Enhanced creativity through computational design

The architectural industry is undergoing a profound transformation. In an ever more digitalized world, the architect is in growing need of integrating computational strategies to solve increasingly complex design problems. Rising requirements of structural performance, sustainability and human comfort are seen to cause havoc in the design and planning process, when actually these challenges could be welcomed as an opportunity to rethink design and create a better environment. Architects have been reluctant to meet this paradigm shift by changing their working methods, and many are unaware of the immense potentials they are missing out on. It has never - in history - been possible to design in a more informed and integrated way, and there has never been more room for questioning and innovation.

Subject

The project investigates how architects can benefit from new methods of computational design by using it to enhance their creativity, experience their designs during development, and gain feedback for their architectural decisions in a way that hasn't been possible in the past.
Using technology and programming to augment and automate portions of the design process is often assumed to diminish the human and creative qualities of good architecture. It is feared that in applying these methods, architects succumb to leaving design judgment to a non emotional, artificial intelligence. Our proposition is a workflow that encourages a fruitful interaction between the architect and the computer, and leaves the architect in control of decision-making while outsourcing time-consuming procedures of modeling and optimization. This way, his decisions are in fact informed by a much broader basis of knowledge

Contact
 
Christoph Gengnagel, Saqib Aziz, Max Marschall