Computational Organicism: Examining Evolutionary Design Strategies in Architecture

The diverse forms of nature, in particular and biological forms, have long been a preoccupation of the architect. As a special category of natural form, biological organisms exhibit extraordinary levels of design adaptability across multiple generations based upon the inherent ‘intelligence’ of the evolutionary mechanism. Evolutionary design theory in architecture seeks to harness this generative intelligence as the foundation for a new architectural design process. This paper investigates the lineage of evolutionary thought in architectural design, paying particular attention to the current trend towards experimentation with generative algorithmic procedures and the theorization of an evolutionary architecture. Only nature is inspiring and true; only Nature can be support for human works. But do not render Nature, as the landscapists do, showing only the outward aspect. Penetrate the cause of it, its form and vital development... Charles L’Eplattenier, 1906, quoted in [Le Corbusier 1925: 198] Underlying the many visible elements of animal form are remarkable processes, beautiful in their own right in the way that they transform a tiny, single cell into a large, complex, highly organized, and patterned creature, and over time, have forged a kingdom of millions of individual designs. Sean B. Carroll [2005: 4] The idea of evolution as we understand it today – a process of natural selection operating within a population of variable replicators – was first introduced to the scientific community by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at the Linnean Society of London in 1858, and was given its first public exposure the following year with the publication of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species. In this seminal work, Darwin lays bare for the first time the mechanism of design in the biological world. Then, just four years later, the Revue Générale de l’Architecture coined the term “Organic Architecture” as a means of relating architecture to the “organized life of animals and vegetables” as opposed to the “unorganized existence of the rocks which form the substratum of the world” [Collins 1965: 156]. Regardless of whether the editors of the Revue were aware of Darwin’s controversial theory at the time, and despite the fact that the rhetoric of organicism in architecture has subsequently been as variable as the forms that Darwin’s theory describes, the distinction set forth by the Revue still remains fundamentally relevant. Today the debasement of geological forms as “unorganized” is clearly disputed by current scientific theories of self-organization and emergence, which ascribe to matter the inherent generative capacity for spontaneous development of complex order. And even Nexus Network Journal 12 (2010) 485–495 Nexus Network Journal – Vol.12, No. 3, 2010 485 DOI 10.1007/s00004-010-0040-6; published online 15 September 2010 © 2010 Kim Williams Books, Turin 486 Brian Holland – Computational Organicism: Examining Evolutionary Design... though organic life is now generally viewed by science as being subject to the same dynamic processes of self-organization as inorganic matter, there still remains one fundamental distinction between the two, and that is DNA: that uniquely productive two-dimensional expression of organic matter that propels the development and evolution of complex adaptive forms among populations of organisms over time. Although we no longer view geological structures as purely informal – as did the editors of the Revue in 1863 – the fundamental distinction between rocks and living organisms remains; rocks do not evolve, but plants and animals do. Thus, I believe that the various theories surrounding the pursuit of “organicism” in architecture must be viewed largely in the context of evolutionary thought. After all, in the intervening 150 years since the near simultaneous debut of both Darwin’s famous theory and the early rhetoric of organicism in architecture, evolutionary science has come to dominate the field of biology. To biologist Sean B. Carroll, the role of evolution in biology is primary: “...evolution is much more than a topic in biology – it is the foundation of the entire discipline. Biology without evolution is like physics without gravity” [Carroll 2004: 294]. Furthermore, the subsequent breakthroughs in heredity, morphogenesis, and evolutionary development have profoundly transformed our understanding of organic forms and the processes by which they are created, and figure prominently in the contemporary pursuit of a “living” architecture [Hensel 2006]. Many architects today appeal to some notion of evolutionary thinking as a strategy for architectural design. Recent scientific discoveries concerning the distinctly computational mechanisms underlying evolutionary biology, paired with ever-increasing sophistication of digital design software, have inspired and enabled architects to experiment with such tools as genetic algorithms and environmental morphogenetic simulation. The resulting proliferation of formal variety represents a temporal becoming that is neither metaphorical nor symbolic, but operative and literally creative. Such a conception of form rejects the recognition of final or ultimate forms in favor of a continuum of evolutionary forms that are continually renewed, either by the influence of external dynamical forces, or through the unfolding of endogenous processes of growth and mutation. This paper investigates the lineage of evolutionary thought in architectural design, paying particular attention to the current trend towards experimentation with generative algorithmic procedures and the theorization of an evolutionary architecture. The motivations for these projects are interrogated through the writings of their proponents. To what extent are they practical – striving for an iterative design optimization through the power of computational variability – and to what extent might they belie an underlying philosophical project, seeking to model a theory of architectural design after the generative processes of nature? Nature’s fecundity, its capacity to produce extraordinary diversity, and our intuitive appreciation of the beauty, economy, and sublimity of biological systems have long inspired admiration and mimicry in the fields of architecture, design and engineering. The use of biomimetics, or the strategic application of adaptive biological design principles to manmade systems, is just one example. Subsequent to the publication of Darwin’s theory, evolution has captured architects’ imaginations as a way of thinking about design. But before it was theorized as a procedural method for architectural design, the notion of evolution was considered primarily as a conceptual analogy. In The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, Philip Steadman offers an explanation for why theories such as organicism, speciation, and