Assignment 1 - Synopsis of "The Machines in Architectual Thinking"

Architecture has always been a complex outcome of the propagation between the pragmatic and the abstract. Galileo’s concept of mechanical efficiency revolutionized the way architecture were made and used, even since that machines have become an integral part of architectural design. However, with parametric design triumphing the age of 21^st century where forms are “found” by complex algorithms, has machines overwhelmed the architects? Is divinatory architecture eradicated from the scene?

The freedom, harmony and purity of nature has remained seductive to architects of the time, evident in the trend of biomimicry in the pursuit of nature-inspired designs.

With architecture evolving and changing, the role of contemporary architects have in fact “evolved” into “machines” in architectural thinking, which constantly innovate and adjust themselves to optimize the abstract idea and mechanical efficiency through the choice of materiality, structural adequacy and conceptual competence. The true beauty of architecture, is neither the maximised efficiency and cleanness praised by the Functionalists, nor the blind analogous natural forms, but an optimised balance of the two conflicting but complementary pair.