Week 8

Surface or facade have become the ‘it’ words of the 21^st century architectural diaspora. Often viewed as a quick fix or a superficial ornament of design, it is the latest gentrification of the architectural toolset used to patch the realm between structure, form and the outside world. Antone Picon subdivides digital architecture’s surface fascination into two discourses; “surface bear more immediately the mark of formation processes than volumes… surfaces appear as more genuine expressions of parametric variations.” And “surfaces challenge the traditional mode of presence of architecture as well as some of the fundamental binary structures that have characterised the discipline for a long time.” Picon highlights the tactility of surface as the point of contact between human and building, defining the surface as a shift in tectonic based form in an imaginative and variable way, appealing directly to the senses, leaving the subject unclear where his sensitive body ends and from where exterior reality truly takes over, in a manner that would make Bruce Willis implode due to sensory over-saturation.

By extension, Ronald Snooks dives into the realm of collective intelligence as data driven systems gain traction as determination within autonomous architectural and computational agents. The use of computation can now foster the emergence of “form emerging from the interaction of localised entities within a complex system.” Snooks applies a notion of localised scale to surface treatment through the use of swarm matter and woven composites as structural precursors to a logical system, demonstrating a shift from uniformity to an emergent assemblage dictated by population interaction.