October 19, 2007

Complex Geometry: Reinventing the Paradigm


With ‘mobius house’(torus house) the use of complex terminology started, the research going on for decades and the constant flux of digital information continuously tries to reinvent the logic between architecture and geometry. For some time after venturi’s complexity & contradiction in architecture architects tried to establish an analogy between complexity in program and its manifestation into architectural form. The advent of digital technologies (cad-cam) supported the process. Lot of conceptual models developed (blobs etc.)New terminologies evolved eventually like kinetics, supple, pliant etc.
Some architects used this to produce functional concepts. A new aesthetic of digitally manufactured spaces can be seen today .however architect like koolhaas uses it rarely.

Is FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal a complex geometry? Is it complex just because we are not used to this kind of surfaces? Will we still consider it complexity when we see it in 2050, when maybe we all will know how to manage this kind of geometry with the help of better computer software? Is it more complex than some Venturi’s buildings or OMA’s Universal project just because our difficulty on drawing it on a paper? Is Ben van Berkel’s Moebius House complex because of its geometry or because of its program? What is complexity in geometry? Does geometry’s complexity depend on our ignorance about new technologies? Aren’t more interesting the shapes that follow complex programs than the free surfaces that respond only to a free game?

Maybe we are in the middle of a process, but something is happen in the new proposals of architecture. The fight between architectural process and architectural easthetic (form), come by the creation of new materials, lenguage, software, etc… and this is a dilema that with the time we will know for the final answers. The complexity of the shape is not new and the programs of the buildings are changing with the new needs of the people. There is the true; the competitibity and the demanding world are creating this kind of development in design and technologies.

To finish this, we can’t forgot that the function and the concept of one project and the column of the architecture. And if in the process during the time we lost this, we will lost, in my way of think, the meaning of being architects

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