Form Follows Material

This chapter is focused on the emergence of a new sense of materiality in which biointegrated design is promoting a technological and aesthetic shift in architecture. It follows on from past research focused on an increasing interdisciplinarity traded between designers, engineers, biologists and artists that has given rise to novel materials, hybrid techniques of production and radically new living forms. In this process, computation is playing a critical role in allowing us to increase the formal precision of design and manufacturing and the customised replication of components, while also making us reconsider the ontological value of ‘material’ as a central subject area of architecture. As a result of our post-digital condition, we can talk about a novel material-led computation in which the employed fabrication procedures are hybrid, including analogue and digital, conceptual and physical, chemical and biological, as well as natural and synthetic processes. We are today developing a heightened awareness of the physical expression and performance of artefacts, in which form and tectonics do not follow function or programme; instead, form follows material or, in other words, the morphology of components and buildings is essentially the result of the chosen materials and the associated digital design and manufacturing protocols of construction. These allow us to invent forms that have a far higher level of geometric complexity than before and that are potentially infused with biological growth. The use of innovative tools is prompting us to rethink our past with its traditional products and techniques, enabling us to utilise them in an entirely new way. Common materials, such as timber, clay or concrete, are being developed into sophisticated compounds. 3D printing and discrete and non-discrete assembly procedures are also extending the possibilities of current construction. While computation in the twentieth century was primarily explored via surface modelling with rather limited options for realisation, current work is programmed and then physically tested. Multi-material simulations are helping to conceive designs with a control and predictive rigour that is time-based and iterative. We are therefore achieving an unprecedented level of resolution that can be potentially understood as ornamental. Design is becoming more material-deep, and data-heavy computational models are leading directly to the construction of multifunctional prototypes.