I was asked by Mollie Claypool to curate the second issue of Prospectives Journal as an ideal follow up to leading Research Cluster 0 at B-Pro in the academic year 2020/21. As such, this issue is a collection of positions that respond to my research interest during that year. 

In fact, my initial objective with RC0 was to research ways of applying computational tools to housing design for high-rise typologies: the aim was to update modernist housing standardisation derived from well-established rationalist design methodologies based on statistical reduction (such as in the work of Alexander Klein and Ernst Neufert), with the computational tools available to us now.

While the outcomes of this research were indeed interesting I was left with a sense of dissatisfaction, because it was very difficult to achieve architectural quality using purely computational tools – in a sense I felt that this attempt at upgrading modernist standardisation via computation didn’t guarantee better quality results per se, beyond merely complexifying housing typology and offering a wider variety of spatial configurations. 

In an essay I published in 2019 (which in many ways inspired the curation of this Journal), I declared my interest to be in the use of computational tools not for the sake of complexity – formal or programmatic – but for increasing architectural quality, while decrying that the positions expressed by the so-called first and second digital revolutions, at the level of aesthetics at least, seemed too invested in their own self-proclaimed novelty. My interest was in rooting them in a historical continuum, with established architectural methodologies; seeing computational design as an evolution of rationalism. 

This is why I wanted this journal to be about architectural form, and not about technical aspects of computational design: there is an urgent need to discuss design traditions connected to computational design, as an inquiry on “best practices” – that is, historical cases of what an algorithmic form has been and can be. 

Any discussion on architecture implies a twin focus, on the one hand, on the technical aspects of construction and the tools of design, and on the other, on how these are interpreted and sublimated by the artistic sensibility of an author. Ultimately, what’s interesting about architecture as the discipline of constructing the human habitat is how it is capable of producing a beautiful outcome; and in architecture, perhaps more than any other practice, the definition of beauty is collective. To be able to establish what’s beautiful, we need to develop common hermeneutic tools, which – much like in art – must be rooted in history. 

In light of this, I’m delighted with the contributions to this Journal, which offer a concise array of historical and contemporary positions that can help construct such tools. Many of the essays presented here offer a much needed insight into overlooked pioneers of algorithmic form, while others help us root contemporary positions in an historical framework – thus doing that work necessary for any serious discipline, technical or artistic, of weaving the present with the past.

My hope is that those individuals or academic institutions who are interested in how we can use emerging computational tools for architecture can re-centre their work not just on tooling and technical research but on architectural form, as the result of good old composition and proportion. The time is ripe, in my view, for bridging the gap between computational fundamentalists who believe in the primacy of code, and those with more conservative positions who foreground good form as the result of the intuition and inclination of a human author, remembering that an architectural form is only interesting if it advances the quality of life of its inhabitants and continues to evolve our collective definitions of beauty.