[ Ссылка ] In this lecture John Frazer asks, what exactly was it about designing that needed aiding before computer aided design? Frazer describes the history of computational design through his own work, it’s operating mechanisms, tools, and possibilities. Public Open Lecture for students of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee Switzerland, Europe 2014
In the talk Frazer describes the monumental problems we face globally that architecture could address, the power computational design possesses, and the tragedy that the later is not employed to address the former. The computational compression of space and time, virtual prototyping, and direct control over robotic fabrication all have the potential of massive global issues. Frazer describes the robust capabilities of cellular automata, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary algorithms.
John Frazer is the godfather of algorithmic and evolutionary design in architecture. Frazer taught at the Architectural Association in London, Cambridge University, and the University of Ulster. He is the former head of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic and the Queensland University of Technology.
John Hamilton Frazer is an influential architect, writer and professor. Frazer has written on architecture and intelligent computer-aided design (CAD) systems. Frazer has been a computer technology pioneer in design research, architecture, and urbanism. John Frazer is widely recognized as the father of architectural computation.
John Frazer is the originator of The Evolutionary Digital Design Process and leader in the field of generative design. He proposed and designed the interactive systems for the first intelligent buildings. He created the field of tangible interfaces and filed the first patents. He developed and marketed the world’s first microprocessor based CAD programs.
His extensive publications focus on generative and evolutionary computing for sustainable design and intelligent and interactive design systems and embrace the domains of participatory and co-operative design, tangible interfaces and public involvement in design and planning.
John Frazer’s An Evolutionary Architecture 1995 is considered the seminal work in the field. The book proposed a new model of the design process fundamentally realigning the roles of the user, the tool and the means of construction. It proposes an Evolutionary Digital Design Process where the computer uses generative and evolutionary computing techniques to become the accelerator of the co-operative evolution of a sustainable future architecture and the means of prediction, exploration and evaluation of multiple possible future design trajectories. Published in January 1995 to coincide with an exhibition of the same name in the Architectural Association, the book investigates the fundamental form-generating processes in architecture considering architecture as a form of artificial life, and proposing a genetic representation in a form of DNA like code-script which can then be subject to developmental and evolutionary processes in response to the user and the environment. The aim of an evolutionary architecture is to achieve in the built environment the symbiotic behaviour and metabolic balance that are characteristic of the natural environment. The interest is not a superficial analogy concerned with looking like an organism but a fundamental concern with operating like an organism and in a direct analogy with the underlying design process of nature. The book also proposes a fundamental change in the role of the architect… “The role of the architect here, I think, is not so much to design a building or city as to catalyse them: to act that they may evolve.” Gordon Pask in his Foreword to the book.
