PARAMORPH I
Paramorph: Anti-accident methodologies



SIAL Team:
    Mark Burry
    Grant Dunlop


Project Team: The School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University, Professor Mark Burry and Grant Dunlop

The aim of this study is an exploration of 'parametric modelling' software and associated geometric strategies used as a speculative design tool. As this approach to and application of parametric modelling has not been carried out and reported upon previously, the exercise was of an exploratory nature. The results of this exploratory exercise have formed the basis for further experimental exercises and projects, see Paramorph II.


The following text is taken from "Paramorph: Anti-accident methodologies", in Parella, S., (ed.) AD: Hypersurface Architecture II, Academy Editions, a division of John Wiley & Sons, London, September 1999

"Given our continuing ill-defined relationship with computer-derived design, it is hardly surprising that accidental effects achieved thereby are given substantial visual status and appreciation. Many computer based surface representations - hypersurfaces - are nevertheless deliberately and not accidentally provoked and they too are sponsoring revised theory and new architectures coinciding with but possibly more in opposition to the outcome of the ars accidentalis school. Many observers recognise the difficulties from a traditional point of view in establishing appropriate aesthetic theory for what are often rather esoteric and spatially unfathomable surfaces. When we review contemporary literature it does not seem to be a priority to delve too deeply into the ways and means whereby the computer is used to generate highly contemporary images of multidimensional spatial boundaries with some measure of explicit user control. Emerging critical theory therefore has no embarrassment in accepting, or benignly accommodating or even celebrating the accident or the error. The intellectual value of a perverse giving-up of authorship ('design') is neither judged with a quizzicality, nor seen as a potential artistic impropriety.

With the exception of those familiar with using digital media themselves, many critics of contemporary design are in an unusual position of being unusually removed from the design process. In contrast an art critic may not be a painter, but they at least know what paint is, and how it gets onto the canvass. This essay therefore involves itself in production issues rather than the productions, and production through design, not through accident as casual champion. Architectural design where the constituent geometry is mutually linked (so-called parametric design or associative geometry) is hardly mainstream, yet the principles involved have been understood for many years, and exploited by vehicle and product designers able to profit from the necessarily substantial investment in software and appropriate hardware. As prices start to fall markedly to the advantage of architectural practice, parametric design procedures can be advanced as both friend as well as potential pariah to the digital designer, should it come out of its rather curious obscurity into our arena."