design

Design by CONTEXT

GINA, the new car designed by BMW, features a sleek and highly sophisticated performative skin. Instead of the traditional steel and plastic body shell, it uses a textile fabric stretching over a carbon fiber frame. This unique idea allows the car’s skin to change shape, stretching to match the position and curve of the wire frame, providing significant flexibility to the car doors as they open, cushions pop out, the engine gets open like a zipper, its embedded ‘blinking’ headlights shining throught the transparent membrane. The structure is rendered dynamic by actuators, creating a performative relationship between structure and ’skin’.

GINA stands for Geometry function in Infinite Number of Adaptations. According to its creators, the real issue was that of context over dogma. Fundamental questions to challenge pre-conceived notions were crucial for the design team to complete their mandate. What do we need the skin for? Does it need to be out of metal? Can a frame be handled without skin? Sculptural form was driven by the capacities of the material, performance considerations, and environmental forces (1).

Why are designers exploring such highly sophisticated design processes? Furthermore, what are the lessons contained for architecture?

An instrumental approach to relational behavioral characteristic as a way of modulating spaces and environments, however, requires operative retooling for architects with respect to analytical and generative methods, techniques, their relations and phasing within the design process (4). Within this context, industrial design, the aerospace and automobile industries have often challenged the boundaries of technology, aesthetics and performance. Digital design techniques enable now to connect architecture and engineering, such as in CATIA, a software developed by Dassault Systems, originally targeted for aerospace but now widely used within the automobile industry and also by some architectural studios, such as Gehry Technologies, Foster and Partners, even now widely used by architectural students. Furthermore, several initiatives within the software industry are exploring to blur the boundaries between disciplines: architectural, engineering, even biology are concurrently operating. The future of digital processes rests on the ability of computer-mediated environments to facilitate the creation of architectural designs so that digital thinking becomes indeed architectural thinking.

Perhaps the most deterministic factor within any design process is how problems are constructed or formulated. ‘True thinking consists in problem posing, that is, in framing the right problems rather than solving them. It is only thru skillful problem-posing, that we can begin to think diagrammatically’ (2). Beyond the obvious questions of innovative forms, it is the notion of challenging preconceived dogmas and the form finding procedures that provides an entirely different dynamic for design professionals, uncovering a vast horizon of possibilities.

Closely linked to these form generative processes lies the concept of ‘responsive environments’ that modify/shape/inform morphology, therefore “buildings can respond to and express the non-linear forces of nature.”(3). It is when the design process embraces certain aesthetic responses as a result of generative conditions that design becomes meaningful, as it is conceived as an extract, a sum, a brief to a given set of problems.

The aim is to ‘propose an architecture that actively differentiates environmental conditions by means of its morphological and material articulation, by linking behavioral tendencies and performative capacities of material systems with environmental modulation.’ (4)

Undoubtedly, the question of CONTEXT over DOGMA, elegantly posed by BMW GINA, may be at the center of the architectural paradigm at the beginning of the 21^st century.

References:

(1) Youtube.com

(2) Eco-logics by Helene Furjan, Softspace, Edited by Sean Lally & Jessica Young, Routledge, 2007.

(3) “A process oriented architecture” David Jirklandm Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners Ltd, chapter 4, pp41. “Innovation in Architecture” Edited by Alan J.Brookes and Dominique Poole. Spon Press Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York. 2004.

(4) “Nested capacities, gradient threshold and modulated environments” Towards differentiated and multi-performative architectures. Michael Hensel and Achim Menges (Ocean North) pp. 62, Softspaces. Edited by Sean Lally & Jessica Young, Routledge, 2007.

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