There's a trend in architecture schools to offload the form-finding "creative burden" to computers with the use of shape grammars. Though they're a driving force in many departments, some will admit behind closed doors that they're also a bit of a red herring, and that years in the spotlight have yet to bear fruit. My own observations are that, rather than easing the burden, shape grammars have shifted the focus of labor: students trade their Olfa knives for a keyboard and mouse, and spend hours debugging Rhino scripts instead of erasing lines. Because most grammars are agnostic to physical law, they also generate needlessly inefficient, material-laden architecture, which rightfully sends the building scientists into the streets screaming blasphemy.
I've found that I'm most productive in creative endeavors when my goals are specific, resources are constrained, tools are comprehensible and transparent, and my attention is focused. I particularly love the sense of immersion that comes when sketching a scene, writing an essay, repairing a small engine or designing a program (I think it's what Csikszentmihalyi termed "flow"). I'd be lost if I had to design an entire virtual world, as its far beyond the limits of my imagination, and dissatisfied if I off-loaded the work to a machine, because I'd always know it to be a knock-off of the real thing. Given a lifetime, I might be able to pull off a reasonable virtual vegetable garden. It's much more fun to go out into the real world, ask questions of it, and use tools like pencils, paint, objects or mathematics to help find meaningful answers. One example comes from learning to draw: I remember being fascinated by the ideas behind perspective drawing, and was humbled that such simple principles could have been hidden in plain sight for so long! After playing around with vanishing points, it seemed that there must be some very fundamental relationships between the points on the horizons and lines on the page. This gave way to an exploration of projective geometry, which I was fascinated to discover is an immensely powerful way of describing relationships -- from mechanical linkages to structural loads and conic sections. From here the lines on the page could be mapped to equations of lines, and from equations of lines to linear algebra. Finding these relationships in ordinary things was a great excitement, and though I've never used the knowledge to build a ny large CAD tool, my small experiments on paper and in silico have given me a new perspective that I'll happily hold for the rest of my life. To that end, I'd never want a computer to create a new world to live in, but instead be an aid to understanding the one right in front of me. Finally, a few books worth mentioning: Cliff Reiters "Fractals, Visualization and J", which chronicles an exploration of many neat ideas: from chaotic attractors, to celluar automata, fractal terrain generation and projective transformations. It uses J as its teaching language, but the code reads like "executable mathematics", and could be put into another form without too much hassle. Reasonably priced print copies are hard to find, but Lulu.com sells the eBook for less than the price of some sandwiches. And though I'm always skeptical of attempts to mathematize art and design, three books worth mentioning are: Point and Line to Plane : Kandinsky Notes on the Synthesis of Form : Christopher Alexander On Growth and Form : Thompson _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
