what kind of forms could we design if we wouldn 't work with references anymore if we had no bias if we had no preconceptions what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from
would they intrigue us would they delight us if so
i propose we look to nature nature has been called the greatest architect of forms
and i 'm not saying that we should copy nature i 'm not saying we should mimic biology instead i propose that we can borrow nature 's processes we can abstract them and to create something that is new
nature 's main process of creation morphogenesis is the splitting of one cell into two cells and these cells can either be identical or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division
if we abstract this process and simplify it as much as possible then we could start with a single sheet of paper one surface and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces we 're free to choose where we make the fold
and by doing so we can differentiate the surfaces through this very simple process we can create an astounding variety of forms now we can take this form and use the same process to generate three dimensional structures but rather than folding things by hand
and in doing so we can suddenly fold anything we can fold a million times faster we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations and as we 're seeking to make something three dimensional
we start not with a single surface but with a volume a simple volume the cube if we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again then after sixteen iterations sixteen steps we end up with four hundred thousand surfaces and a shape that looks for instance like this
and if we change where we make the folds if we change the folding ratio then this cube turns into this one we can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape
or this shape so we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we 're making the fold but essentially you 're looking at a folded cube
and we can play with this we can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions
we can begin to sculpt the form and because we 're doing the folding on the computer we are completely free of any physical constraints so that means that surfaces can intersect themselves they can become impossibly small we can make folds that we otherwise could not make
surfaces can become porous they can stretch they can tear
changes correspondingly but that 's only half of the story ninety nine point nine percent of the folding ratios produce not this but this the geometric equivalent of noise
the forms that i showed before were made actually through very long trial and error a far more effective way to create forms i have found
is to use information that is already contained in forms a very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye so for instance we can plot the length of the edges white surfaces have long edges black ones have short ones we can plot the planarity of the surfaces their curvature
how radial they are all information that may not be instantlyvisible to you but that we can bring out that we can articulate and that we can use to control the folding
so now i 'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it but instead i 'm establishing a rule i 'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded
and because i 've designed the process and not the form i can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms
these forms look elaborate but the process is a very minimal one there is a simple input it 's always a cube
so let 's bring this process to architecture how and at what scale i chose to design a column columns are architectural archetypes they 've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty about technology
a challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column
i started using four cylinders through a lot of experimentation these cylinders eventually evolved
into this and these columns
they have information at very many scales we can begin to zoom into them the closer one gets the more new features one discovers some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility and unliketraditionalarchitecture it 's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail
the more interesting question perhaps is are these forms imaginable usually an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing
in this case the process is deterministic there 's no randomness involved at all but it 's not entirely predictable there 's too many surfaces there 's too much detail one can 't see the end state so this leads to a new role for the architect
one needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out
for one thing
one can design many variants of a form in parallel and one can cultivate them and to go back to the analogy with nature one can begin to think in terms of populations one can talk about permutations about generations about crossing and breeding to come up with a design
and the architect is really he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes
but enough of the theory at one point i simply wanted to jump inside
this image so to say i bought these red and blue three d glasses got up very close to the screen but still that wasn 't the same as being able to walk around and touch things so there was only one possibility to bring the column out of the computer
there 's been a lot of talk now about three d printing for me or for my purpose at this moment there 's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale
on the one hand and resolution and speed on the other so instead we decided to take the column and we decided to build it as a layered model made out of very many slices thinly stacked over each other what you 're looking at here is an x ray of the column that you just saw viewed from the top
unbeknownst to me at the time because we had only seen the outside the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves to grow on the inside of the column which was quite a surprising discovery from this shape we calculated a cutting line and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter
to produce and you 're seeing a segment of it here very many thin slices individually cut on top of each other
and this is a photo now it 's not a rendering and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer almost all of the details almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved
but it was very labor intensive there 's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual
and the physical it took me several months to design the column but ultimately it takes the computer about thirty seconds to calculate all of the sixteen million faces
the physical model on the other hand is two thousand seven hundred layers one millimeter thick it weighs seven hundred kilos it 's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium and the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again
but it is increasingly possible machines are getting faster it 's getting less expensive and there 's some promising technological developments just on the horizon
these are images from the gwangju biennale and in this case i used abs plastic to produce the columns we used the bigger faster machine and they have a steel core inside so they 're structural they can bear loads for once
each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns you can see a different column in the mirror if there 's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion so where does this leave us
in short we have no constraints instead we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we couldn 't even have dreamt up
and if i may add at one point we will build them thank you
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