BACKGROUND

                          

YSOA, Patternism: Computation and Contemporary Continuity
Brennan Buck, Fall 2012

Over the last two decades, digital form has energized modernism’s neutral field to
produce undulating surfaces tense with potential energy. Topological surfaces,
deployed at an architectural scale, define spaces of constantly shifting size,
proportion and orientation. These surfaces are enabled by calculus rather than
geometry and characterized by topological vectors and flows more than stable
tectonic assemblies of points and planes.

Calculus, the underlying mathematics of digital form, is the study of differentials –
relationships between multiple points on a curve or elements in space. At least a
decade before calculus was employed by large numbers of architects, Robert Venturi
argued for a differential understanding of the built environment and Gregory Bateson
described differential relationships as the key to understanding nature. Today,
architectural computation allows for the precise modulation of differentials, opening
up a new extension of the digital formal project. This seminar proposes that a
formalism combining the continuity of topological surfaces and the articulation of
tectonics, enabled by the precise modulation of computation, might catalyze a more
diverse mode of formal continuity: pattern.