Algorithmic Sustainable Design- Twelve Lectures on Architecture

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About the Book Twelve one-hour video lectures are archived online, and can be accessed for free. The course material is original, and includes innovative topics such as algorithms, fractals, cellular automata, complexity, emergence, information theory. symmetries, scaling, codes, and networks, here introduced into architecture and urbanism for the first time. Students from around the world can now learn the intelligent basis. for architecture, and use it to re-establish adaptability and genuine sustainability.

Preface I came away from reading this book especially informed and much more optimistic. This rarely happens these days... I would like to note my personal imp pressions and all the thoughts that were generated in someone who comes from an entirely different discipline.

Before coming into contact with this book, I would have looked with special mistrust at anybody who claimed that architecture could be ranked among the sciences. Even more so, as the criterion of what constitutes a good and success ful design seemed to be lost in labyrinthine conversations among experts.

Introduction In the early twentieth century, music, like all the arts, went through cataclys mic changes, the very concept of tonality was challenged when a number of com posers started experimenting with different atonal systems. Abolishing tonali ty in music was tantamount to abolishing syntax in language. This is something that every composer knows and, these days, so does every cognitive neuroscien tist. Unexpected notes (out of tonality) in a tonal sequence evoke the same reac tion in the brain as does the appearance of syntactically wrong words in a sen tence, as shown with functional MRI scans. The experiment of atonality was a purely intellectual one; it neither came from nor did it satisfy the emotional rameters that music relates to. Actually, it was not just intellectual, it was more pa narrowly academic: because music has been loaded with heavy intellectual con tent using the language of tonality for centuries. Atonality sought to destroy the language itself; with the language destroyed, conveying any meaning, intellectu al or other, automatically becomes much more difficult.

If this story sounds awfully familiar to an audience interested in architec ture, it is for a good reason. The modernist movement, and especially its decon structivist incarnation, have arisen from the same intellectual processes and have moved towards the same language-destroying targets. There is a difference, however. The atonal movement in music did not totally dominate the twentieth cento ry, although some composers persisted in following it dogmatically. The uncom fortable psychological effect of atonality was recognized not only by those who completely avoided it, but also by composers like Leonard Bernstein who would occasionally use an atonal theme precisely for this unsettling effect. Like anoth er color in his music palette.

In architecture, modernism sought to dominate architecture and ostracize all other forms of architectural expression, by pretending it was not a style, but a totally different approach. It has both succeeded and failed in that goal. It has cer tainly dominated most of the 20th century but, on the other hand, its main ide ological weapon the claim that "form follows function" regardless of the aes thetics achieved has been proven to be wrong. For modernism created its own aesthetics; Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair are clearly not made in the simplest, most utilitarian manner. Some of us actually find them quite beautiful, and therein lies the ideological failure of mod ernism. Revealed to be, after all, nothing but just another style, with its good and bad moments, it automatically loses the moral high ground and with it the right to judge all non-modernist art as inferior or degenerate.

**Contents and Sample Pages**