hello world.
This project is the culmination of the Master of Digital Design, which I have pursued in parallel to my architecture studies. It continues an interest in experimenting with procedural design approaches and their productive potentials and limitations.
I am interested in digital architectures and forms that are not just about spectacle. My starting point is in fact partly a reaction to superficial image making in architecture and design. The National Gallery of Australia has many moments of rich experience that have long captured my imagination. This architecture can not be reduced to a single iconic image for a postcard, it must be explored.
I have no image of the generative architectural outcome which I am working toward. This is both exciting and daunting. I am attempting to develop a methodology from analysis of the architecture and iterative sketches in code - and to seed some strange and unexpected outcomes.
Many digital designers start to develop a generative model from natural systems - eg Nervous System. My expectation is that basing a new generative architecture on historical architectures is an approach that lend's itself to (but doesn't guarantee!!) a rich architectural outcome.
Col Madigan speaks of a grammar for the National Gallery that can be evolved. The architecture is formed from a crystalline structure on a trihex grid as described in the Architect's Statement. There is an abstract relation to a natural system, but it appears that, although likely inspired by nature, Madigan's architectural system was derived from first principles rather than being based on a particular starting point in nature. The geometric logic is my starting point - and all of the geometry has an architectural reason for being.
Such an approach, of working from a historical architecture, is not without precedent. Zaha Hadid's architecture is exemplary as a rich elaboration from constructivism and more recently futurism. I am cognisant that Hadid is very sculptural (painterly) and fluid in interpreting and evolving the initiating architecture. For this project I am not pretending that I will be able to progress a new architecture as Hadid has - but I would like to develop and explore some beginnings.
