الفهرس 
Overview: Form, Material and Performance
Biological Principles for Nature’s FormsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Historically, architects used to draw what they could build, and built
what they could draw. The straight lines and circular arcs drawn on
paper using straight edge and compass have been translated into the
materials made by the extrusion and rolling machinery. This reciprocity
between the means of representation and production has not
disappeared entirely in the digital age. With the introduction of the first
programming languages in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, design
methodologies have undergone several evolutionary changes, which
provided opportunities for building more multifaceted and complex
forms. Moreover, this has radically shifted our conception of the design
process, as well as our understanding of geometrical forms as a function
of performance instead of finite positions in space.
However, the materials perspective in these digital technologies has not
yet been explored on the basis of the new possibilities disclosed by these
very same tools; material considerations have almost exclusively focused
on construction -techniques or as a post-rationalization design input. So
far, the materialization of formal expressions instigated by such
processes is primarily based on techniques of assembly, which do not
negotiate the inherent morphological and performative capacities of the
employed material systems that the tools put forward, resulting in a
style driven or decorative computational form making processes.
The approach introduced in this dissertation contrasts previous ones that
focused either on questions of representation and meaning in
architecture, or, alternatively that have treated performance as
synonymous to function placed in the context of post-design functional
optimization. It attempts to investigate new strategies for sustainable
and ecological design, in which forms are derived from the evolutionary
development or ’Biogenesis’ of natural forms, from their material
properties and from their adaptive response to changes in their
environment. Steering away from such words as ’green’, ’ecological’ or
’sustainable’, and think about the word ’ecology’ from afresh, as ’the
relationship between an organism and its environment’. Through this
approach, space can be perceived not as distributed geometries, but
rather as a composite graft responding locally to flows of programmatic
and environmental parameters. This is achieved through an attempt to
engage architecture in an integrated approach - the synthesis of
structure and natural processes results in an information-based design therein
promoted here is an act of prototyping akin to Nature’s search
for endless forms, from all this perhaps architecture can achieve a
condition of robustness and sustainability.
The framework of this thesis should be regarded as an open-ended
process of discovery. Future research and innovation can be continued
with respect to similar focus. The goal of this thesis is to engage design
problems with recent innovations in material-based computational
desig