SS: Here is an excerpt , and the link, from and article by Tom Wiscombe, the founder of Emergent. Tom focuses on defining and explaining emergence not only as it occurs in nature but also why it is the name of the company. The journal entry stresses the need for complexity in the sense of freeing architectural process from the linear or additive routine. Its interesting how he connects biology, bio-mimicry and computation with architectural performance. This got me thinking of how readily computation in architecture can be a catalyst for sustainable design. After reading take a look at some of the projects.


__This century is going to be about biology. I don’t want to confuse architecture with biology. You can take analogies too far of course. But, as Gödel once said in his Theory of Incompleteness, sometimes to solve a problem in a particular discipline, you have to switch to completely different territory.

Architecture and biology at first glance do not appear to be so different—both are materially and organizationally based, both are concerned with morphology and structuring. Both are wound together by multiple simultaneous systems and drives, and probably most important for us here, both are constructed out of parts operating as collectives. While buildings, and to a lesser extent organisms(especially the human kind), may often be laden with content or meaning, that seems to be culturally transient and not particularily informative for either on the level of material dynamics and properties. Nevertheless, despite their parallels, some of the primary terms with which both architecture and biology are concerned turn out to be different in kind rather than degree: what architecture calls function, in the dogmatic sense, biology calls behavior. What architecture calls order, biology calls DNA scripting. Biology, it turns out, defines its processes dynamically and generatively, while architectural processes still tend to be understood as fixed and stable. Recent bio-theories on complex adaptive systems and especially the phenomena of emergence have begun to open up territory that architecture can no longer ignore if it is to have any relevance, and indeed resilience, in the future.__


Article http://www.emergentarchitecture.com/pdfs/OZJournal.pdf

Projects http://www.emergentarchitecture.com/projects.php?id=20