The digital culture of ephemeral and sensuous images has been always opposed to the culture of pragmatic. But recently these two cultures that seemed to be incompatible collaborated and produced the 'digital tectonics'. Up-to-date computer programs make easy the design process and the latest digital tools let architects generate new architectural forms. A lot of architects use the new possibilities in the following fields: material composition, structural engineering, and construction technique. This architectural style is studied by many architects and Greg Lynn and Patrik Schumacher are among them.
Lynn believes that architects have been over occupied with producing conflicting, fragmented, and heterogeneous formal systems. They tried to embody the differences in various cultural, social, and physical contexts. This lead to the contradictions between unlike elements. The problem of contradictions between a building and its context has become an emblem of the contemporary culture, as now it is common to use conflicting materials, geometries, styles, programs, and histories (Lynn, 29 Folding in Architecture). Lynn describes the ways to create buildings that seem to be moving or fluid because of their non-standard construction. Such buildings are the part of the post-modernity culture that is based on complexity, like industrial modernity is based on standardization. Complicated figures in the post-modern style are involved in various intricate and complex connections. The needed effect can be reached with the help of special techniques and the usage of anexact geometries is one of the most effective. Anexact geometries are irreducible but rigorous at the same time. Such geometries can not be reduced to average dimensions though they can be determined with precision. In contradistinction to exact geometries, there are no repeated anexact geometric figures outside the context it is situated. That is why it is not easy to translate the anexact figures (Lynn, 35 Folding in Architecture). Patrik Schumacher studies the ‘new hegemonic paradigm’ that ideally suits to post-industrial society – parametricism (240 The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012). Parametricism has been developing for the recent fifteen years and now it claims hegemony in avant-garde architecture practice. The mass society was characterized by universal consumption standards, but we have evolved in the heterogeneous society that is characterized by the multitude of lifestyles and extensive work-path differentiation. So, architecture should organize and articulate the growing complexity of our post-modernity society (243 A New Global Style). The transfer from modernism to parametricism is proved by the evidence that the late Modernist architects widely use the parametric tools in order to absorb complexity while maintaining the Modernist aesthetic. Parametricism is supported by modern electronic computing and seems to be the best in managing the variability of design. Schumacher believes that parametricism should show the ‘sensibility’ that is created with the help of the right combination of the sense of fluidity and the elegance of complexity (240 The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012). At the time Post-Modernism solves external influences of an economy, use, advertising, and program through contradiction, compliancy that is also used in parametricism involves twisting, knotting, folding, and bending them within a form (Lynn, 36 The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012). Parametricism is used not only in designing one building, it aims to get a full control of design of everything that can be built in a city.
The nowadays choice of construction options, styles and typologies is too huge to expect the pragmatic logics. Usually, the result of mixtures is the cacophony of incompatibilities. But parametricism can coordinate and articulate pragmatic concerns despite rich differentiations without overriding richness as adaptiveness and variety are common to the genetic make-up of the style (Schumacher, 254 The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012).
Works Cited List
Schumacher, P. ‘Parametricism: A New Global Style for Architecture and
Urban Design’, Neil Leach (guest-editor), Digital Cities, ADProfile 200, AD79,
July–August 2009, pp 14–23. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012
Lynn, G. ‘Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple’. ADMarch – April 1993
