Surface Design

The pieces concentrate on the relationship between biological systems and changing architectural design approaches and methods through their history, method and development.

In his article Bioconstructivisms, Detlef Mertins focuses on the relation of emerging approaches for architectural design in the last century to the explorations and new understandings in science. Addressing Otto’s design on complex and dynamic curvature structures and showing a beginning for a kind of new era; the writer brings up the concept of generative models inspired/triggered by nature, science and technology. With the development of modern mathematics and biological sciences, the understanding of living beings and the discoveries about their self-organized formation aids to produce a new theory of self-generation. The mutuality, variation and manyness of the animal or vegetable orders raise another insight for the plastic arts and design. With the evidences of microscopes, the observed transformation of the dynamic living organisms through growth and movement, the complex structures that they form/are formed in bring the research of an analogy between biology and from creation for designers. Arrangements of cells and atoms, their repeating patterns, the rhythms of their form forces architects to question the building components, just as Otto did by the inspiration of radiolarians.

In a way to continue in the search of the effect of these self-generated dynamic forms, Hensel, Menges and Weinstock provides information about the methods that can be followed to apply the inspirations from biology to architecture in the intro of the book Emergent Technologies and design: Towards a biological paradigm for architecture. A self-organization without external control necessitates non-linear, complex adaptive systems, and thereby the sciences of complexity. To generate dynamical architecture, now, design software enables the architect to write and script codes. Mathematical structure turns