FLUX: Architecture in a Parametric Landscape focuses on the radical evolution of computational and material technologies that, during the last 25 years, have catalyzed one of the most creative and prolific periods in architecture since the early 20th century.
The widespread uptake of computational tools did not yield a singular architectural or urban typology despite the sharing of genetic traits derived from the use of common tools, methods and even materials. Rather, the heterogenous products of this period, organized in this book through a taxonomy of eight themes—Stacked Aggregates, Modular Assemblages, Pixelated Fields, Cellular Clusters, Serial Iterations, Woven Meshes, Emergent Surfaces, and Multi-Agent Networks—each of which explores a dominant logic and set of morphological traits, reflect the complexity of advancing tools, logics, and systems whose evolution continues to breed new evolutionary types and an unlimited diversity of architectural species.
These themes are theoretically explored and elaborated through the presentation of 145 built works and experimental architectural projects, which are then expanded through analytical and generative diagrams and models that further the design potential of the logics used to create them. Within the book, the architectures presented are considered as a population of objects responsible for the evolution of something that far exceeds the trajectory of a single project. They are thus explored less as autonomous works than as a collection of interrelated and interacting cultural artifacts in flux, whose formation, methods, and tools, as well as their experience, perception, and meaning are necessarily tied to a broader field of cultural production, contributing to the dynamic generation of new architectural and urban models.
Ila Berman is the former Dean, and the Elwood R. Quesada Professor and Director of the Next Cities Institute at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and Principal of Scaleshift design. She is an architect, theorist, and curator of architecture and urbanism whose research investigates the relationship between culture and the evolution of contemporary material, technological and spatial practices.
Andrew Kudless is the founder of the design firm Matsys and the William D. Kendall Memorial Professor and Director of the Construction Robotics and Fabrication Technologies Lab (C.R.A.F.T. Lab) at the University of Houston Hines College of Architecture and Design. His work investigates the emergent and integral relationships between form, growth, and behavior in material systems.
