Patterns of Interaction

This book is a reflection on contemporary computational design thinking at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture, in a time marked by complex challenges like climate change, urbanization, and population growth. Based on a critical rethinking of the notion of ground and the relation between the manmade and the natural environment, an understanding of architecture as regenerative practice is proposed where computational thinking feeds itself back into the governing laws of nature.

Taking Colin Rowe’s contextualism as a starting point, this chapter focuses on the changing relationship between the architectural intervention and the ground, as well as the dematerialization of this relationship through the abstraction of digitally mediated context. Such an abstraction supports the transfer of design methods between design disciplines and ultimately fosters the convergence of computational design thinking between architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. It is argued that this convergence of computational design thinking dissolves the difference between natural and manmade and provides the framework for design as a contextual figuration of the ground.

This chapter looks more closely at the process of contextual figuration through the lens of computational design thinking. This design thinking is characterized by the articulation of flexible relationships between entities, often denominated as topological diagrams. It is argued that these diagrams not only govern the use of the contextual data but are organized as a nearly decomposable web of diagrams. From a system theory perspective, this web of diagrams is embedded in the web of laws of nature. That means architecture is inscribed into its natural surroundings as a manmade extension. With such an understanding, computational design intentionally shifts away from the design of objects, of elements of consumption of environmental resources, towards the design of interrelationships—of interactions with the environment. The design of architecture, of cities, and of landscapes and territories is not about the mere enhancing of environments, it is about building environments themselves.

This chapter discusses a reading of computational design, which no longer aims at sustainable design solutions that minimally impact the environment but rather at regenerative design solutions that actively support the natural environment and its future development. It aims at an architecture, an urban space as landscape, as being no less than of prosthetic nature. The discussion is exemplified through initial design investigations towards regenerative architectural design that were conducted as part of the design studio teaching at the Department of Architecture at Aalto University and as joint studio teaching with Prof. Carlos Bañón from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and his design studio in the Architecture and Sustainable Design Pillar.