Scripting Cultures: Architectural Design and Programming

Chapter 5

Dimensions

Up to this point we have formed a working definition of scripting, reviewed the contemporary context, referred to the principal software choices and literature resources available at this time, presented some influential opinions of pioneers and maestros, and located scripting within architectural education and practice today. This chapter precedes what I have positioned as five examples taken from my own portfolio of projects. The first three examples draw from my experience in practice and consider scripting for increased productivity, experiments in form, and links to fabrication. The fourth and fifth examples are thought experiments, hypothetical designs arrived at through scripting. This chapter provides a little more detail about some of the turning points that helped shape my portfolio; these are not offered as formulae for others to take up, but rather as pointers to some of the creative relationships that link scripting to design.

Design space between geometry, mathematics and computation

Ultimately scripting is anything but rigidly formulaic in application however much scripters might flock to this or that fashionable problem-solving algorithm at any particular point of time. Scripting can be engaged purely to speculate, and even working from an historiographical perspective, future gaze. The range of techniques I describe here are limited somewhat to what I can do myself framed around what I have actually wanted to do over the years. There is an ...