Professional Documents
Culture Documents
106
Patrik Schumacher
TECTONISM IN
ARCHITECTURE,
DESIGN
AND FASHION
INNOVATIONS IN
DIGITAL FABRICATION
AS STYLISTIC DRIVERS
107
After ‘foldism’ and ‘blobism’ comes
‘tectonism’ – a new branch of the epochal
style of parametricism that allows greater
expressive and formal variety. It is made
possible by an evolving range of digital
tools for structural form-finding and physics
analysis, linked directly to fabrication. As
Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha
Hadid Architects, underlines, these do
not remove the need for architects to
collaborate with engineers and fabricators,
but they do enable them to acquire more
reliable intuitions about the logics of these
other disciplines. This can only enhance
their capacity to produce works that
successfully combine communication and
social functionality with technical integrity.
108
Recent advances in numerically controlled fabrication technologies Zaha Hadid Architects Computational
Design Group (ZHA CODE),
increasingly feed back into the formal repertoires prevalent in 3D-Printed Chair,
avant-garde architectural, product and fashion design. This feedback 2014
is actively and strategically pursued by current protagonists opposite and below: The design exploits the nearly limitless
of parametricism, not so much to empower their prior design geometric complexity and fineness of manufacture afforded by
high-resolution 3D-printing technologies. It emerged from several
intentions, but to discover new sensibilities in the rather particular successive optimisation processes. After the outer edge line was
sets of affordances and constraints that come with the different modelled, the surface was generated via mesh relaxation with
Kangaroo. This surface was then the input for a structural topology
technologies explored. optimisation to generate a pattern of reinforcement lines via
On the basis of industrial robots as generic fabrication iterative subtraction.
109
processes that are then set free to search the characteristic solution Patrick Schumacher with Vasilija Zivanic,
Parametric Dinner Jacket,
space delimited by the constraints. The Zaha Hadid Architects 2013
Computational Design Group (ZHA CODE) is currently developing
The jacket is made from neoprene fabric, which is super-light,
many of its own custom tools to model the particular constraints of warm and elastic. The elasticity allows the tailoring to follow
particular fabrication processes. the body shape closely without compromising movement
and comfort. Zips substitute for buttons everywhere. Laser-
All this leads to uniquely characteristic morphologies and cut perforation patterns allow for ventilation where needed,
features that nevertheless all remain recognisable as variants of and also enhance the elasticity, as well as delivering an
additional substrate for ornamental/semiological expression.
tectonism and indeed parametricism because all these techniques The idea is to offer an elegant formal evening jacket perfect
follow the methodology of parametricism favouring parametric for going jogging right after the event.
110
Each of these fabrication techniques
imprints its unique, unmistakeable
character onto its products, including
the shape-range of the overall form
as well as the materiality and texture.
111
of art. The concept emerged in the context of Russian avant-garde
art and design during the early Soviet Union, and is seen as giving
character to the product.
This new diversity of form making potentials and aesthetic
expressions affords a welcome expansion of parametricism’s
repertoire beyond the smooth non-uniform rational basis spline
(NURBS) surfaces that had previously been prevalent. This fuels
both programmatic invention as well as semiological articulation.
According to my theory of architectural autopoiesis,2 new styles
manifest both new formal concepts as well as a new conception
of programme or social function, both connected with the
opportunities offered by new technologies.
As Lei Zheng, the curator of the ‘Meta-Utopia’ show, noted
in the catalogue: ‘New aesthetic sensibilities are here as much
tested as are technological feasibilities, rendering a possible
future viscerally tangible, and querying its desirability.’ These
works query ‘technological, aesthetic and anthropological
innovations. Fabrication technology experimentation becomes
here an engine of both spatio-formal invention as well as socio-
programmatic invention.’3 Zaha Hadid Design and Ai Build,
Puddle Chair,
While many current design experiments focus on exploring new 2017
technologies and architects/designers are inevitably drawn into
The chair was designed specifically to be manufactured via
engineering problematics and thus become proto-engineers, stirring freeform, multicolour (black and blue) robotic 3D printing.
and steering real engineers to come on board, it is important to keep The sofa’s space-frame is optimised for lightness, material
robustness and structural integrity, and its intricate design
track of the fundamental difference between the design (including is layered with an artificial cloth to transform it into a
architecture) and engineering disciplines. The demarcation between comfortable seating surface with a stimulating ripple texture.
Fabrication technology
experimentation becomes
here an engine of both
spatio-formal invention
as well as socio-
programmatic invention
112
TECTONIC ARTICULATION In the terminology of the founder of semiotics, Charles S
The relationship between the technical and communicative Peirce, tectonic articulation thus transforms ‘indexical signs’ into
dimensions of the built environment leads to the concept of ‘symbolic signs’.8 This process too gives degrees of freedom to the
tectonics, or more precisely ‘tectonic articulation’,4 here understood designer in the selection of the indexical features that might be
as the architectural selection and utilisation of technically motivated, heightened and systematised to become elements of a semiological
engineered forms and details for the sake of a legibility that aims system of signification. To pursue tectonic articulation, architects
at an information-rich, communicative spatial morphology, for the need to guide and orchestrate the engineering investigations and
sake of visual or tactile communication. then select the engineering options that most suit their primary
It was the Guest-Editor of this issue of 2, Neil Leach, who task, namely to fulfil the posed social functions via spatio-
first used the concept of tectonics in connection with the digitally morphological communications. The adaptive differentiation of
based design movement I later termed parametricism, in his 2002 loadbearing structures as well as the adaptive differentiation of
anthology entitled Designing for a Digital World,5 and then in volumes and envelopes according to the building’s environmental
a follow-up work entitled Digital Tectonics (2004).6 According performance (with respect to its exposure to sun, wind, rain and
to Leach, the title was intended as a strategic reappropriation of so on) as well as differentiations that stem from fabrication logics
the term ‘tectonics’ from the more conservative – and seemingly (tessellations, tool-path patterns) afford many opportunities for
moralising – way that Kenneth Frampton had used it in his differential tectonic articulation. A lawfully differentiated built
earlier Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995).7 I welcome this general environment would therefore be much more legible and navigable
reappropriation as a basis for my much more specific concept of than Modernism’s mute, isotropic order of repetition or the visual
tectonics that implies the capacity (if not always the explicit agenda) chaos of postmodernist collage.
of communication. The development of sophisticated computational design tools
The concept of tectonic articulation applies to all design within both the architecture and engineering disciplines, and
disciplines from architecture to product design and fashion, and within the construction industry, means that the scope for nuanced
so does the distinction between design and engineering implied in tectonic articulation has much increased. The realisation of this
the distinction between technical and social functionality. Within potential requires an intensified collaboration between innovative
our complex information/network society, the built environment architects, engineers and fabricators. Although there can be no
and the world of artefacts have to share the task of information doubt that architecture remains a discourse that is distinct from
processing and communication: they become an important source engineering and construction, close collaboration with these
of information helping us to navigate and orient within our disciplines as well as the acquisition of reliable intuitions about
increasingly complex social world. Thus the social functionality of their respective logics are increasingly important conditions for
a designed space or artefact crucially depends on its communicative the design of contemporary high-performance built environments.
capacity. All design – across all design disciplines – is to an These intuitions can be more reliably acquired if architects and
important extent communication design. In fashion design this designers engage in amateur proto-engineering by using the
is often more obvious than in architecture or product design, but various physics engines cited above to experiment with fabrication
it applies universally across all design disciplines. The designed processes. Tectonism is committed to such practises that demand
environment together with the world of designed artefacts – additional skills and knowledge, and that deliver a new, rich
effectively the totality of the phenomenal world that surrounds formal repertoire of articulation. These new articulatory powers
us – functions as an interface of communication. This also includes can be employed in a design agenda of communication made
graphic and web design. Therefore all human interactions, whether explicit: design is communication. 1
face-to-face or mediated, depend on being framed and facilitated by
designed spaces and artefacts that should take this crucial function Notes
1. See Patrik Schumacher, 2 Parametricism 2.0: Rethinking
into account.
Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century, March/April (no 2), 2016.
The history of architecture abounds with examples where 2. Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volumes 1 and
2, John Wiley & Sons, 2010 and 2012.
architectural elements and features with technical functions become
3. Lei Zheng, Meta Utopia: Between Process and Poetry, ‘Meta-Utopia’
the object of articulatory or ‘ornamental’ endeavours. However, we exhibition catalogue, Zaha Hadid Design Gallery, London, 2017, p 2.
4. This concept of ‘tectonic articulation’, defined with reference to
need to understand the instrumentality of ornament. We need to
semiology, was first introduced by the author in ‘Tectonics: The
grasp ornament not in contrast to performance, but as a special type Differentiation and Collaboration of Architecture and Engineering’,
in Ursula Kleefisch-Jobst et al, Stefan Polonyi: Bearing Lines–Bearing
of communicative performance. A technically efficient morphology
Surfaces, Edition Axel Menges (Stuttgart and London), 2012.
might thus also assume an articulatory, communicative function. 5. Neil Leach (ed), Designing for a Digital World, John Wiley & Sons
(Chichester), 2002.
The articulatory integration of the morphological consequences
6. Neil Leach, David Turnbull and Chris Williams (eds), Digital
of technical requirements is always the more elegant solution than Tectonics, John Wiley & Sons (Chichester), 2004.
7. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, MIT Press
the attempt to fight and deny them by covering them up with a
(Cambridge, MA), 1995.
separate communicative surface. This latter stance would require 8. Charles S Peirce, ‘What is a Sign?’, The Essential Peirce: Selected
Philosophical Writings 1893–1913, Indiana University Press
the invention of additional communicative features because social
(Bloomington, IN), 1998.
distinctions desire and require expression. However, the utilisation
of the initially technically motivated morphological features for the
characterisation of spaces is not only more economical, but leads
to a higher level of credibility of the communication because the Text © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 106 photo
morphological feature that is now to become a signifier is often by Christian Hogstedt, Courtesy of ZHA/Georg Jensen;
p 107 Courtesy of ZHA/Georg Jensen; pp 108–9, 112
already an index of the intended meaning rather than a merely Courtesy of ZHA; p 110-111 © Patrik Schumacher
arbitrary symbol.
113