The idea of evolution in digital architecture: Toward united ontologies?

Abstract

Humans have always sought to grasp nature’s working principles and apply acquired intelligence to artefacts since nature has always been the source of inspiration, solution and creativity. For this reason, there is a comprehensive interrelationship between the philosophy of nature and architecture. After Charles Darwin’s revolutionary work, living beings have started to be comprehended as changing, evolving and developing dynamic entities. Evolution theory has been accepted as the interpretive power of biology after several discussions and objections among scientists. In time, the working principles of evolutionary mechanisms have begun to be explained from genetic code to organism and environmental level. Afterwards, simulating nature’s evolutionary logic in the digital interface has become achievable with computational systems’ advancements. Ultimately, architects have begun to utilise evolutionary understanding in design theories and methodologies through computational procedures since the 1990s. Although several studies about technical and pragmatic elements of evolutionary tools in design, there is still little research on the historical, theoretical and philosophical foundations of evolutionary understanding in digital architecture. This paper fills this literature gap by critically reviewing the evolutionary understanding embedded in digital architecture theories and designs since the beginning of the 1990s. The original contribution is the proposed intellectual framework seeking to understand and conceptualise how evolutionary processes were defined in biology and philosophy, then represented through computational procedures, to be finally utilised by architectural designers. The network of references and concepts is deeply connected with the communication between natural processes and their computational simulations. For this reason, another original contribution is the utilisation of theoretical limits and operative principles of computation procedures to shed light on the limitations, shortcomings and potentials of design theories regarding their speculations on the relationship between natural and computational ontologies.