For those of you who remember i mentioned how last fall i volunteered for the LA Forum, well one of the best lectures of the series was by a man named Tom Wiscombe and his firm Emergent. I would there work to be simple amazing and the methods of deriving the form to be even more amazing. enjoy
Founded in 1999 by Tom Wiscombe, EMERGENT is dedicated to researching issues of structure, tectonics, and materiality through built work. EMERGENT is a platform for experimentation, leveraging techniques and logics from fields outside architecture including biology, complexity science, aerospace engineering, and computation. EMERGENT’s directive is to move beyond categorical thinking in architecture and the stratification of building systems. This involves a re-examination of heirarchies and discreetness of systems toward coherent but differentiated constructions. Ultimately, the results are understood both in terms of performance and spatial and atmospheric effects.
EMERGENT’s approach is informed by contemporary models of biology and systems theory rather than by the arts, toward an architecture based on structural pattern formation and emergent behavior. The work is part of a larger contemporary movement in architecture referred to by Detlef Mertins in 2004 as ‘Bioconstructivism’, where a bias toward material intelligence begins to produce an architecture characterized by its variability and responsiveness to local forces.
The work questions the dialectic of excess and efficiency in architecture, in favor of a more complex understanding of both through biological thinking. The recursive process of random mutation and natural selection in nature provides a model for how a dynamic feedback between excesses and efficiencies can create innovation and elegance. This feedback logic is executed in the office using both generative and analytical algorithms as well as hands-on design techniques.
Key to the work is the phenomenon of emergence which offers insight into the way apparently isolated bodies, particles, or systems exhibit group behavior in coherent, but unexpected, patterns. The animated beauty of emergent organizations, such as in swarms or hives, points to a range of real architectural potentials where components are always linked and always exchanging information, and above all, where architectural wholes exceed the sum of their parts.
Biological thinking has led EMERGENT toward the exploration of new methods of systems integration, construction documentation, and fabrication. Recent co-ventures with international engineering companies, including Buro Happold and DeSimone Consulting Engineers, have begun to reveal new working methods which establish active feedback loops between engineering and design disciplines, ultimately pointing to a redefinition of AEC territories.
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