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Inside the Blackbox: SOM's Technological Trajectory

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Inside the Blackbox: SOM's Technological Trajectory GO form-RKZxvrsDm google_appliance 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.
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