International Journal of Architectural Computing

Parquet Deformation is an architectural studio exercise introduced by William Huff in 1960s. It aims to improve students’ reasoning of spatiotemporal variation by utilizing sequential shapeshifting of patterns. This article examines the outcomes of this educational research from a perspective of design computing with a purpose to remark its pedagogical significance. A multilayered reading about the exercise will reveal its historical, theoretical, and artistic backgrounds. Then the common structural elements and different construction approaches are explained along with a novel design and analysis method. The proposed method embeds variations of two-dimensional pattern deformations on a third dimension. It enables various analyses such as the measurement of regularity and locating the attractor points. This study is expected to exemplify how computational thinking and new digital tools change the way designers would approach to such systematic compositions.

Barely a month before the end of World War II, a technical report begun circulating among allied scientists: the ‘First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC’, attributed to John von Neumann, described for the first time the design and implementation of the earliest stored-program computer. The ‘First Draft’ became the template followed by subsequent British and American computers, establishing the standard characteristics of most computing machines to date. This article looks at how the material and design choices described in this report influenced architecture, as it set up the technological matrix onto which a discipline relying on a tradition of drawn geometry would be eventually completely remediated. It consists of two parts: first, a theoretical section, analysing the repercussions for architecture of the type of computer laid out in the ‘First Draft’. Second, a description of a design experiment, a sort of information furniture, that tests and exemplifies some of the observations from the first section. This experiment examines the possibilities of an architecture that, moving beyond geometric representations, uses instead the programming of events as its rationale. The structure of this article reflects a methodology in which theoretical formulation and design experiments proceed in parallel. The theoretical investigation proposes concepts that can be tested and refined through design and conversely design work determines and encourages technical, critical and historical research. This relation is dialogical: theoretical investigation is not simply a rationalisation and explanation of earlier design work; inversely, the role of design is not just to illustrate previously formulated concepts. Both design and theorisation are interdependent but autonomous in their parallel development.

This study sheds light on a holistic understanding of muqarnas with its historical, philosophical and conceptual backgrounds on one hand and formal, structural and algorithmic principles on the other hand. The vault-like Islamic architectural element, muqarnas, is generally considered to be a non-structural decorative element. Various compositional approaches have been proposed to reveal the inner logic of these complex geometric elements. Each of these approaches uses different techniques such as measuring, unit-based decoding or three-dimensional interpretation of two-dimensional patterns. However, the reflections of the inner logic onto different contexts, such as the usage of different initial geometries, materials or performative concerns, were neglected. In this study, we offer a new schema to approach the performative aspects of muqarnas tectonics. This schema contains new sets of elements, properties and relations deriving partly from previous approaches and partly from the technique of folding. Thus, this study first reviews the previous approaches to analyse the geometric and constructional principles of muqarnas. Second, it explains the proposed scheme through a series of algorithmic form-finding experiments. In these experiments, we question whether ‘fold’, as one of the performative techniques of making three-dimensional forms, contributes to the analysis of muqarnas in both a conceptual and computational sense. We argue that encoding vault-like systems via geometric and algorithmic relations based on the logic of the ‘fold’ provides informative and intuitive feedback for form-finding, specifically in the earlier phases of design. While focusing on the performative potential of a specific fold operation, we introduced the concept of bifurcation to describe the generative characteristics of folding technique and the way of subdividing the form with respect to redistribution of the forces. Thus, in this decoding process, the bifurcated fold explains not only to demystify the formal logic of muqarnas but also to generate new forms without losing contextual conditions.