http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/the-critics/parametricism-how-quaint/1935874.article
Parametricism? How quaint
27 November, 2008 | By Sam Jacob
Parametric architecture’s abstract hubris lies in ruins, but Sam Jacob finds it all rather picturesque.
Every success harbours the seeds of its own failure. Somewhere in the hubristic peak of complete accomplishment lurks the complacency, arrogance and absence of doubt that fans the inevitable, all-consuming bonfire of vanities. It’s just this kind of raging self-immolation that has cindered the global economic landscape – in days, the terrain has been completely transformed. The speed of transformation has hit built culture hard. The collapse revealed a world undescribed by the maps and charts we had drawn. Buildings find themselves completed in a different landscape, appearing on the skyline like giant mausolea for a failed ideology, or abandoned, half-built, like freshly minted ruins.
The markets had evolved into hyper-sophisticated, super-calibrated, cleverly geared systems whose logistics supported an ever-finer kind of abstraction. They became a machine for manufacturing value and growth in vaporous form, decoupled from substance. Their fall marks the failure of a particular kind of algorithmically programmed fantasy of abstraction.
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BD The Architect’s website
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3122853
The future is parametric
19 September 2008
In Venice last week, Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, hailed parametricism as the great new style after modernism. This is an edited version of his manifesto
We must pursue the parametric design paradigm all the way, penetrating into all corners of the discipline. Systematic, adaptive variation and continuous differentiation (rather than mere variety) concern all architectural design tasks from urbanism to the level of tectonic detail. This implies total fluidity on all scales.
The mass society that was characterised by a single, nearly universal consumption standard has evolved into the heterogenous society of the multitude. Contemporary avant-garde architecture is addressing the demand for an increased level of articulated complexity by means of retooling its methods on the basis of parametric design systems.
The contemporary architectural style that has achieved pervasive hegemony within the contemporary architectural avant-garde can be best understood as a research programme based on the parametric paradigm. We propose to call this style parametricism.
Parametricism is the great new style after modernism. Postmodernism and deconstructivism have been transitional episodes that ushered in this new, long wave of research and innovation.
That the parametric paradigm is becoming pervasive in contemporary architecture and design is evident. There has been talk about versioning, iteration and mass customisation for quite a while within the architectural avant-garde discourse, formulated at the beginning of the 1990s with the slogan of “continuous differentiation”. Since then, there has been both a widespread, even hegemonic, dissemination of this tendency, as well as a cumulative build-up of virtuosity, resolution and refinement within it.
This development was facilitated by the attendant development of parametric design tools and script. Parametricism can only exist via sophisticated parametric techniques. Finally, advanced design techniques like scripting (in Mel Script or Rhino Script) and parametric modelling (with tools like GC or DP) are becoming a pervasive reality.
But the parametric design tools by themselves cannot account for this drastic stylistic shift from modernism to parametricism. Late modernist architects use parametric tools to maintain a modernist aesthetic. At Zaha Hadid Architects, our parametricist sensibility pushes in the opposite direction and aims for a maximal emphasis on conspicuous differentiation.
Fields not space
Modernism was founded on the concept of space. Parametricism differentiates fields. Fields are full, as if filled with a fluid medium. Swarms have also served as paradigmatic analogues for the field concept. We would like to think of swarms of buildings that drift across the landscape or of large continuous interiors like big exhibition halls.
Imagine there are no more landmarks to hold on, no axes to follow and no more boundaries to cross. Contemporary architecture aims to construct new logics — the logic of fields — that gear up to organise and articulate the new level of dynamism and complexity of contemporary society.
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