Terri Peters - Computing the Environment: Digital Design Tools for Simulation and Visualisation of Sustainable Architecture

This edition first published 2018

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Executive Commissioning Editor: Helen Castle
Project Editor: David Sassian
Assistant Editor: Calver Lezama

Page design by Emily Chicken
Cover design and page layouts by Karen Willcox
Front cover image BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

Brady Peters & Terri Peters

PHIL BERNSTEIN

Today functional problems are becoming less simple all the time. But designers rarely confess their inability to solve them. Instead, when a designer does not understand a problem clearly enough to find the order it really calls for, he falls back on some arbitrarily chosen formal order. The problem, because of its complexity, remains unsolved.

In the case of a real design problem, even our conviction that there is such a thing as fit to be achieved is curiously flimsy and insubstantial. We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe.

Christopher Alexander in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964)

Having defined the system known as pattern language more than 60 years ago, Christopher Alexander, the seminal mathematician and architect, seems to have anticipated the challenges facing todays building designers as we struggle with an increasingly complex array of constraints, parameters, performance requirements and compositional options. The design harmony he asserts in the quote above perfectly characterises the challenge that Peter Rowe (via design theorist Horst Rittel) described as the making of architecture as a wicked problem (that) requires the use of heuristic reasoning.(1)

The digital age has certainly changed those heuristics, and we are only now beginning to understand the implications of those changes. Where the architectural design process in the pre-digital age was one of careful contemplation, limited calculation, experienced intuition and, ultimately judgement, todays designer can rely on an array of analytical, simulative and visualisation tools that enhance understanding of an emergent design and predict its ultimate performance.

As hand drawing gave way to computer-aided design (CAD), and CAD to building information modelling (BIM), we now have much of the informational infrastructure and data fidelity needed to bring on the next technological era in design, characterised by algorithmic design combined with big data. Digital tools can now help designers to reason and optimise their designs with measurable results, changing the design process itself, as well as the roles and responsibilities of architects and engineers, in the systems of delivery of building.

Thus this text by Terri and Brady Peters comes at a critical juncture in the history of the evolution of design methodology in the digital turn. If we are now moving from the era of BIM to that of connected design information, generated not simply by authorial but also analytical tools, both practitioners and tool creators need the theoretical framing, exemplary practices and speculations about the future that Computing the Environment offers. At a time when the explosion of software solutionscommercial platforms and bespoke algorithmspresents a bewildering array of procedural options and, with it, a cornucopia of data, the authors offer a lens through which to organise and understand the emergence of computational analysis and evaluation. The methodologies and trends so skilfully described and unpacked here will lead the way for the next generation of designers to find, to paraphrase Alexander, a non-arbitrary formal order.

The mile markers of the digital turn that Computing the Environment represents are just the beginning of this journey for the building industry. Architects will always search for the form which we have not yet designed, but will increasingly do so in the context of analytical and predictive insight anticipated by the authors, a context that is, at least in part, now describable. The search for solutions will be informed and enhanced by these systems, giving designers not a new set of constraints, but rather new, greater degrees of freedom to search, iterate, evaluate, select and then synthesise answers to the challenges of our increasingly complex environment. As these methods and tools establish data-rich predictions of building performance across a spectrum of parameters that will soon evolve beyond energy conservation or daylighting, a knowledge base will emergethe collective insight of predicted behaviour versus actual performancethat will further amplify the power of performance-based design.