Parametric Notations: The Birth of the Non‐Standard

Abstract

The use of scripted parameters that define objects in architecture is generally regarded as a recent phenomenon, associated with digital design. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), describes how parametric notations are part of an enduring architectural lineage that has its roots in the theses of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, previous to printing, when the only means of disseminating the proportions and combining of elements was to describe them, writing them out by hand without the aid of illustration.

Acheiropoietic Architecture

“…The evidence of this change is even underlined by the new function that the building industry is taking over, leaving the usual position of "building makers" to embrace new ways to virtualize and predict how the buildings and the cities will behave and develop within a given lapse of time. Further, creating diagrams rather than objects helps designer on combining the medieval idea of variations [7] with the potential of contemporary computers and machine for digital fabrication.…”

Arquitetura, projeto e produção na era do digital turn

“…No campo de possibilidades descerrado por essa nova internet, franqueia-se a ideia da criação como um contínuo processo de reelaboração, com infinitas possibilidades de modificação. O paradigma técnico instaurado pelo parametricismo digital, termo cunhado por Patrick Schumacher, sócio da Zaha Hadid, para definir o novo estilo da arquitetura contemporânea do século XXI, é essencialmente antiautoral e colaborativo, e confronta valores arraigados na própria natureza do que seja o arquiteto desde a concepção albertiana, de uma maneira nova e radical (CARPO, 2013;CARPO, 2016).…”

Digital Parametrism and Proto-Parametrism as Manifested in Architecture: Theory and Practice

“…It provided graphical interfaces, new software features, and an easier and more intuitive approach. Carpo (2016) has indicated that this time period was characterized mainly by practices of a speculative nature through which the possibilities arising from the new technology tools as well as their impact on the project were explored. Architecture in particular was influenced in this period by cybernetics (Carpo and Claypool, 2016;2019), with the concept of cyberspace emerging as one of the central concerns of architecture in the sixties (Frazer, 2013) with a strong and interdisciplinary technological nature.…”

“…Indeed, this has often led to exemplary projects of conscious utopian spaces through constant reactions between technology and people, marked mainly by the sixties and seventies of the last century (Claypool,2019). According to the study of Mario Carpo (2016), no electronic structure actually appeared despite the influence and involvement of some cyber scientists in the digital transformation that would have occurred in the nineties. However, according to Claypool (2019), the ideal projects of that period ended up influencing many architects of the second half of the twentieth century ().…”

“…In the nineties, with the advent of more accessible modeling software, in addition to the specialization of other software, a wide range of professionals (Carbo, 2016;Schüreer, 2010) have adopted to these new tools Waters (2003). They have indeed been immediately adopted by deconstructivists and formalists such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid who have relied on them to create complex geometric shapes and non-geometric shapes (Carpo, 2016) which characterize their work.…”