Architectural Liberation
"A Tale of Two Cities: Architecture and the Digital Revolution" by William J. Mitchell, in Science (Aug. 6, 1999), 1200 New York Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
"A Tale of Two Cities: Architecture and the Digital Revolution" by William J. Mitchell, in Science (Aug. 6, 1999), 1200 New York Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
Four decades ago, Danish architect Jorn Utzon’s winning design for the Sydney Opera House, featuring free-form curved concrete shell vaults, presented an extraordinary structural challenge. After heroic labors, the architect and a London engineering firm figured out how to build an approximation of the spectacular curved surfaces. But other parts of the design were discarded as hopelessly impractical. Ultimately, Utzon was forced to resign from the project. Aside from the magnificent shells, the completed building had little of his design’s freshness and originality. Today, that story would have a much happier ending, writes Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For architects, the computer has dramatically narrowed "the gap between the imaginable and the feasible." In the past, designers of large and complex buildings were severely limited in the geometric and material possibilities they could explore, Mitchell points out. "Traditional drafting instruments— parallel bars, triangles, compasses, scales, and protractors—largely restricted [them] to a world of straight lines, parallels and perpendiculars, arcs of circles, and Euclidean geometric constructions." The limitations of the analytical techniques (based on precedent and rule of thumb) used to predict the building’s performance and ensure its structural adequacy further reduced the range of acceptable designs.
But not any more, Mitchell writes. "Modern CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems allow designers to create very complex three-dimensional geometric models with ease." And cheap computer power allows sophisticated analyses and simulations to be done to predict, reliably and precisely, the performance of even the most imaginative structures.
Architect Frank Gehry’s initial sketches and model for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, had "an even more audacious assemblage of free-form curved surfaces than Utzon’s," Mitchell says. But thanks to the digital revolution, Gehry did not have Utzon’s problems. "The completed building—remarkably true to the architect’s first visionary sketches—opened in 1997 to universal acclaim."