Post-Graduate master programme

Guest Prof. Dr. Oliver Tessmann

The new specialisation: Architecture and Performative Design (APD) is informed by a range of material, constructional, manufacturing and environmental considerations and technologies. The performance of an architectural design is conceived in its ability to incorporate various requirements resulting from programmatic, functional, structural and environmental aspects in a synergetic and fruitful manner. This specialisation focuses on how computational techniques and processes are changing the methodological and strategic make-up of architectural design by linking projective and analytical phases informed by technical data in the work process.

Whereas digital tools in architecture continue to be predominately used for representational purposes, APD draws on the transformative role of digital computational processes to bridge the abstraction of geometry with the performative aspects of contemporary and advanced material, technical and constructional systems. Form is not merely driven by subjective design approaches but results from adaptive, evolving processes. These affect architecture in new and profound ways by enhancing its environmental, functional and aesthetic performance potential.

APD is linked to contemporary advances in theory and practice training students in areas of architectural design that potentially have the most radical and unsettling effects on the traditions of the discipline. The new digitally driven changes to how architecture can be practised and theorised deny the architect the traditional role of ‘the master builder’ as an individual protagonist and transfer and distribute his or her creative and productive role to a larger team of project collaborators. By implication, architectural design is carried out in a more complex methodological setting where various forms of feedback inject projective and analytical momentum to the design development.

Computational design techniques are changing the role of analysis in the design process. Digital feedback loops of synthesis, analysis and evaluation establish a process of becoming in which solutions evolve, differentiate and adapt to specific requirements. Complexity is tackled by circular procedures. Instead of a linear cause-effect relationship, circularity creates feedback via signal exchange between effectors (output) and sensors (input). The computer becomes more than a mere representational machine. Its formalised systems are not inscribed into mechanical cogwheels but provided as a string of symbols based on a certain syntax. Scripting, programming and parametrics help to access this layer of description where the algorithm (the machine) and the data are represented with similar symbols and syntax. These processes create the conditions for the digital mediation of design emergence through evolutionary structures. Furthermore the simulation of material properties and structural behaviour enables designers to integrate constraints and transform them into design drivers.

APD revolves around these novel paradigms and conceives architecture and its design processes as a complex system which is comprised of sets of elements and their relations whose behaviour is unpredictable. The system properties are not defined by individual elements, but rather emerge from intricate interaction without any top-down control. Collaborative design demands the negotiation of multiple design criteria in these larger systems that account for increasing number of elements and relations. Thus, APD is actively engaged in relocating the architect’s role as a creative designer in an emerging field of technologically driven changes.