It's no secret that in recent decades, architecture has constantly had to “catch up” with increasingly complex technologies. The technical "stuffing" of buildings has become so complicated that in the process of designing any modern building, an architect needs to cooperate with a large staff of specialists in related fields. At the same time, the architect is increasingly being pushed aside not only, say, from the design of systems for theatrical, commercial and other equipment, but also elements such as windows and doors. The question naturally arises: what is left for the architect himself? The author of the report "Technology and Architecture", Doctor of Architecture, Corresponding Member of RAASN, Alexander Anisimov, believes that the lot of an architect today is to come up with a beautiful "shell", and in the case of a project - to work as a manager who consolidates the efforts of all the numerous professionals employed in construction.
One of the most striking consequences of this trend, according to Alexander Anisimov, can be considered modern architectural competitions, in the technical specifications of which all parameters of the building are actually predetermined, except for its external appearance, and as a result, participants spend all their skills and creativity on the shell. Anisimov named an international competition for the design of the second stage of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg as one of the most famous Russian examples of this approach: the shape of the plan and dimensions of the building, as well as the entire stage part of the theater, were predetermined in it. The TK was developed by a company specially invited for this, and any deviation from it was regarded as a violation of the conditions of the competition, so the contestants had no choice but to create an alluring external image: Dominique Perrault invented the "golden cloud", Eric Owen Moss - "glass bags" …
According to Alexander Anisimov, today technologies are changing so quickly that, having not yet exhausted its safety margin, the building becomes obsolete and requires reconstruction or demolition. It is clear that both are much more convenient and cheaper to implement if the "shell" is not associated with the internal structure. As Anisimov notes, today the tendency towards polyfunctional transformable spaces has prevailed, replacing stationary architecture. A replaceable casing, for example, made of special fabric or Teflon, is already used everywhere, especially in the buildings of exhibition pavilions, sports arenas, megamalls.
Along with the biomorphic themes fashionable in the 1990s, in search of original forms for such "shells", the architecture of the 2000s increasingly began to use mathematical models that unexpectedly revealed rich aesthetic possibilities. As Dmitry Kozlov, PhD in Art History, Research Fellow at NIITAG, said in his report, among these models, the so-called one-sided surfaces are of particular interest to architects, the most famous of which is the Mobius strip. At the beginning of the 20th century, these intricate mathematical structures were described by artists, today the baton has passed to architects: Peter Eisenmann, UN Studio, BIG noted buildings on the theme of Mobius. These projects, however, use so far only an external semblance of the form of a ribbon, although more amazing things can be created on its basis, for example, something like a single extended interior-exterior. It is possible, says Kozlov, that such an object will appear in the very near future.
If we digress from the formation of forms and turn to the method of erecting such structures, then mathematics turns out to be indispensable here and suggests absolutely fantastic things. That there are at least three-dimensional printers that "print" projects immediately into three-dimensional models. While such equipment is used only in design or for making models, however, researchers do not exclude that in the future printers will “grow up” to the size of an average residential building and begin to “cast” buildings in full size.
Indeed, the design process over the past decades has been completely subordinated to computer technology. And this is a consequence not only of rapid computerization, but also of the incredibly complicated technical parameters of modern buildings, which one person is no longer able to grasp and comprehend. Today, all parameters are included in the program, and in fact it is she (and not the architect) who creates the building. True, if a few years ago architects sounded the alarm about the fact that the computer actually deprives them of the opportunity to create, today they are more and more willing to explore the possibilities of co-creation with the machine. The so-called "digital baroque" is becoming more and more popular and in demand in modern architecture, and a lot of attention was paid to this direction at the conference.
For example, Doctor of Architecture Irina Dobritsyna, the author of several books on modern architecture, believes that such a “new formalism” reflects the protest of the architectural community against the “engineering” approach to design. The new generation, for example, the students of the famous group Coop Himmelb (l) au, create buildings that are emphatically manneristic, redundant in their formal novelty, proving that they have overcome pressing technical complexity. True, whether this phenomenon will become widespread and whether this will lead to the emergence of the figure of the architect-Creator, in scale comparable to the masters of past eras, scientists from NIITAG have not yet undertaken to predict.
