- towards a living architecture -

Fusion of computation and genetics in design
Contemporary approach towards architecture is the conclusion of a new well-established cross-fertilization of ideas between computer science including concepts as computaion, informatics, modeling, animation and biological science concerned with evolutionary concepts and genetics.

Thus, the paradigm now that architectural discourse is into is the erutive juxtaposition of three disciplines which are computer science, genetics and architecture. The computational paradigm introduces architecture concious process of design with a bottom-up approach, whereas the biological paradigm apparently allows the designer a return to reality from the pure electronic realm of digital computation. Appreciating biological systems within the process of computation permits us to see how techniques of computation reflect the way organism and environment involve and evolve simultaneously. This interpretation brings out resolutions of re-understanding architecture as living entities and of evaluating potential benefits of applying life criteria to architecture.

Re-evaluating natural evolutionary processes in terms of computation and harnessing some of the qualities of natural systems can bring a real improvement in the built improvement. Such an approach proposes broad innovations and creative solutions by passing the boundaries of intuition, perception, and experiences of an architect. The traditional engines of architectural design have been the unique capabilities of human brain, whereas within the approach of biodigital architecture architectural creativity departs in many ways from the traditional model, but still relies on human skills for the essential first step of forming the concept. The concept is not only draft drawings of a predicted solution anyways; the concept here refers to drawing process of the system by determining initial operations and parameters.

Nature here becomes a guide from reality to understand the information processing in computational ways, and a helper to identify basic rules that would lead to healthy environments which will satisfy simple missions. Following a similar path of that exists in natural evolution changes architectural products to organizations which behave with life-like capacities, fulfilling solutions for sustainability, one of the biggest problems of our contemporary world that has been left with insufficient solutions.

The biological structures of natural ecosystems behave very distinctly from our man-made structures we have today. They recycle their materials, allow change and adaptation in their form, and make efficient use of the environmental energy; where as built environments do not recycle, are not adaptable and waste energy. However, the way out is not directly replicating natural organisms but applying some general principles of interaction with the environment. The solutions to our environmental problems lie in relating architecture to the new holistic understanding of the structure of nature in order to create buildings that act as ecosystems in themselves instead of only containing some added mechanisms to reduce consumption.

In short, incoming information from the sciences of nature and understanding them in means of computation brings us towards a new way of doing architecture. Applying essentials of biological systems in the framework of computation to artificial systems proposes many advantages and possibilities for our built environment. This new approach of form-generating changes static architecture into living systems that they themselves are ecological structures that live in harmony with its surroundings and environmental conditions showing adaptive and responsive behavior and including inventive space framing and material usage. Consequently the search for a new form of life brings up researches on life itself. And in this search for constituting artificial life, architecture questions how emphasizing on the process of generation, leaving behind the questions of what.