Form Follows Technology

Image source: posted to Flickr by Ken Lund, “New York-New York Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas, Nevada

It seemed fitting that Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown finally won the Gold Medal. The book they worked on together with Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, was a seminal book on architectural theory for the 1970’s and the decades that followed. Context and precedent were the guiding principles for so many architects, learning from Main Street, the street culture of American highways and byways. There was Levittown, the great American middle class, the advent of the car culture and the suburbs. But America has moved into the 21st Century and more than 50% of the population now live in urban areas. Car ownership is declining, roadside architecture and scale and iconography for suburban environments is becoming less important. Buildings may still be ducks and sheds, but referential to what and why? Hasn’t the cacophony of MacDonald’s, Texaco, Home Depot and the like dulled all our senses to the point that they are background noise? Has the vitality of the commercial strip become an unsustainable headache?

Learning from Las Vegas, was a book primarily about a city as it existed in the early 70’s and this city, one could argue, has since transformed more than any other American city. The old casinos set back from the strip are no more. Ersatz Eiffel Towers, volcanos and glass pyramids are the new norm. Is the notion that, ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,’ a public license to be creepy? Maybe it’s no longer the best place to study architecture in America.

But what of the lessons of ordinary and ugly, buildings as symbols? Building of historic and cultural context? Or has modern technology in design and construction so changed our ability to manipulate form that our imaginations can produce almost anything?

Image source: Originally posted to Flickr as Case danzanti, attached under Creative Commons Atrribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Pictured: The Dancing House or Fred and Ginger, Prague, Czech Republic

Was Frank Gehry the Pied Piper of free form architecture, requiring computer programs to digitize models so they can be fabricated and erected in almost any shape and size? This is architecture reliant on technology in order to be documented and constructed. This revolution has accelerated over the past few years; new, cheaper, more accessible computer programs that can almost do what Gehry’s Catia software program did years ago. Traditional ways of thinking about form due to construction and documentation limitations are changing. This new technology available to architects has opened up all sorts of possibilities that were too difficult and or too expensive to accomplish years ago.

Pictured: MIT’s Stata Center, original image by Finlay McWalter, source: English Wikipedia

So, with the availability of new software tools, materials and products, a much broader design palette is available. Just look at the recent AIA award-winning projects in the May issue of ARCHITECT: J.Craig Venter Center by ZGF, Pterodactyl by Eric Owen Moss Architects and Fayetteville 2030 Food Center Scenario. Hard to imagine historical precedent for most and context seems to be ignored for all. Does this mean cultural homogeneity is out and individual cacophony is in? Is architecture now freed from the past in a brave new world of individual expression with little or no regard to what has gone before? Complex forms and ersatz materials will rule the day, and given ever-increasing computing power, isn’t this inevitable that ‘form follows technology.’

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