Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form

Author: Mark Goulthorpe Year: 2006 (reprint; original essay 2002) Source type: chapter Raw file: raw/chapters/goulthorpe-2006-notes-on-digital-nesting.md

Summary

Mark Goulthorpe's "Notes on Digital Nesting: A Poetics of Evolutionary Form" (originally published in Architectural Design, vol. 72, no. 2, 2002, pp. 18–25; excerpted here at pp. 20–24) reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 133–138), stages a confrontation between two accounts of creative form-generation: John Frazer's An Evolutionary Architecture (1995) — genetic algorithms breeding architectural forms in "open-ended formulaic experimentation" — and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, read through its "natural spatialities," the shell and the nest. The central opposition is Bachelard's concern for the effect of a work against Frazer's "apparent disinterest in the result of an essentially automatic praxis." Goulthorpe argues that form generated "by inner logic" — the shell "exuded from within, the secretion of an organism," "not fabricated from without as an idealised form" — is the poetics' very test of a genuine image, whereas Frazer's computed grotesques "provoke no such traumatic impulsion, lacking a cultural qualification other than their technical feasibility": "abridged evolutions" that "never attain the force of image." The interior implication runs through the nest — "an intricate imprint of the inhabiting body" — toward "an alloplastic relation between self and environment, moderated by an endlessly redefined digital matrix," in which "forms of absence" (the empty shell, the empty nest) serve "as images of the function of habitation." The essay closes by declining to judge Frazer and projecting instead "a dream of imagination enhanced and actualised by digital generation": "I am eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis."

Key Claims

The power of the early digital-architectural projects (Lynn, Nox, Novac) "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" (p. 133) — the digital vanguard is judged as poetics, not buildability.
Frazer's An Evolutionary Architecture 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) — yet it is "nakedly scientific-rational in its prescriptive manner," the mode Bachelard "repeatedly suggests as being inappropriate to cultural 'evolution'" (p. 134).
Bachelard's shells test (via the Poetics): "The created object itself is highly intelligible; it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious" (Bachelard, quoted p. 134) — the mesmeric outer geometry defeats imagination; the essential force of the shell is "that it is exuded from within, the secretion of an organism; it is not fabricated from without as an idealised form" (p. 134).
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" (p. 134).
Bachelard's mollusc motto — "one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!" (quoted p. 134) — is the ideological inversion that would be "a recipe for a genetic architecture, on condition that its secretions are unselfconscious and 'felicitous,' obeying an internal law" (p. 134). Frazer's generative process is exactly this inversion — but whether it attains felicity is the open question.
The exposed inner shell "provokes an imaginary dementia": poetic imagination "involuntarily conjures endless series of grotesques, emergent forms that slide expansively in/out of the curvaceous yet inexpressive void" (p. 134). The shell demands "an appreciation of an impulsion, a force of egress, which is somehow trapped in the geology of the form, a latent trauma" (p. 134).
"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" (p. 134).
Frazer's grotesques "provoke no such traumatic impulsion, lacking a cultural qualification other than their technical feasibility"; Frazer suggests genesis requires a "natural selection," "but never offers sufficient parameters or process of selection" (pp. 134–135).
Bachelard's "uncanny presentiment": as shell-form becomes technically feasible, grotesqueness will be generated "not… by an impelled imagination, but simply as an abridged evolution, never attaining the force of image" (p. 135) — Bachelard's own aphorism, cited in note 5: "In order to achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution" (p. 136).
The essay's normative demand: "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" (p. 135).
The Frazer Spiral digression: an "optikinetic figure that impels a vortex-effect simply through the use of non-concentric circles," a 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 may deploy simplistic geometric figures to mesmeric effect, "nonetheless exhibiting a keen awareness that it is the processual capacity of a digital medium that is its most compelling attribute" (p. 135).
Frazer "spits out the pearl of subjectivity, dispersing the creative impulse throughout the body of the new medium, creativity and not simply receptivity becoming transsubjective": "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" (p. 135). "Herein lies the struggle between intellect and sediment, which the ever-descending digital norms are apt to blanket" (p. 135).
Bachelard's nest: "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" (p. 135) — raising "the spectre of an environment adapting to our bodies and continually recalibrated to suit the vulnerability of our relation to the environment" (p. 135).
The nest's "dry modelling, merging camouflage and comfort in a density of ambient 'stuff'" suggests "an alloplastic relation between self and environment, moderated by an endlessly redefined digital matrix" (p. 135) — the alloplastic/autoplastic distinction (Ferenczi, via Goulthorpe's own 1999 AD essay, note 8): "a rigid and static relationship between the environment and the self, an autoplastic rigidity," against "a malleable and reciprocal alloplastic deformability" (p. 137).
The empty nest, like the shell, "carries an unknowing impulsion, a trauma, as if an 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" (pp. 135–136).
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).
Bachelard "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" (p. 136) — yet "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" (p. 136).
The verdict on Frazer: "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" (p. 136) — Goulthorpe's project is neither to legitimate nor denigrate Frazer but to "implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis" (p. 136).
Frazer's own terms (quoted in notes): the computer used "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, quoted p. 137); "one should code not the form but rather precise instructions for the formative process" (Frazer, quoted p. 137); "The genetic code of the selected models is then used to breed further populations in a cyclical manner" (Frazer, quoted pp. 136–137).
Bergson's distinction, invoked in note 4: "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" (p. 136) — the epistemological ground of the shell's "impulsion."

Connections

Concepts: evolutionary-architecture · forms-of-absence · function-of-inhabiting · alloplastic-space · poetic-image (Bachelard's "image" as the essay's evaluative criterion) · felicitous-space (the "felicity" genetic architecture must attain) · emergence (Frazer's "complexity and emergent form," the "electronic muse") · autogenic-design (form generated by internal law — the shell as its natural model) · computational-design ("code not the form but… precise instructions for the formative process") · digital-architecture (the "preordinate expression of an emergent 'digital' discourse") · digital-fabrication (formation-from-within vs fabrication-from-without) · parametricism (the "algorithmic and parametric (digital) propensity") · interactive-architecture (the Hyposurface's alloplastic premise) · boundaries · trauma (the form's "latent trauma") · temporality (geological time trapped in materiality) · authorship (creativity "transsubjective"; the "pearl of subjectivity" dispersed) · dwelling · inside-outside-dialectic (the shell as lived inside/outside form) · intimate-immensity

Authors: goulthorpe-mark · bachelard-gaston (the shell and nest chapters of The Poetics of Space) · bergson-henri (geological vs geometric form, note 4) · spuybroek-lars (Nox, named among the projects whose power "may well lie in their capacity as 'images'") · taylor-mark-preston-julieanna (Intimus editors, framing headnote)

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture (the alloplastic/autoplastic distinction as the self–environment form of the dynamic thesis) · nature-vs-culture (evolutionary architecture's "nature" is a scientific-rational model — the Modern Constitution's objective nature) · everyday-vs-iconic-architecture (marginal: the "image" criterion vs buildability/"prudence")

Related source notes: Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the responsive-environment paradigm whose theoretical basis (the Aegis Hyposurface) this essay supplies · Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the AD 72.2 companion piece on generative, processual architecture · The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the Poetics of Space source in this wiki · Transforming Interior Volumes (Anderson & Lovell-Anderson 2018) — the interior-scale descendant of Frazer's autogenic/genetic process · Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the shell typology's biophilic afterlife · Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — the shell as concealing formation

Direct Quotes

"Architect and academic Mark Goulthorpe discusses the poetic reverie of form generated by inner logic, and that emanating from digital scientific-rationale." (editors' headnote, p. 133)

"[I]t seems to me that the power of certain projects by Lynn, Nox, Novac, etc… 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." (p. 133)

"[I]t 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." (p. 133)

"Frazer's work 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, which justifies the juxtaposition of two such apparently heterogeneous texts (both are accounts of evolving patterns of cultural imagination)." (pp. 133–134)

"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." (p. 134)

"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.'" (p. 134, quoting Bachelard)

"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." (p. 134)

"'The mollusc's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in!'" (p. 134, quoting Bachelard)

"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." (p. 134)

"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." (p. 134)

"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." (p. 134)

"I have the sense… 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." (p. 134)

"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 selection, which Bachelard's processual sensibility would doubtless require to be fully developed, as a poetics of evolutionary form." (pp. 134–135)

"[T]he 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." (p. 135)

"[A]n 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." (p. 135)

"[T]he 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." (p. 135)

"[A] keen awareness that it is the processual capacity of a digital medium that is its most compelling attribute." (p. 135)

"[H]e 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." (p. 135)

"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." (p. 135)

"Herein lies the struggle between intellect and sediment, which the ever-descending digital norms are apt to blanket." (p. 135)

"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." (p. 135)

"Such forms of 'dry modelling,' merging camouflage and comfort in a density of ambient 'stuff,' seem suggestive of an alloplastic relation between self and environment, moderated by an endlessly redefined digital matrix." (p. 135)

"The empty nest, like the shell, carries an unknowing impulsion, a trauma, as if an 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." (pp. 135–136)

"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." (p. 136)

"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)

"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." (p. 136)

"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." (p. 136)

"[A]lthough 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." (p. 136)

"Much rather, recognising less technically proficient but more poetically charged works emerging in Frazer's wake…, I am eager to implicate the felicity of Bachelard's thought into an emergent digital praxis." (p. 136)

"In order to achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution." (Bachelard, quoted in note 5, p. 136)

"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." (note 4, p. 136)

"'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, quoted in note 7, p. 137)

"'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, quoted in note 6, p. 137)

"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." (note 8, p. 137)

Open Questions

What would "sufficient parameters or process of selection" for a genetic architecture look like — can a selection criterion be designed at all without re-importing the "idealised external form" the process was meant to escape?
Is the "impulsion" (the "force of egress" trapped in form) a property of formation that computation can capture — can code be written for the trauma of formation, or only for its geometries? Goulthorpe leaves the "thinking of the digital itself" explicitly open (p. 133).
Does the "electronic muse" thesis — computation compressing "evolutionary space and time so that complexity and emergent form are able to develop" — describe real emergence or a simulation of emergence, given Bachelard's criterion that formation, not form, is what remains mysterious?
The essay's "forms of absence" are uninhabited (empty shell, empty nest): can an occupied interior be an "image of the function of habitation," or does inhabitation by definition abridge the absence that carries the image?
Goulthorpe's own Aegis Hyposurface ("From Autoplastic to Alloplastic Space," 1999) is the essay's unstated built test: did the alloplastic surface attain an "image" in Bachelard's sense, or remain — per Glanville's later audit of such work — a "clever trick… designed to retain a static stability"?
The essay declines to adjudicate Frazer ("neither legitimate nor denigrate") but finds no adequate image in his book: what would a built work not look like if it did pass the Bachelardian test — and would it still be recognizably a product of genetic process?