The Contemporary Art of Tracery
MATTER, ed. Gail Borden and Michael Meredith, 2011
 
At the beginning of the 21st century, following the death of the 'single surface' project in digital design, a sudden interest in tectonic discretization and componentry emerged. To some degree this development can be attributed to the first generation of digital designers beginning to tire of virtual continuity in the form of endless blank surfaces, moving toward fine-grained surface articulation driven by material limits and available production methods. Since then, a huge amount of work has been undertaken in this area, with issues ranging from buildability and cost-effectiveness, to the aesthetic implications of CNC tooling, to the use of parametrics to generate variable panelization across surfaces. Parametric discretization, in particular, has taken the discipline by storm, with its seductive implications of being an art form conveniently couched in an economic model...
 
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Extreme Integration
AD: Exuberance, ed. Marjan Coletti, 2010
 
In Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil, there is an unforgettable scene where Robert De Niro, a guerrilla air-conditioning repairman, responds to an urgent call for help from a sweating man. He has intercepted a call directed to the totalitarian state parodied in the film, and drops in out of nowhere to assist. De Niro removes a standardised interior panel from a wall, and mechanical systems behind literally pour out onto the floor in a shower of sparks and feeble pulsations. As he makes illegal repairs to the jumble of tubes and wires and ducts, he reveals his motivation: 'I came into this game for the action, the excitement, going anywhere. I travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble.'
Brazil depicts a dystopian world in decline characterised by failing infrastructure and decadent culture. In its focus on dysfunctional infrastructure...
 
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Structural Ecologies
AADCU Monograph, Tom Wiscombe, 2009
 
A menagerie of geometries has been developed in the office over the past few years which we use for various projects. They are really prototypes, neither a chunk of building nor a detail. These prototypes are studies of structural, mechanical, and circulatory behavior, particularly in terms of their feedback, collapse, or hybridization as systems. All projects are driven by one or more prototypes, in combination with more prosaic issues of building massing and program. Prototypes are sometimes digitally animated to reveal their range of behavior, in terms of geometric syntax, growth patterns, depth variability, and transformative capabilities such as delaminating, branching, cellularizing, lightening, or thickening. Beam-branes, surface-to-strand hybrids, and hydronic armatures constitute geometric/performative species that link recent projects within a kind of taxonomy...
 
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Out of the Lab, Into the Jungle II
FORWARD, September, 2009
 
Have you ever heard of the Bowerbird?
This bird, known to animal cognition experts but not so much to architects, is intriguing because it appears to exist at the edge of consciousness, driven by both bottom-up instinct as well as what appears to be taste. In order to attract female mates, male birds build an audacious 'mating-stage', characterized by ornate thatch-work, berry-juice paint, and colorful collections of organic and synthetic objects. This is not a nest, but a girl-magnet, and while it is evidence of the male's prowess and ability to procure resources, its primary expression is of the male's aesthetic sensibility in construction. Females are highly discerning-- they look for formal coherency, color composition, and construction innovation in these stages. According to James and Carol Gould, authors of The Animal Architect, the male's...
 
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Pretensions of Form: A Conversation
LOG, Fall, 2009
 
Hammering away at the relation between 'superficial' and 'serious' might reinforce a binary way of thinking on the subject. I think Jeff Kipnis is right that good architecture operates simultaneously on multiple ontological levels; for me, making connections between the realms of exotic beauty and performance (in that order) is one way of achieving that kind of complexity. A thing can exist simultaneously as an architectural "delight", which is emotional and immediate, and something that does work, which requires thinking and is delayed.
Look at the Agamid lizard from Australia: its skin is a wild composite of deep grooves, micro-relief, and color variegation which can neither be unwound from one another nor associated conclusively with any particular function. But it turns out that this patterning does in fact do work such as channeling water from its back to its mouth...
 
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Out of the Lab, Into the Jungle
Insect Nest to Human Architecture, ed. Guy Theraulaz, 2009
 
In 2009, algorithmic or 'swarm architecture' is at a critical juncture: it is seductive and ubiquitous, but at the same time often misunderstood in terms of its accomplishments to date. It's important to look at its successes and failures with fresh eyes rather than continue to promote it as if it is permanently pioneering. In its actual pioneering phase in architecture, during the mid- 1990's, swarm architecture was highlighted by work from Karl Chu, Marcos Novak, and Greg Lynn, and the parallel criticism of Jeff Kipnis, Manual Delanda, and Sanford Kwinter. This group, although it by no means ever operated under the flag of 'swarm architecture', set the stage for thinking about a new architecture which could capitalize on iterative computational techniques as well as deal with new discoveries in science related to complexity theory, evolutionary biology, and emergence. It was a perfect storm which yielded...
 
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EMERGENT MODELS OF ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE
Yale Perspecta #38, 2006
 
The idea that innovation, whether scientific, technological, or architectural, is a byproduct of artistic chance or a result of singular genius can no longer be sustained in the 21 " century. Complexity theory reveals that innovation - the creation of the new - is the direct result of bottom-up evolutionary processes. Science knows this; industry is learning. Architecture is just beginning to engage the concept.
In order to move into this space of innovation, architects will have to accept the value of multiplicity and dynamic feedback over the retrograde nature of authority. They will have to accept that architecture might not be about essences and theoretical positions, but rather about exchanges of techniques, expertises and materialities in multiple industries. They will have to accept the architecture is no longer a heroic center, but one micro-intelligence among many...
 
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Emergent Processes
OZ #27, 2005
 
This century is going to be about biology. I don't want to confuse architecture with biology. You can take analogies too far of course. But, as Godei once said in his Theory of lncompleteness, sometimes to solve a problem in a particular discipline, you have to switch to completely different territory.
Architecture and biology at first glance do not appear to be so different- both are materially and organization ally based, both are concerned with morphology and structuring. Both are wound together by multiple simultaneous systems and drives, and probably most important for us here, both are constructed out of parts operating as collectives. While buildings, and to a lesser extent organisms (especially the human kind), may often be laden with content or meaning, that seems to be culturally transient and not particularly informative for either on the level of material dynamics and properties...
 
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Beyond Assemblies: Systems Convergence and Multi-materiality
Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, ed. George Jeronimidis and Petra Gruber, 2011
 
The architectural construction industry has become increasingly more specialized over the past fifty years, creating a culture of layer-thinking over part-to-whole thinking. Building systems and technologies are often cobbled together in conflicting and uncorrelated ways, even when referred to as "integrated", such as by way of building information modeling (BIM). True integration of building systems requires rethinking how systems and architectural morphologies can push and pull on one another, creating not only innovation in technology but in aesthetics. The revolution in composite materials, with unprecedented plasticity and performance features, opens up a huge range of possibilities for achieving this kind of convergence...
 
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Interview by Hernan Diaz Alonso
SCI-Arc Magazine, October 2011
 
In the permanent state of arrival and departure that defines SCI-Arc, the role of the faculty is of course critical, but is not about finding individuals who fits within a dogma. Instead, we like to think, it's about identifying some very specific and hopefully important part of the larger architectural conversation that is, right now, at a critical inflection point, and people who are pushing and defining it. Always looking for an ingenious way to push it in a new direction. If we are to be successful in challenging the individual the individual will challenge us, it will make everybody who is already part of that conversation stop and change what they are thinking based on what we have contributed.
Tom Wiscombe is one of those forces, his work since his days as the Senior Designer in Coop Himmelblau, until today with his own firm; his work is always at the...
 
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Interview by Olaf Winkler
BUILD Magazine, 2010
 
A major characteristic of your working philosophy is the integration of other disciplines and sciences into the architectural work, introducing the latter into a far bigger framework. Could you elaborate on that a bit more? What are the main fields of interest outside the "traditional" architectural world from which you draw further knowledge, what are the aims?
I am actually torn on this subject because although I do believe that disciplinary crossovers are critical to architecture's evolution, as I get older I am more and more convinced that architecture is a distinct form of knowledge. But I wouldn't go so far, as some people do, to say that it is autonomous. I just believe in expertise, and that architecture gets weakened when it becomes a medium for reflecting the agendas of other disciplines...
 
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Interview by Tracey Woods
ADAM & EVE Magazine, 2008
 
You're inspired by natural structures, like plants and insects. How are you working this into buildings?
Many of the things that inspire my work now are linked to biology. A certain kind of biology though, a messy biology. The biology of excess and not efficiency. It is infuriating how often I hear about the perfection of biology and how things that are in nature are the "best of all possible" solutions to problems. That idea leaves out the very things that create difference: mutation, randomness, evolutionary dead-ends, and so on. Nature is exceedingly beautiful and I am in awe of how organic features build up and become obfuscated, fuse, embed, and become co-opted for behaviors which they did not originally support. An ecology is surprisingly resilient, but not clean or optimal. Ecologies work based on redundancies and overlaps...
 
 
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Interview by Tracey Woods
DUDYE Creative Warrior Magazine, April, 2010
 
What has built the fascination for synergistic effects?
This comes from both an intuitive and an intellectual place. I have always been interested in natural systems: plants and animals and ecologies. When I look at the diversity of species in the rainforest, I always think, why doesn't architecture have this kind of diversity? Of course I know why, but the question just doesn't seem to go away for me. The diversity is in terms of visible features and embedded behaviors, not just one or the other. For a while now I have been trying to bring the idea of features and behaviors together in a profession which seems to cycle between promoting one or the other. Sustainability is one example of how behavior is being promoted at the expense of architectural features, and the digital Neo-baroque is an example of how form is being promoted at the expense of behavioral robustness...
 
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