Processing Nature

Architecture is experiencing a paradigm shift. Modernist dichotomies exacerbated human nature from non-human nature, what is made from what is born, separating architecture as an abstract matter from nature. All we know, all that is around us, is nature; the term “artificial” is misused as synonymous of synthetic, while anything is a product of a process in nature, which is a complex system made of (mostly emergent) processes. Any kind of operation made in the environment is a process in the system. Architecture is a process itself, like communication, life, cognition, intelligence, growth, differentiation. Architecture is a way of processing nature - modulating the environmental response in different hierarchical levels - in order to differentiate habitats. Living beings are complex homeostatic systems that work far from equilibrium and only because of their intrinsic ability of being able to compute (process information) they can react and regulate establishing a dynamic economy (interrelation) with the environment. This process involves simultaneously multiple variables and multi-level performative response. Processes require code and algorithms; the concept of nature (as stated by Whitehead, A. N.) is not in the substance of things but in the interrelations established among the various elements; this web of relations is the logical structure (form) that shapes all things in nature, it is the code. Operating as architects under this concept requires a deep understanding of biology for its application in architecture through appropriate tools, processes and materials in order to define new and more sustainable ecologies between man and environment. Shapes and spatial organization in nature are the evolutionary, emergent result of complex simultaneous interactions of forces acting upon material systems, generating patterns in space and time, organized in multi-level hierarchies of morphological complexity. Complex morphologies are thus an efficient response in the dynamic environmental economy. To that extent, the use of computational models induce a new analytical and generative sensibility to architectural design, as they may facilitate a much better understanding of synergies between systems and environments, or subsystem interaction. Entire building systems and envelopes could thus be informed by multi-variable input and optimized to satisfy multi-performance goals. Information management and processing is thus a crucial point, both in the analysis and modulation of environmental stimuli and in the interaction processes during lifetime, or in a different expression, to drive metabolic processes of growth and energy management through morphology. Generative tools, besides the use of algorithms, should be applied consistently within a framework that encompasses their biological origin, environmental analysis and associative geometry tools in order to engage multi-performative efficient architectural design. Architects should tap on the threshold of continuity, reducing the scale of discretization allowing for raising levels of complexity in search of qualitative novelties; such novelties are possible with the application of morphological strategies inherited from nature through digital tools