الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 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.
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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 design.
Keywords Form; Hylomorphism; New Materialism; Gilles Deleuze; Biomimicry; Sustainability; Complexity theory, Emergence; self-organization; Digital Morphogenesis; Material-based computational design