Evolutionary Architecture

Definition

Evolutionary architecture names the generative programme codified in John Frazer's An Evolutionary Architecture (Architectural Association, 1995): architectural form produced not by drawing an "idealised form" from without but by deploying genetic algorithms that generate "all manner of 'architectural' forms" through "open-ended formulaic experimentation" (Goulthorpe 2002/2006, p. 134). Frazer's own formulations: "The genetic code of the selected models is then used to breed further populations in a cyclical manner" (p. 68, via note 6); and the doctrine that would become the generative turn's signature — "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" (p. 69, via note 6). The computer's role is generative compression: "'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" (Introduction, p. 18, via note 7).

Goulthorpe's assessment is double. Genealogically, Frazer's book is "perhaps the 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" (pp. 133–134). Critically, it is "nakedly scientific-rational in its prescriptive manner" — the mode Bachelard "repeatedly suggests as being inappropriate to cultural 'evolution'" — yet it "seemingly exceeds its own scientificity in offering many points of departure for drifts into a Bachelardian daydreaming" (p. 134). The concept's constitutive problem is therefore selection: "Frazer suggests that such genesis requires a 'natural selection,' but never offers sufficient parameters or process of selection" (pp. 134–135) — without which the output is "abridged evolution" (Bachelard: "In order to achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution," p. 136), forms that "provoke no such traumatic impulsion, lacking a cultural qualification other than their technical feasibility" (p. 134).

The claim to nature is itself demystified: "Evolutionary architecture claims inspiration from natural processes (in fact from scientific-rational models of evolutionary process)"; 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" (p. 136) — its "nature" is the Modern Constitution's objective nature, not Bachelard's secreting organism.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Goulthorpe — the concept's critic and inheritor: the Bachelardian audit (effect vs result; impulsion vs technical feasibility; felicity vs abridged evolution) and the project of implicating "the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis" (2002/2006).
• John Frazer — An Evolutionary Architecture (AA, 1995), the concept's founding text: genetic algorithms, cyclical breeding of populations, code-the-process-not-the-form, the computer as "electronic muse." Not yet paged (see log).
• Gaston Bachelard — the concept's evaluative frame: the "function of inhabiting," the formation/form distinction, and the warning against abridged evolution (The Poetics of Space, "Shells").
• Greg Lynn, Nox (Lars Spuybroek), Novac — the "less technically proficient but more poetically charged works emerging in Frazer's wake," whose power "may well lie in their capacity as 'images' rather than in their 'prudence' as actualisable architectural works" (p. 133). See spuybroek-lars.

Related Concepts

• Computational Design — the disciplinary home: Frazer's "code not the form" is the founding statement of the algorithmic, process-driven approach later systematized as agent-based scripting and parametric modeling.
• Emergence — the intended output: "complexity and emergent form" developed by compressing "evolutionary space and time"; Frazer's 1995 "electronic muse" anticipates the computer-for-emergent-phenomena thesis.
• Autogenic Design — the interior-scale descendant: both name form "self-generated" under an internal law; the shell's "secretions… unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law" (p. 134) is the concept's natural prototype.
• Digital Architecture — the movement whose "preordinate expression" Frazer's book is (p. 134).
• Forms of Absence — the concept's cultural correlative: the empty shell and empty nest as "images of the function of habitation" against which generated form must be measured.
• Poetic Image — the test the concept has not yet passed: "no 'image' in the book… adequate to Bachelard's appellation" (p. 136).
• Alloplastic Space — the inhabitation stakes: the malleable self–environment relation evolutionary architecture must crystallize if it is to produce "a new 'function of inhabiting'" (p. 135).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form (Goulthorpe 2002/2006) — the concept's source: Frazer's genetic-algorithm programme as quoted (notes 3, 6, 7), the Bachelardian audit (formation vs form; effect vs result; impulsion vs technical feasibility; felicity vs abridged evolution), the selection-gap critique, the Frazer Spiral's optikinetic mesmeric effect, and the closing project of a Bachelardian digital praxis (pp. 133–137).

Open Questions

• Can a "poetics of evolutionary form" be designed — i.e., can the "sufficient parameters or process of selection" be specified without destroying the unselfconscious felicity the selection is meant to protect?
• Is the gap between Frazer's "nakedly scientific-rational" method and Bachelard's effect-criterion a temporary incompleteness (a young field lacking selection criteria) or a category error (computation cannot generate "impulsion")?
• The "electronic muse" claims computation as a source of inspiration, not just execution — has any evolutionary work since 1995 substantiated this, or did the lineage (parametricism) merely industrialize the "abridged evolution" Goulthorpe's Bachelard predicts?
• Goulthorpe names the "thinking of the digital itself" as the unaccounted term (p. 133) — thirty years on, is there yet an account of digital creativity adequate to the "patterns of creativity latent in digital production"?