01

OVERVIEW
Visual Studies // APPROACHING CONVERGENCE

SPRING 2012 | COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GSAPP | ARCH 4792
Instructor: Biayna Bogosian | bb2466/at/columbia.edu
Research Coordinator: Steven Garcia | steven/at/thediscontinuum.net
Assistant: Phillip Crupi | pwc2110/at/columbia.edu

Have we reached a stasis in the long-heralded potential of the parametric?
We as architects have certainly acknowledged the limitations of the performance-based paradigm, challenges both human—the inescapability of embedded presuppositions + subjective determinations of fitness—and technological—perhaps most concerning, the lack of a universal computational language for modeling + analytics. Along the way, our ambitions for performative design have shifted to generative + nonlinear potentials, while exploiting our control over the efficiency, fluidity + substantive analyses of the parametric system to close the gap in the exchange of information has remained largely unexplored.

The architect has always operated across a multitude of domains at once. This course emerges from the assertion that the architect of the very near future will design workflow + software as integrally as projects + buildings. We aim to establish sizable research + progress toward this end, first developing then employing an encyclopedic catalogue of dynamic computational operations and systems, grounded in robust, performative evaluation + time-tested mechanisms + techniques. Navigating through, between, + within modeling applications as a continual platform for exploration, students will launch into a variety of opportunities for advanced + fluid interoperations. The ultimate goal is to begin to approach a convergence of varied + disparate computational platforms of design, with a specific focus on integrating techniques of digital craft + analysis into a near-seamless and active coexistence.