Statement of Purpose; The Case for an Architectural Theory of Computation

Drew Seskunas

As the dust settles on the digital party of the early millennium, the core revolutionaries have reevaluated their initial goals as woefully insufficient. Camps have split as computational and digital techniques are distinguished through critical and formal characteristics, respectively. Despite these factions, the concepts evolving from computation are currently the loudest ticks beating at the heart of architectural discourse, out of which a new vanguard has emerged. And while definitions of computation differ, there is a consensus that computational/digital techniques are the present and future of meaningful architecture. It seems ironic then, that with such a massive critical engagement of contemporary discourse, the architecture which it has birthed is increasingly culturally irrelevant. This debate calls for a meta-critique of the apparent relationship between computation, architecture, and biology; or more precisely the exploration of an architectural theory of computation.

Notwithstanding the unavoidable conflicts regarding a theory of computation, the solidarity which is present among computational and digital architects is significant. The movement emerged as an outgrowth from, not reaction to, elite architectural discourse. This can be seen in an almost uniform allegiance to the work of Peter Eisenman (his firm was practically a breeding ground for today’s digital vanguard). It was at Eisenman’s provocation of architecture as language, “with the proviso that architecture must explore more challenging, less familiar meanings”, from which today’s efforts were launched. While digital culture has flourished, the apparent line between built and virtual environments has dissolved, as has architecture’s relevance to society. This paradox is not new to our profession; in Jeffry Kipnis’ words:

…the unabated presence of architecture and our profound familiarity with it combine subtly to erase our perception of the significant difference between the building profession and the expert practice of architecture as cultural research and discourse.

Once digital culture has been fully absorbed at a grand societal scale, how can the inherently tangible field of architecture engage its intangible future?

Theorist Karl Chu describes the development from Eisenman as two distinct approaches to architecture: the Morpho-Dynamic and the Morpho-Genetic. These approaches have emerged as markedly different interpretations of technology information, but nonetheless engage its cultural and formal concepts at the highest level. Through these approaches we have been able to explore architecture’s relationship to any organic process, societal impulse or dynamic force imaginable, yet we have still been completely unable to extend these relationships to anything more than representational. Architects can develop form based on evolutionary algorithms, structural soft kill options and flow patterns, but the end result has yet to create anything which nature hasn’t already perfected. Only Karl Chu has been able to conceive of architecture, computation, and anthropology as having a relationship beyond interpretation or mimicry. But his precepts require architecture to remain in the abstract; as space would become written into code and therefore non-existent.

At the heart of the argument is Chu’s critical engagement of the Church-Turing Thesis, his point of divergence from the digital avant-garde. To many of these architects, the establishment of a computational meta-critique only serves to muddy the waters which the digital revolution has already stirred up. The field has justifiably exhausted its tolerance for the slick imagery of digital design programs. Substance and build-ability have taken precedence over novelty. And while it is equally as valid to harvest what valuable affects have been garnered from digital experimentation and begin to convert them into real architecture, it is important that we finish the journey of computational exploration which the digital revolution was first sparked on, lest we fall prey to Kipnis’ architectural conundrum regarding the significance of cultural discourse. Even though Chu’s critique of the Church-Turing Thesis may brand him a computational theorist among his fellow digitals architects, it aligns him with many theorists in neighboring fields; namely Stephen Wolfram and his concept of computational equivalence, and the quantum theorist David Deutsch as an advocate of multiple realities. But although these theories point towards the unification of biology, mathematics and physics; where exactly architecture fits in seems to be as yet undecided.

Chu would argue that as computation, nature, and the laws that define both become more in sync, anthropology’s grip on architecture will be loosened and it too will be guided by this bio-computational synthesis. In Chu’s words:

Architects take note: this is the beginning of the demise, if not the displacement, of the reign of anthropology, which has always subsumed architecture…..The potential emancipation of architecture from anthropology is already affording us to think for the first time of a new kind of xenoarchitecture with its own autonomy and will to being.

The flaw in his argument is that he continues to refer to this new reality as “architecture”. Computation is inherently representational; its goal is the compression and decompression between reality and virtual reality. So how can a space be architectural when it is essentially space-less? The best analogy would be from the Wachowski brothers in the oft-referenced movie The Matrix. When the main character realizes he is delimited by a digital simulation of reality, he sees his setting as a series of 1’s and 0’s image-mapped onto the surrounding architecture. The inanity of this description of virtual reality alone should pre-empt any further reference to virtual “architecture”. It is not, as Morpheus from The Matrix might say, that we must “believe”. We must instead find better ways of description and perhaps pull the debate back to the present tense where we have yet to be enslaved by an army of rogue artificially intelligent robots.

To achieve the goal of reconstituting architecture to society, none of these references can be overlooked no matter their anchorage too far in the past or future. A critical analysis of not only computational theory, but society’s relationship to it, is a must. This would entail an investigation of Algortihmic thought from Leibnez back to the Syllogy of Aristotle as a starting point. Furthermore an in-depth exploration of computational design techniques and architectural theory, as well as an investigation of computation’s implications on mathematics, physics, and philosophy specifically what impact Cellular Automata, Computational Equivalence, Quantum Computing and Multiple Dimensionality can have on architectural thought? As no such unchallenged theories have developed in any of these fields, this task may seem doomed to fail, yet it is of paramount importance at this critical juncture to define what role computational architecture can have in the pantheon of the field beyond a phase where architects mimicked flocking organization or emergent properties in slime molds. To not act at this decisive point in history to keep this discourse moving would be equivalent to abandoning a symphony after its first movement; the groundwork has been laid, clarity and a triumphant conclusion await us in the final stages.