is a long tradition of entirely virtual art forms. Drawings, paintings, models and maps all depend on a level of make-believe, trust and imagination. From the earliest drawings in Altamira onwards to digital building information modelling there has been a persistent gap between the actual objective reality of the drawing and its intended purpose.
To consume the intended experience in its entirety (past its physical artistic medium) a level of ‘consensual hallucination’ is required, as defined by William Gibson. That is for the viewer to use the physical stimulus of an artwork and then agree to subjectively recreate the intended virtual experience.
Any artwork is essentially a manual to an imaginary subjective experience. To achieve this, especially from the Renaissance onwards, a set of rules is most often utilized: perspective, projection, mathematics, etc. These enable an easy transition of an intended imaginary experience to the user by using a universal visual language which will be decoded by the viewer.
Illustrated by the case of Raphael’s School of Athens, the overall allegory is that of philosophy and, by proxy, wisdom. Although featuring a myriad of various layers of meaning, composition, colour and perspective, the first impression is an ornate virtual open hallway, populated with various individuals. Although the image is not overly complex and can be decoded by the viewer subconsciously as a virtual extension of space along with the aforementioned figures, other layers are more difficult to read. These rely on objects placed within the fresco, colour meaning, contemporary texts, etc. Without all the layers understood appropriately and their accompanying virtuality decoded all that is left are blotches of coloured plaster.
Architecture is even more complicated due to its unique impersonal spatial quality. It possesses two additional phases of virtuality. Firstly, it is most often a flat representation of a spatial object and secondly, it is hardly ever created by the architect in person.
In other words, while paintings are an end in themselves and most often represent a virtual space populated with objects, architecture on the other hand is required to not only create a similar virtual space, but also allow for its materialization by a third party. And as mentioned before, the materialized structure has little to do with the initial drawings used to virtualize it.
The need for architecture itself is manifold. From directing building efforts in the most efficient way to adding economic value to buildings through their architectural ornamentation, as well as many others. And yet through the many intentional decisions that guide architecture’s development, a subconscious identity of society is expressed through the architecture it creates. Therefore the role of architecture is also a medium of encrusting society’s progress and its perception of space and time, along with its aspirations. The commemorative aspect of architecture makes it useful for such analyses of technological capabilities, worldviews, limitations, etc.
This is important as the current rise of digital architecture holds many details of today’s society, technical achievement and perhaps the future fate of architecture itself. Parametricism is perhaps the most prominent of digital architecture, as it best embodies contemporary prevalent issues.
And yet what lies at the core of Parametricism? Is it simply an old notion represented in a new package, or an altogether new entity? Some of its key components could be identified as: evolutionary theory with Darwin, mathematical biology and fractals with Turing and Mandelbrot, computers development with Moore’s law, interconnectedness with internet and blogs, emergence with simplexity, algorithms with cookbooks and DNA, amongst others. They show the permeation of some wider issues into the realm of architecture and subsequently its reaction to them.
The question that arises is whether Parametricism is a historical style (i.e. grew organically out of its wider temporal and spatial environment) as Modernism was, regardless of the latter’s Futurist tendencies to break with the past and historical continuation. Or is it genuinely an entirely unique innovation? In either case, it is certainly architecture’s attempt to keep up with society - learning to play its part in a game where rules have become adaptable by becoming simultaneously simpler and more complex.
The beginnings of this crumbling of hierarchies can be linked to the technological development of the past decades, particularly the second half of the 20th century. By beginning to understand the inner workings of the atom, the world itself has lost its solid footing that has been painstakingly built in the preceding centuries.
When explored at a minute enough level, all traces of solidity were replaced by a fluid status quo, adapting itself to the environment at any given time. Subatomic exploration continues to this day, with numerous issues still unresolved. Although there isn’t a widespread preoccupation with these issues (or their implications) in society at large, their influence has permeated it at numerous levels and Parametricism can be understood as architecture’s effort to catch up with other industries.
This exceptionally unstable status quo has had a cardinal effect on architecture. Partly because unlike other art forms (or forms of expression on the whole), architecture has a unique role to perform. Even in the most stable environments, architecture is in effect always speculation about the future. So the architect is not only creating a non-existent (i.e. virtual) building, but also for a time that has not happened yet and an environment that does not yet exist. Within such a turbulent environment even the tamest of such predictions can quickly develop a radical aura.
Of course this can be done in any one of an array of media (carvings, pencils or pixels) used to conjure up an image of this non-existing structure in a future environment. As said before, architecture is caught within the virtuality of the potential building. But do these representations (whether flat drawings or spatial models of a reduced size) have any significant relationship to the materiality of buildings at all? And would Ruskin’s lamp of truth shine any differently on Renaissance drawings any than an intricate model created through building information modelling?
The issue, as will be tackled below in more detail, is whether a building can ever be the direct embodiment of a plan or a model? Or, by proxy, an idea? Perhaps catenary models represent a curious organic unity of model and building, most closely replicated when enlarged, but unfortunately still remain models, only to be potential used by some Lilliputian inhabitants.
