Patrik Schumacher and devotees of parametric design have embraced its capacity for futuristic formmaking...

... But its real potential—to improve building performance—remains unrealized.

Once upon a time, schools of architecture displayed plaster casts of Ionic capitals and Renaissance portals for the edification of their students. Visit any school today and you’re likely to encounter, either in one of the corridors or standing outside the building, structures resembling giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles made of interlocking pieces of laser-cut plywood. Such constructions, no less iconic than the old plaster casts, are the product of classes in the academy’s current architectural obsession—parametric design.1

Tangled grammar aside, Ceborski captures the preoccupation with parametric design to create new “contemporary” forms, as evidenced regularly in student projects, and less frequently in the façades of trendy boutiques, edgy condominiums, and upscale department stores. One of the largest built examples is Foreign Office Architects’ cruise ship terminal in Yokohama, Japan, a pier whose sinuous walking surface is said to have been inspired by traditional wave paintings. According to a primer on parametric design by the AIA California Council, this project proves that “complex building forms correlated to a series of imagined or perceived parameters could be organized and constructed on a grand scale with dynamic, real-world results.”

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Is the most effective use of parametric software simply to generate unusual forms? Architects have been deliberating on how best to use the computer ever since Ivan Sutherland invented Sketchpad (the ancestor of CAD) in 1963. Two years later, a seminal meeting on “Architecture and the Computer” took place at the Boston Architectural Center. In attendance were such luminaries as Walter Gropius, Yale’s Serge Chermayeff, the structural engineer William LeMessurier, and Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab. The architects imagined that computation would take over repetitive operations in the design process, but Minsky (correctly) predicted that the computer held much more in store. “We can use a computer to execute a procedure that is not just more tedious,” he said, “but more complicated than anything we can ask humans, including ourselves, to do.”

Complexity was precisely the concern of Christopher Alexander, an architect who that same year published Notes on the Synthesis of Form, a small book with an ambitious message. 

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  • 1. Google parametric design and the first site that you will find is not a Wikipedia entry but a blog, Rethinking Architecture. The author, a Polish architect named Jaroslaw Ceborski, is rather vague about definitions, but he writes enthusiastically: “It’s quite easy to distinguish something designed using parameters and algorithms from the rest, so it gives us a message, ‘I’m contemporary, I was rethinked.’ ”