Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Mark Goulthorpe

Architect and academic Mark Goulthorpe discusses the poetic reverie of form generated by inner logic, and that emanating from digital scientific-rationale. Central to this discussion of the poetics of evolutionary form is Gaston Bachelard's concern for effect, and John Frazer's disinterest in the result. In the examples given he suggests both methods generate creative 'images' from internal and poetic imagination rather than through fabrication of an idealised external form. The implication for the interior when considered as an 'impulsion,' a force of egress trapped in form, is a malleable relationship between self and environment in which 'forms of absence' indicate the function of inhabitation. Critically, Goulthorpe projects a dream of imagination enhanced and actualised by digital generation that uncovers the need to address an 'image' adequate for inhabitation of a displaced spatial sense.

It seems to me that the power of certain projects by Lynn, Nox, Novac, etc (who I cite as examples of architects who develop their architecture through a phenomenologically rich creative discourse) may well lie in their capacity as 'images' rather than in their 'prudence' as actualisable architectural works, such images then seemingly legitimised by the Poetics. What would remain is for the onset of such 'images' to be accounted for, the thinking of the digital itself, and it is here that we might expect a quite marked shift in creative manner if we are attentive to the impact of digital technologies. Or rather, it remains to be seen how digital production, steeped in discourses of scientific rationalism of the type that Bachelard dismissed as inadequate for a poetics to emerge, yet which proffers entirely new genres of creative possibility, might offer sufficient scope for a genuine cultural morphogenesis.

Doubtless such an inquiry is an interminable and immense one, since it concerns the patterns of creativity latent in digital production, yet I share Bachelard's concern to interrogate the very manner of creative imagining. Here I restrict my interest to examination of a single text, John Frazer's An Evolutionary Architecture, through consideration of Bachelard's phenomenological 'opening.' Frazer's work is perhaps the

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preordinate expression of an emergent 'digital' discourse, and a pioneering attempt at the definition of a new architectural language as well as new patterns of creativity, which justifies the juxtaposition of two such apparently heterogeneous texts (both are accounts of evolving patterns of cultural imagination).

Yet Frazer's book is nakedly scientific-rational in its prescriptive manner, which Bachelard, attentive to the birthing of poetic imagination, repeatedly suggests as being inappropriate to cultural 'evolution.' Yet given the newness of the field, Frazer's text is not only one of the only ones that we have to consider, but seemingly exceeds its own scientificity in offering many points of departure for drifts into a Bachelardian daydreaming. Bachelard's reverie on Shells perhaps provides a counterpoint, where his interest 'to experience the image of the function of inhabiting' may be contrasted with the simple will to shell-form, which he derides. For Bachelard, the mesmeric geometries of shells, their outer appearance, actually defeat the imagination: 'The created object itself is highly intelligible; it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.'¹ The essential force of the shell being that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form. The shell is left in the air blindly as the trace of a convulsive absence, the smooth and lustrous internal carapace then exfoliating in its depth of exposure to the air, a temporal crustation.

Such inversion of ideological tendency, an expansive mental shell-emptiness, Bachelard captures deliciously: 'The mollusc's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!'² Such inversion would seem to be a recipe for a genetic architecture, on condition that its secretions are unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law. This describes the generative process outlined by Frazer in An Evolutionary Architecture, which becomes one of open-ended formulaic experimentation, Frazer deploying genetic algorithms to generate all manner of 'architectural' forms.³

However, Bachelard then dwells on the voluptuous inscrutability of the exposed inner shell which, born of an impalpable inner logic, provokes an imaginary dementia. Faced with the shell's indifferent beauty, poetic imagination involuntarily conjures endless series of grotesques, emergent forms that slide expansively in/out of the curvaceous yet inexpressive void. The shell seems to demand, that is, an appreciation of an impulsion, a force of egress, which is somehow trapped in the geology of the form, a latent trauma.⁴ I have the sense, if only as a subtle shiver in Bachelard's phenomenological lyricism, that the process of formation is left as a mental material residue that then bends imagination to its logic; which would be the fully cultural wager, the poetic, of such improbable forms. Frazer's grotesques, by contrast, provoke no such traumatic impulsion, lacking a cultural qualification other than their technical feasibility. Certainly Frazer suggests that such genesis requires a 'natural selection,' but never offers sufficient parameters or process of

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selection, which Bachelard's processual sensibility would doubtless require to be fully developed, as a poetics of evolutionary form.

Yet if the empty shell conjures grotesques, by virtue of such implosion of determinism, the Poetics seems to carry an uncanny presentiment that as the shell-form becomes technically feasible such grotesqueness will not be generated by an impelled imagination, but simply as an abridged evolution, never attaining the force of image.⁵ And it is here that an evolutionary architecture, if it is to crystallise a new 'function of inhabiting,' needs to cup its ear to the whispering shell, attaining in its creative imagining a felicity that separates it from an aborted genetic process, and the means of deploying its algorithmic and parametric (digital) propensity to material effect.

We might note, wryly, the dissimulating geometry of the Frazer Spiral, which is an optikinetic figure that impels a vortex-effect simply through the use of non-concentric circles. The figure is a well-known trompe l'oeil, exceeding the geometric closure of such simplistic generic form through its vertiginous disturbance of optic sense, stimulating an almost haptic mental experience. Evolutionary architecture might be seen to be deploying simplistic 'geometric' figures to similarly mesmeric effect, but nonetheless exhibiting a keen awareness that it is the processual capacity of a digital medium that is its most compelling attribute. And evidently in its prescription of an open-ended 'evolutionary' process it dreams of becoming unabridged in the potential richness of genetic algorithmic process.⁶

Yet if Frazer speaks as if from within the clam, dissimulating its genetic (processual) secrets, he nonetheless seems to spit out the pearl of subjectivity, dispersing the creative impulse throughout the body of the new medium, creativity and not simply receptivity becoming transsubjective. It is as if the phenomenological belief in substance (whether as word, act or gesture), in the essential presence of imaginative impulse, suddenly dissolves into a swirl of sedimentary digits. Henceforth cultural imagination sifts this informatic sea, bereft of a belief in any point of ultimate legitimacy.⁷ Herein lies the struggle between intellect and sediment, which the ever-descending digital norms are apt to blanket.

Bachelard's chapter on Nests seems to similarly articulate forms that were predigitally imaginary but which now merit consideration in their actuality by architects. He muses on the nest as an intricate imprint of the inhabiting body, adjusted continually as a soft cocoon that outlines the aura of movement of the bird's rounded breast. This raises the spectre of an environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrated to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment. Such forms of 'dry modelling,' merging camouflage and comfort in a density of ambient 'stuff,' seem suggestive of an alloplastic⁸ relation between self and environment, moderated by an endlessly redefined digital matrix. The empty nest, like the shell, carries an unknowing impulsion, a trauma, as if an

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interminable and complex three-dimensional weaving had been interrupted. Such forms of absence, as images of the function of habitation, offer a cultural correlative to the temporal generative processes of evolutionary architecture, outlined by Frazer in essentially rational terms.

Evolutionary architecture claims inspiration from natural processes (in fact from scientific-rational models of evolutionary process) by way of exploring the creative possibilities offered by a rapidly developing digital technology. It redeploys scientific models and patterns by considering digital systems as analogous to genetic ones, taking essentially analytical tools as opportunities for speculative creative endeavour. Bachelard, concerned as a philosopher of scientific rationalism to account for the actual evolution of creative process, is evidently unconvinced that any such analogy is adequate for the attainment of a 'poetic' image, highlighting the need for more profound forms of cultural imagining that his phenomenological reverie sets out to explore. In The Poetics of Space he outlines an expansive discourse that interrogates all manner of spatial conditions, concrete and imaginary, which he finds at work 'felicitously' in a wide range of poetic works. In this he also insists on accounting for the effect of the work, which is in marked contrast to Frazer's apparent disinterest in the result of an essentially automatic praxis.

However, Bachelard would be the first to dismiss 'intentionality' as offering any guide to cultural value, and would doubtless be intrigued by such 'unintentioned' and speculative technological experimentation. My interest in rereading Bachelard's 'natural' spatialities (the shell and the nest) then being to offer another reading on the general impulsion of evolutionary architecture, but from the perspective of a discourse of bodily desire (that of the Poetics). This is to neither legitimate nor denigrate Frazer's work, since although I find no 'image' in the book that is adequate to Bachelard's appellation, I nonetheless recognise the pertinence of such research and the inevitability of such 'creative' processes in a digital economy. Much rather, recognising less technically proficient but more poetically charged works emerging in Frazer's wake (some of which I have mentioned), I am eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis. (… p 24)

Notes

1 Gaston Bachelard, 'Shells', The Poetics of Space, trans Marie Jolas, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1969, p 106.

2 Bachelard, 'Shells', Poetics of Space, p 106.

3 See, for instance, the section on 'Evolutionary Techniques' in John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture, Architectural Association (London), 1995, Section Two, p 68.

4 Following Henri Bergson, we might usefully separate geological from geometric form, where the geological manifests a temporal dimension, as if trapping time in its very materiality, sensed as such.

5 Bachelard's remark is starkly simple: 'In order to achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution.' Bachelard, 'Shells', Poetics of Space, pp 108-9.

6 Consider comments such as 'The genetic code of the selected models is then used to breed further

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populations in a cyclical manner …' Frazer, 'Evolutionary Techniques', Evolutionary Architecture, Section Two, p 68, or 'We are inclined to think that this final transformation should be process-driven, and that one should code not the form but rather precise instructions for the formative process.' Frazer, 'Transforming the Output', Evolutionary Architecture, Section Two, p 69.

7 "Imaginative use" in our case means using the computer – like the genie in the bottle – to compress evolutionary space and time so that complexity and emergent form are able to develop. The computers of our imagination are also a source of inspiration – an electronic muse.' Frazer, Evolutionary Architecture, Introduction, p 18.

8 Alloplastic is a term developed by Sandor Ferenczi and discussed at length in my essay dECOi Aegis Hyposurface: 'From Autoplastic to Alloplastic Space', 'Hypersurface Architecture II', Architectural Design, vol 69 no 9–10, 1999, pp 60–5. The terms articulate the difference between a rigid and static relationship between the environment and the self, an autoplastic rigidity, and a malleable and reciprocal alloplastic deformability.

Mark Goulthorpe, 'Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form', Architectural Design, vol 72 no 2, 2002, pp 18–25.

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