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Inside the BlackBox: SOM's Technological Trajectory

Introduction

For an architecture firm to remain competitive, perhaps nothing is more critical than the pursuit of emerging technology. In its best buildings, SOM has used technological advances to establish new systems of architecture, from supertall engineering to large-scale sustainable urban plans.

Today the pursuit of technology applies, in particular, to computational systems. In May 2007, SOM made a significant commitment to exploring the nascent field of computational design when it established the BlackBox studio in the Chicago office. Under the direction of design partner Ross Wimer, four graduates of the Product Architecture and Engineering Program at the Stevens Institute of Technology joined the SOM team with the purpose of developing and leveraging parametric and algorithmic processes to generate new approaches to architectural, interior, and urban design within the firm’s own “black box”. BlackBox’s incubation within SOM marks a significant (re)turn to technical mediation in the service of rational form- making, recalling investigations of earlier SOM studios. Several of the firm’s most well-known architects and engineers—including Walter Netsch, Fazlur Khan, and Bruce Graham—foreshadowed similar methods of algorithmic design as early as the 1960s.

Close-up of the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel, composed of 100 tetrahedrons

A History of Technological Innovation

Using Field Theory, a system based on Greek geometry that relied heavily on recursive calculation, architect Walter Netsch developed manual drafts of buildings that prefigured the type of complex designs that now populate the contemporary architectural landscape. For instance, Netsch’s design for the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel contained 17 spires made up of 100 tetrahedrons that were painstakingly drawn out and reworked by hand. Many years after he designed the Air Force Chapel, Netsch remarked that designing with Field Theory “was a lot of extra work. Those of us who took it seriously, we spent hours of extra time on our own searching for an extra little shape.”1 Today, Netsch’s Field Theory can be seen as a predecessor of the complex, digitally-designed architectural systems that BlackBox now helps to devise.

At the same time that Netsch was developing Field Theory, architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan were working together on supertall office buildings that required extensive calculations for structural engineering. In the 1960s, computer technologies that had been developed during World War II for code-breaking were trickling into the commercial market. Although programmable computers were available, high costs prohibited most companies—even Fortune 500s—from using them.

Walter Netsch, working on drawings for SOM’s Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel

The Crude Consciousness of a New Age

Graham and Khan lobbied SOM partners to purchase a mainframe computer, a risky investment at a time when new technologies were just beginning to take shape. The partners agreed, and Khan began programming the system to calculate structural engineering equations and, later on, to develop architectural drawings. Graham remarked that “SOM was way ahead using the computer,” noting that Khan—often referred to as the “Einstein of structural engineering”2 —was “already a computer genius” by the 1960s. These technological advances had a significant impact on how Graham and other SOM architects saw the future of design, leading Graham to observe, “We have the technical tools as well as the crude consciousness of a new age.”3

Since that first computer purchase, SOM has remained at the forefront of technology, mapping the ever-changing boundaries of digital design. With the establishment of the BlackBox studio, SOM is spearheading new and highly experimental uses of BIM (Building Information Modeling) software developed by leading tech firms such as Gehry Technologies, McNeel, and Autodesk. As potential applications of these programs multiply, the ability to comprehend and manage the scope of possibilities grows more specialized, requiring investment not only in new software, but more importantly in minds that are capable of analyzing data and decoding the increasingly dense “black box” of computer technology.

The Hancock building was designed using SOM’s first computers.

Multiple Software Platforms

In his book Pandora’s Hope (1999), Bruno Latour defines blackboxing as “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” This theoretical model of the black box is a contradiction—it is both obscure in its “internal complexity” and obvious in its predictable outcome. In response to the problems posed by this theoretical paradox, BlackBox demystifies the obscure (training architects and engineers in new technologies and bridging the gap between design and data) and moves beyond the obvious (exponentially increasing the number of possible design iterations).

BlackBox’s reach extends beyond a single software platform—the studio customizes and integrates a range of advanced technologies to reinforce architectural processes from conception to construction. When a design process requires tools that are not available in any commercial application, the BlackBox team will utilize their programming expertise to author design tools from scratch. BlackBox studio head, Keith Besserud, explains, “These types of tools have the ability to provide designers with valuable real-time feedback about their design choices, allowing them to respond from a more informed position while also helping to build an intuitive understanding of the phenomena being studied, whether it is structural forces moving through a tower or incident solar radiation across a curved skin or the distribution of daylighting throughout a space.”

White Magnolia Plaza – parametric model of tower developed by BlackBox studio

Inside the Black Box: Using BIM

One of the first programs adopted by the new studio was Gehry Technologies’ parametric BIM software, Digital Project. Built on the Catia software platform which was developed to service the high-performance aerospace and automotive industries, Digital Project has the ability to parametrically define, track, and modify the entire lifecycle performance of a project. BlackBox is not only exploiting the extraordinary capabilities within Digital Project; they are also connecting Digital Project with other software platforms such as Ecotect (environmental analysis), Strand (structural analysis), Excel (financial proforma analysis), and Revit (project documentation). By integrating these various technologies, SOM is able to more efficiently adapt its projects to the particular needs of a client, drawing upon this workflow to address a wide range of design parameters and constraints. A design’s fulfillment of its stated goals may be directly and easily surveyed not only by the architect and the engineer, but also by the client, the contractor, and any other critical stakeholder.

The constraints and objectives in play with BIM and other digital design tools allow the architect or engineer to relinquish some degree of control; design collaboration can become more direct by integrating client requirements as parameters in the BlackBox “database.”

Window design concept for Ali Al-Sabah Military Academy generated with custom-written genetic algorithm

Inside the Black Box: Structure Defines Architecture

Besserud further explains, “When you are working within an algorithmic approach to design, the focus shifts somewhat from the results themselves—the building—to the rules that are actually driving those results. So design begins to happen before form-making. It starts to happen as you begin creating a system of rules, as you are trying to figure out the rules that will connect some source of data to some geometric parameter. So, perhaps, the shading values you are getting from Ecotect are driving some specific angle or dimensional parameter which causes the building to rotate or move in a certain direction. The point is that the building design is the result of the rules and goals that are defined in the beginning and carried out through the algorithm.”

White Magnolia Plaza, a three-tower, mixed use complex along Shanghai’s Huangpu River, served as an early opportunity to validate and refine the BlackBox paradigm. The developer asked the SOM designers to design a large canopy to shade portions of the plaza, using as few vertical supports as possible. In response, the design team conceived a gridded sunshade of glass and steel tubing; then BlackBox developed an algorithm—or procedural system of logic—to organize the structural components. Using a spiral shape as a rule-maker, BlackBox panelized the surface into a curved, triangulated grid with spiral vortices forming the canopy supports. BlackBox provided the structural engineers with the 3d coordinate data for all the nodes of the canopy geometry, which the engineers then used to build their analytical model and determine the sizes of the structural components. BlackBox then took the structural data and incorporated it into a parametric model that could be easily modified by changing the value of any geometric parameter that described any aspect of the canopy shape. The spiral can be rotated, for example, to form a looser or more tightly latticed surface. The glass panels and even the connection fittings all update parametrically in response to these modifications as well. Ross Wimer, lead architect of White Magnolia Plaza, describes the canopy as a design in which “structure defines the form of the architecture.”

Parametric model of the canopy design for White Magnolia Plaza

A Culture of New Technology

Clay Risen, managing editor of the journal Democracy, has observed how “the fast-paced development—and ultimate convergence—of PM and BIM technologies point to a common horizon: a seamless relationship between design, construction, and maintenance in which pure data is the only deliverable.”4 This chain of connection can be interpreted negatively as a restraint on creativity or positively as a more collaborative approach to the creative process.

In fact, it has been observed that the network culture of new technologies challenges the authority of the architect as visionary, but in a firm of SOM’s size and scale the notion of absolute creative ownership is necessarily challenged on a daily basis. As a corporation that has survived the coming and going of numerous celebrated architects and designers, SOM embodies what architectural historian Nicholas Adams called “an experiment in cooperative practice at a large scale.”5 SOM’s culture of collaboration and, some would argue, competition within the firm has laid the groundwork for the active pursuit of new knowledge and an overall willingness to experiment with cutting-edge technologies.

Algorithmically generated design concept for USAFA competition

Driving New Design

A key component that differentiates BlackBox’s work is the team’s focus on being a critical driver of the generative stages of the design process, as opposed to focusing only on the visualization and documentation of resolved designs “after the fact.” For SOM’s Plot 16 design—a two-tower development in the heart of Moscow—BlackBox generated custom analysis scripts that helped to site the residential tower, develop its curtain walls, and analyze its natural light, views, and relationship to the Kremlin. From dozens of options, BlackBox filtered out a set of the top 20 performers, and architects selected the option that they felt did the best job of reconciling the various performative goals and establishing the look they were trying to achieve on the site.

Speed and efficiency are also critical to BlackBox’s work within SOM. An architect using conventional digital drafting and BIM tools might need weeks to model and generate drawings of a tower, then several additional days to integrate just one change into their model and drawings. When the Plot 16 client called at a late stage in the documentation process to request several changes to the towers, BlackBox worked with architects and designers to create an entirely new model within just two days, as opposed to what would have conventionally required a month or more.

Parametric concept for roof of a transit hub – the form is generated from a mathematical formula

The Space Between Discovery & Practice

The resultant form of Plot 16 may be considered a convergence of many disparate ideas, physical elements, and environmental factors—this is design as an open-ended process. By developing parametric models side by side with studio heads before handing them off to the studio architects, BlackBox helps to frame the essential logic for the remainder of the design process and directly impacts the gestation of the building. As a result, studios are experiencing a major task shift from drafting and other modes of representation to more intelligent design systems.

In addition to working with architects on current projects, BlackBox also researches theoretical systems, operating in the space between discovery and practice. In a discussion about a phenomenon of complexity known as Emergence, Besserud references two different research projects the group has undertaken to explore this “bottom-up,” “rules- based” frontier of artificial intelligence. “Ants” is a program which seeks to simulate the interactions and behavior of an ant colony, while “Growing Cities” seeks to simulate patterns of growth and decay in an urban context. Besserud describes the rationale behind these investigations as a counterpoint to traditional “visionary” approaches to design. “The idea,” he says, “is to create a framework or game system in which you have a few simple rules that are encoded into a whole bunch of agents. Then, assuming you’ve set it up properly, when you hit ”go” you can sit back and watch all these things interacting with each other, resolving conflicts, and evolving in interesting patterns. Of course, the patterns that develop are a function of the rules you created, so if you play with the rules you can create new patterns of interaction and evolution. What’s really interesting is when you get something that is totally unexpected and it causes you to really think about why that happened.” Design in this “rules-based” paradigm is very much the outcome of a process, not a predefined condition.

Snapshots of growth progress for a hypothetical city using a custom developed emergent urban design software program

Applications for Sustainable Design

In particular, the practice of theoretical modeling has immediate applications for sustainable design. As new sustainable systems and concepts are applied within the firm, BlackBox can develop parametric models that can be used to iteratively and accurately evaluate a design’s environmental performative characteristics. For example, BlackBox applied a number of algorithmic processes to the development of SOM’s competition design for a zero-energy commercial tower in Dubai.

Working with the architects and sustainable engineers from SOM’s Performative Design Group, BlackBox helped to develop a curtain wall for the tower that was arrayed with solar tubes. This parametric model allowed the designers to easily manipulate the surface curvature of the skin and analyze its energy performance, moving quickly to potential solutions that best integrated the solar tubes with the architecture and structural components of the tower while achieving maximum energy efficiency.

This convergence of research and immediate application allows the group to not only forge important progress in the development of new, sophisticated tools for wider use on future applications, but also serves as a catalyst for accelerating the development of intuition and knowledge among SOM designers and architects. When a designer has the ability to use and understand software tools that simulate environmental and structural performance, the cycle time for testing design ideas is reduced by magnitudes, compared to using manual formulas. In addition, the ways in which these tools provide visualization of results with colored mappings and animated sequences makes the lessons much easier to understand and more profound in their significance.

Selection of parametric tower concepts for Oasis Generator used in analysis of solar performance

Creating Connections Between Data & Form

The tools and processes being developed by BlackBox are highly transferable across disciplines, a significant point given the multi-disciplinary mix that exists in the Chicago office. Working closely with engineers in the structural group, for example, BlackBox has been exploring the development of various search algorithms such as evolutional structural optimization, homogenization, and topology optimization.

An early success was the creation of a tool called a genetic algorithm (GA) which is a search algorithm based on theories of natural evolution and the principle of “survival of the fittest.” When connected with a parametric model and some form of an analysis program, the GA is able to methodically sample an enormous sea of design possibilities in search of the best performers. This process is relevant not only to structural problems, but to other performative problems as well, including environmental, economic, constructability, and view quality. For the problem of view quality, the BlackBox team built a simulation tool from scratch that maps data onto a proposed building. The simulation shows the quality of the views at different points on the surface of the building and makes clear whether or not certain landmarks are visible.

These types of analytical data serve as drivers of form. By creating rules that associate numeric values from the analysis (such as structural deflection, solar radiation, return on investment) with parametric variables that define the building geometry (such as dimensions, angles, areas), the simulation and analysis programs can directly influence the building’s shape. The result is the ability to quickly shape buildings according to a wide array of design criteria.

Custom-developed View Calculator tool used for studying view qualities for a proposed building

The Blackbox Confederation

As studios and disciplines engage BlackBox on a project by project basis, an evolving digital design paradigm is being accelerated throughout the office, a paradigm which is novel in the explicitness, breadth, and rigor of its application, yet also consistent with the rational philosophy of innovation that has historically marked the best of SOM’s work.

Architects, designers and engineers in the various studios are taking greater ownership stakes in the tools, methodologies, and philosophies of this new paradigm, and a BlackBox “confederation” is building. Clusters of research are forming across the office, where a culture of interest in scripting, mathematics, and the use of simulation and analysis tools is propelling new trajectories of form-finding. Research is being nurtured through a rapidly evolving strategy in which interesting and relevant ideas are banked as high-value investigations, and then advanced on specific opportunities that present themselves. As new project commissions are moved through the preliminary design processes, designers and engineers are able to identify those opportunities which might lend themselves to specific research theses. The teams are then able to test these theses and make incremental pushes on the technological and design envelopes. Each project marks an advancement of the firm’s knowledge for eventual and deeper application on subsequent commissions. In this iterative process new areas of research are constantly identified, banked, and investigated, and the process, becomes an unending cycle of knowledge-building.

Conceptual rendering of roof form derived through structural and environmental optimization studies

Conclusion

By casting a broader net, Blackbox and the technologies they investigate paradoxically draw project stakeholders together, blurring traditional distinctions between clients, architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, and technical specialists. This is not to say that specialization is being eradicated (it is, in fact, becoming increasingly important), but rather that communication between team members is accelerating and evolving. Design Partner Ross Wimer has said that, “SOM, as a collaborative practice, is at its best doing large, complex projects. We lead teams of professionals to create innovative solutions. The BlackBox studio adds new tools to that process.” In establishing BlackBox, Wimer created a space where designers can re-examine the logic of a structure, adding complexity to the creative process and codifying various programmatic, financial, and spatial conditions.

In the context of SOM’s technological trajectory, BlackBox has evolved from the “technical tools and crude consciousness” that Bruce Graham once spoke of into an increasingly complex network system. In the coming years, perhaps we will see an even greater shift as networks become more tightly interwoven and distinctions between program, rules, architecture, design, and engineering become less clear. In Graham’s words, “We are, at this particular time, in an age of discovery…”

Parametric model of pneumatic arch system for proposed temporary structure

(1) Betty J. Blum, “Oral History of Walter Netsch,” Chicago Architects Oral History Project, The Art Institute of Chicago, May 8 and June 5-28, 1995.

(2) Ali Mir (2001). Art of the Skyscraper: the Genius of Fazlur Khan. Rizzoli International Publications.

(3) Betty J. Blum, “Oral History of Bruce John Graham,” Chicago Architects Oral History Project, The Art Institute of Chicago, May 25- 28, 1997. (4) Clay Risen, “The Next Dimension,” in The Architect’s Newspaper, 6/8/2005

(5) Nicholas Adams, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill: the experiment since 1936, p.15, Electa, Milan, 2006

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