Computing Architectural Materiality: the Hyper-natural Aspirations of the New Paradigm

The article is based on the premise that in the history of architecture there has always been an intimate relationship between architectural ideas and the various perceptions of the alive. On this premise the article focuses on and investigates the relationship of the contemporary architectural paradigm labeled as digital, parametric or morphogenetic with the alive. Its objective is to reveal its new profound reasonings which lead and nourish its creative expression, to articulate its new ethos with the extended use of advanced information technologies for the creation of architectural forms, but also for the generation of a broad spectrum of new building materials with properties predefined by the architect. The immaterial, the hybrid, the composite, the mutable, the transformable, the interactive, the dynamic, do not only appear as properties of certain architectural creations or building materials, but also as values expressing this ethos and declaring a new relationship or a reconsidered admiration of the natural, the living, the alive. The article concludes that the new hyper-natural aspiration of the contemporary paradigm constitutes a new dynamic expression of architectural materiality and its guiding intellect