Simulation and the Engineering of Fantasy

In designing with a system such as the one described in this text, there is a great advantage for conceptual, sculptural ideas to have reality "applied to them." This takes place in a way that is analogous to contemporary design practice when an engineer makes formal or mechanical alterations to a design to ensure that it behaves as expected when exposed to the highly constrained and infinitely variable environment of physical reality.

In a computational design environment, reality is applied in the form of simulations. A structural simulation applied to a model that is built to accept it is capable of providing the designer accurate and validated information regarding the performance, cost, and availability of the structural elements. In the same way, a daylighting or ventilation simulation can provide the designer with a range of possible scenarios that can be compared against each other. This myriad of possibilities enables evaluation based on quantitative or qualitative trade-offs.

Well-made simulation tools are capable of decomposing natural phenomena into abstracted values that can be used in the design process. Simulations have been used to great benefit in the engineering disciplines, where automobiles are designed using a system that applies fluid dynamics, structural strength, and production processes in real time into the schematic design process.

Process Integration and Design Optimization (PIDO), as developed by companies like Esteco and Phoenix Integration, has successfully integrated a series of simulation tools into the design environment. Parametric models are typically introduced and constrained in order to limit a search space. A high-capacity computing system (often an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud server) is provided with a routine to evaluate, record, and mutate a parametric model until an optimal solution can be found from a humongous population of candidate solutions.

The implication of this is that a designer can now prescribe a design loosely, along with a series of conditions that the design must satisfy in order to be suitable to build. A fitness parameter guides the optimization, as the computational solver is only able to modify parameters in the model and minimize, maximize, or target a value. The production of a fitness parameter is a craft in engineering, as it will be in architecture.

Architecture suffers from being either too highly generalized, as in the case of mass housing, or too highly customized, as in the case of custom housing. The lack of a middle ground is represented in the lack of architectural involvement in the production of the built environment as a whole. Following the trends of the engineering disciplines and modifying the tools for the specific constraints and objectives of the architect will bring about a new era of hybridized architecture and planning.

Customization will respond to a vast number of parameters and conditions. Acquisition of data to construct a useful model of reality will continue beyond environmental phenomena and into the realm of the brain. The acquisition of information regarding how an individual experiences space, and their aesthetic predispositions, will become commonplace as input for the development of architectural designs.

Fantasy has been engineered based on parameters of reality with varying degrees of success. Gaudí's sculptural treatments of surfaces with mosaic tile and rigorous catenary experimentations gave his work increasing levels of validation throughout Barcelona, and ultimately from his greatest patron, Eusebi Güell. If indeed artificial intelligence systems can imbue our greatest fantasies with the demands of reality as well as engineers have in the past, then what is the position of the engineer in this system?

What is more important than fantastic imagination in a world where even the most ephemeral thoughts or gestures can be captured, optimized, and translated into physical form?