What’s New in Architecture

I’ve just spent a week re-immersing myself in the world of architecture, visiting architects and engineers, end of year student shows and going to the Space Syntax 20th anniversary party.
Some of what is in the Bartlett and Architectural Association shows could have been done 20 years ago. There are still Peter Salter influences in drawings and layered collages are in permanent vogue but there is an important technological shift towards using digital technologies to produce organic results.
At the superficial level of graphic representation, there are 3 new tricks: bas-relief style layered laser cut plans that are somewhere between a model and a collage; combinations of nurbs based modeling with quasi cellular automata style programs and some very interesting uses of 3-D printing. Here, the Bartlett seems to have kept its edge over the AA, stylistically.
Most interesting is an emerging theme linking the less trendy but intellectually more rigorous domain of the planners with the hand waving architects.
This is how that relationship worked until now:
Architecture school is about training people to produce seductive presentation skills which serve to get you a foot in the door in a commercial practice, while looking like you are pretending to be at art school. In the commercial world architecture is often principally about working out optimal geometry to maximize developer revenue, say, and optimize chances of obtaining planning permission. Ironically, actual design in the true sense is often done by people who produce shop drawings for component manufacturers. The degree of value-add architectural ‘design’ varies according to the status of the project, from corporate lobbies to funny shaped curtain walls, however very few building are monuments, and architecture school in many ways teaches people to design monuments. Many architects are therefore left feeling unfulfilled.
Ironically, the town planners who are often considered the less hip cousins of architects, since there is less peacockery involved, get the last laugh because the real intellectual stimulation that is to be gotten from architecture most often comes from looking at cities and how they work. Hipsters yearn to be urbane, and there is nothing more urbane than cities, by definition.
But this is where the world of fancy presentation drawings and sober planning decisions are following the same trend. The connection is that the complexity of cities is based upon simple, iterated, changeable rules just in the same way that an organic looking 3D modeled design is based upon the same.
At the prosaic level of what this involves, in architecture, MicroStation Generative Components and Maya dynamic scripting can produce emergent complexity via iterative mappings in a similar way that some graphic designers using the Processing language have done with displaying quantitative data. Designers are able to produce the organic look and feel of natural objects or the complexity of cities. Planners, on the other hand are able to use iterative analysis of complex environments via methods such as Space Syntax’s, to derive underlying rules or non-obvious patterns from organic complexity.
Emergent, organic design is being produced and understood in both planning and architecture departments where the creationist-like, strict rules of modernist dogma used to dominate.