GRAMMAR, CODE AND COMPUTATION
A Workshop by Adjunct Associate Professor Liss C. Werner

‘In more recent times my colleagues and I have written things that are much more like, what you call code. They are generative processes, which are more like sets of instructions that produce the things. They are actually sets of instructions, which allow the unfolding to occur in space [….] and therefore are capable of producing living structures’
Christopher Alexander

Lecture at “1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)”

Within the last decades architecture has become increasingly subjected to computation supported by digital means. The ‘object d’architecture’ has been replaced with the ‘object d’information’. In 1917 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson stated in his treatise that living things and physical phenomena take their form as a result of inner and outer forces. We may be able to understand this principle when looking at simple discrete objects, but how can we comprehend this when designing in and for complex systems such as urban environments. The role of the architect is – and has always been – to design systems. In order to understand what an architectural system implies. We will start with a flat sheet of paper, traversing analogue computation and finally bridging towards an architectural spatial vision.

Focusing on the complex relationship of IN[FORM]ATION FORM GEOMETRY SPACE
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