Plastic Super Models: aesthetics, architecture and the model of emergence

• Main Author: Pia Ednie-Brown
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Humanities Press 2008-01-01
• Series: Fibreculture Journal
• Subjects: modeling and architecture; computational architecture; emergence and design
• Online Access: http://twelve.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-078-plastic-super-models-aesthetics-architecture-and-the-model-of-emergence/

Modelling is at the core of what architects do, rendering the discipline especially fragile and sensitive to shifts in the nature of models and modelling. A digitally-based, explorative architectural milieu has been actively modelling in tune with a socio-cultural paradigm related to the concept of emergence, presenting numerous challenges to a range of assumptions about the activity of architectural design. This paper explores how this milieu has acted to unsettle the cool containments of architectural composure by bringing affective activity emphatically to the foreground.