The Power of Architecture:
Transhistorical Dimensions and Contemporary Parameters
Patik Schumacher, London 2025
Published in: Tai Lee Siang & Ong Eng Hong (eds), The Power of Design and AI Convergence,
CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, 2025
Abstract
This paper articulates the foundational societal role of architecture as the spatial framework that organizes and facilitates human cooperation, communication, and cultural evolution. It argues that architecture’s function transcends shelter. Architecture’s most potent function is the structuring of social interaction through spatial organization and morphological articulation. Drawing from systems theory, anthropology, and semiology, the paper frames architecture as a medium of social order, embedding and broadcasting societal information via designed environments, and presents a comprehensive task model for architecture, comprising spatiology, phenomenology, and semiology. The paper introduces the research agenda of agent-based parametric semiology—leveraging occupancy simulations to model complex, socially differentiated user interactions. Finally, the paper emphasises the merits Tectonism, an evolution of Parametricism, as a paradigm capable of addressing the increasing complexity and communicative demands of post-Fordist, networked societies. Architecture is positioned as an indispensable cultural force capable of upgrading social functionality and unlocking world society’s potential in the 21st century.
Architecture Catalyses the Order of Society
Architecture is an indispensable factor in the formation of any human society. There is no human community without a built environment. The built or designed environment is always and everywhere an integral part of culture. The most profound power of architecture is that it catalyses and facilitates the formation of large scale, social-cooperative order. This is the demiurgic power of architecture. This power of architecture is a transhistorical universal of human life.
It is the built environment – together with the panoply of crafted artefacts – that provides cultural evolution with the cross-generational, material substrate it needs. A key part of any evolution is the persistence of its environment and the stability of its reproduction, as a background process upon which variation and selection can play. The role of the built environment plays this double role: it is part of a persistent environment, and it also co-evolves and progresses together with the collective organism that is society. Compelling demonstrations for this formative nexus between social and spatial structure can be found within social anthropology, attesting to the crucial importance of cross-generationally stable built settings for the initial emergence, temporary stabilization and further evolution of all societies. Only on this basis, with this artificial material substrate upon which the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation, selection, and reproduction could operate, was the evolution of mankind out of the animal kingdom, and all further cultural evolution, possible. Thus the built environment acts functionally analogous to the DNA as the material substrate of evolution.
The built environment at any point stabilizes an evolved social order. It also allows for this order to grow cumulatively by accrual of more and more built structures being placed and functionally integrated in the overall societal settlement structure, as well as by gradual, piecemeal substitution and renewal of the settlement structure or urban fabric. In this way human settlements form and accumulate ever larger and more differentiated spatio-material structures, as the growing skeleton for growing social structures. Without this substrate human groups (communities, societies) would not have managed to attain such a scale, which is indeed unnatural for primates. Moreover, the level of cooperation, so important for the exceptional and ever-increasing human productivity, could not have emerged and continuously advanced on an ever-extending scale. Architecture and urbanism are not only an expression of human progress, but one of it’s key factors. What applies to the beginning of cultural evolution and consequently to human evolution per se still applies today in relation to the developmental tasks facing current societies.
Architecture’s fundamental, original contribution to human life is not the oft-invoked shelter (protection from the elements and wild beasts), but principally a structure-forming contribution, the catalysing, facilitation and reproduction of a social cooperative order. The built environment aids the structuration of social processes of interaction and plays an indispensable role in the establishment and stabilization of social order. This involves the demarcation of ownership claims, facilitating spatial exclusion by means of physical barriers with corresponding rights of access. Yet above all, it involves the spatial distribution and functional configuration of productive activities, the spatial sorting of various types of social interaction, the distribution and distinction of various communicative situations.
Built environments started to become designed environments since the Renaissance when architecture first emerged as a consciously innovative, theory-led academic discipline and profession in distinction from the tradition-bound craft of construction. The transference of the built environment’s evolution from incremental in situ improvements to comprehensive design speculation via complete sets of drawings and perspectival simulations led to a momentous acceleration of this evolution.
Architecture Shapes the Phenomenal World
Architecture, together with the other design disciplines, can claim universal competency and exclusive responsibility for the totality of the designed environment and world of artefacts, both physical and virtual, i.e. for the totality of the human phenomenal world. Everything that surrounds us, meets our senses and as interface mediates our communications with the social world was designed by a colleague. The design disciplines include: urban design, landscape design, architecture, interior design, furniture design, fashion design, product design, as well as graphic design and web-design, and in the near future: metaverse design. All the design disciplines together form a single function system of society (discourse, profession) with the shared societal function of the spatio-visual framing of all communicative interactions. For all designers the social rather than technical functionality is their core competency. Social functionality implies a focus on user experiences, especially social experiences. Forms deliver social function. The expansion of formal repertoires is of interest. Formal repertoires are problem solving repertoires. This includes problems of expression, information and communication. To the extent that all designers are plugged into and respond to the global design discourse, this discourse is omnipotent with respect to the spatio-visual and tactile shaping of the phenomenal world, within the economic constraints and social functionality expectations set by (private or public) clients. The creation of all items and aspects of the phenomenal world must pass through this needle’s eye of this institutionalized designer’s discourse. In the age of internet communication these discourses have accelerated and expanded. The discourse has been democratized. Anybody’s design, built or unbuilt, can be uploaded, become viral, and change the all design going forward.
Architecture Communicates Societal Information
The spatial order of the human habitat is both an immediate physical organizing apparatus that separates and connects social actors and their activities, and a material substrate for the inscription of an external ”societal memory.” These ”inscriptions” might at first be an unintended side effect of the various activities. Spatial arrangements are functionally adapted and elaborated. They are then marked and underlined by ornaments, which make them more conspicuous. The result is the gradual build-up of a spatio-morphological system of signification. Thus, a semantically charged built environment emerges that provides a differentiated system of settings to help social actors orient themselves with respect to the different communicative situations constituting the social life-process of society. The system of social settings, as a system of distinctions and relations, uses both the positional identification of places (relative location) and the morphological identification of places (ornamental marking) as props for the societal information process.
The distinction of social situations involves spatio-morphological signification, whereby both conspicuous urban and architectural forms and ornaments, as well as the relative spatial positionings of places (centre vs periphery, adjacencies) are means of a semiological encoding of situational distinctions. The built environment thus not only structures social situations via physical distance, separation or connection but, importantly, provides visual-cognitive orientation for the participants of the social processes thus organized, who then can find their places within the cooperative interaction process of their own accord. The ordered built environment communicates the social structure and thereby facilitates everybody’s orientation and participation. While the social structure as a whole can hardly be made fully visible any longer, each of the local social structures, offerings and options for interaction can still be made evident. Spaces communicate the social situation: who is welcome, what is to take place, how actors are to configure, and which social protocols are to be followed. The city is therefore a giant spatial broadcast and three-dimensional map of society, facilitating the navigation of society. This is an ideal that prevails where a culture had sufficient long-term stability. In more turbulent times not all city structures, urban or architectural designs are equally self-revealing and able to make the order of society transparent.
Architecture’s social functionality resides to a large extent in its communicative capacity. The built environment orders social processes through its pattern of spatial separations and connections that in turn facilitates a desired pattern of separate and connected social events. This is social organization via spatial organization. However, it is important to reflect that the functioning of the desired social interaction scenarios depends on the participants’ successful orientation and navigation within the designed environment. The built environment, with its complex matrix of territorial distinctions, is (or should become) a giant, navigable, information-rich interface of communication.
The artificiality and communicative capacity of human settlements, artefacts and dresses becomes tangible when we compare the diversity of human visual-material cultures, analogous to the diversity of human languages, each with its own rich internal differentiations, with the visual uniformity of other primate species. What sets human groups apart from other primates is what we might at earlier times, in the broadest sense, have called art, and what we should now refer to as design. This includes profane and sacred buildings and places, tools and other artefacts, as well all the artistry of decorative self-transformation via dress, jewelry, and make-up. These practices of “artistic” self-transformation are a universal phenomenon of all human groups.
These practices of decoration also include all buildings and artefacts, i.e. in contemporary terms they include all design disciplines. The significance of these practices, then and now, is the visual marking and thereby conspicuous differentiation of social arenas, roles and identities without which no social order can be built up or maintained. These props and marks allow dominance hierarchies, as well as more complex societal differentiations, to be expressed. This expression of social order becomes an important aspect of its reliable institutionalization. The social order becomes independent of the continuous combative physical reestablishment of hierarchy and this way also becomes scalable. Design is involved in the elaboration and reproduction of these vital semiological systems. All design is communication.
The Societal Function of Architecture: Task Dimensions
The life process of society is a communication and cooperation process that is ordered via a rich typology of communicative and collaborative situations. It is the designed environment that spatially distributes, frames, stabilises and coordinates these distinct situations within an evolving order that allows us to self-sort as participants of various specific social interactions. Designing is communicative framing. This task formula and understanding of the societal function of architecture and design applies also to web design and the framing of all digitally mediated forms of social interaction.
Architecture’s social functionality includes its communicative capacity. The built environment orders social processes through its pattern of spatial distinctions and connections that in turn facilitates a desired pattern of social events. The functioning of the desired social interaction scenarios depends on the participants’ successful orientation and navigation within the designed environment. The built environment, with its complex matrix of territorial distinctions, is a navigable, information-rich interface of communication. To order and articulate this interface is the core competency of architecture. This core competency is reckoning with users as sentient, socialized actors who use the built environment as an orienting matrix and text of instructions within which myriads of nuanced social protocols are inscribed.
Architectural order – symbiotic with social order – requires both spatial organisation and morphological articulation. While organization establishes objective spatial relations by means of distancing (proximity relations) as well as by means of physically separating and connecting areas of space, articulation operates via the involvement of the user’s/participant’s perception and comprehension of their designed/built environment. Articulation reflects the phenomenological and the semiological dimension of architecture. Thus, to the extent to which architecture operates through articulation (rather than mere organization) it also relies on engendering an effective semiosis within the designed/built environment. It is one of the fundamental claims of the theory of architectural autopoiesis that the semiotic dimension of architecture is of central importance with respect to architecture’s capacity to successfully discharge its unique societal function.
In as much as architecture is inhabited by culturally socialized subjects, the ordering effects of architecture rely, to a large extent, on effective signification. The effective social utilization of complex institutional spaces cannot be achieved purely by means of the physical channelling of human bodies. The effectiveness of the spatial order relies upon the active orientation of the subjects, on the basis of a “reading” of the spatial territory. This in turn requires articulation over and above physical organization. Current forms of differentiated office landscapes may serve as example: The traditional physical demarcation of territory by means of solid walls is replaced by the subtle coding of zones and the articulation of legible thresholds. This means that the importance of the semiotic dimension of architecture increases.
To grasp the problem of communication and interaction on a deeper level one might go to Talcott Parsons and his attempt to formulate a general theory of action. When Parsons theorizes interaction, i.e. when the object towards which an actor orients his action is another actor, a fundamental theoretical problem is encountered, a “problem” which is nearly always already solved in everyday life. Parsons theorized the underlying problematic under the chapter heading “interaction and the complementarity of expectations” (Parsons, 1953, p.14). Parsons describes the basic constellation of interaction between ego and alter – the actors that are oriented to each other – as follows: “There is a double contingency inherent in interaction. On the one hand, ego’s gratifications are contingent on his selection among available alternatives. But in turn, alter’s reaction will be contingent on ego’s selection and will result from a complementary selection on alter’s part. Because of this double contingency, communication, which is the precondition of cultural patterns, could not exist without generalizations from the particularity of specific situations (which are never identical for ego and alter) and stability of meaning which can only be assured by “conventions” observed by both parties.” (Parsons, 1953, p.16). Parsons concludes that double contingency requires the normative orientation of action and poses the norms of a shared symbolic system as the means by which the problem of double contingency in interaction is being solved. Parsons elaborates: “A shared symbolic system is a system of “ways of orienting” plus those “external symbols” which control these ways of orienting, the system being so geared into the action systems of both ego and alter that the external symbols bring forth the same complementary pattern of orientation in both of them.” (Parsons, 1953, p.16).
Architecture is a fundamental and indispensable part of a thus defined culture. Architecture operates and contributes to the coordination of “ways of orienting” as a part of what Parsons refers to as “external symbols”. The designed built environment thus, always already, acts as anker or channel that facilitates determination, i.e. the definition of the situation, the termination of the indeterminacy and volatility implied in the inherent double contingency of every encounter. (Luhmann picked up this notion of double contingency and made a central problematic in his social systems theory.) Over and above his identification of the deep problematic of double contingency, it is Parsons’ reference to “shared symbolic systems” that makes his work relevant towards the attainment of a deep theoretical formula for architecture’s societal function.
Here is the author’s definition of architecture’s societal function as first provided in ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ (Schumacher, 2010, p.364): “All social communication requires institutions. All institutions require architectural frames. The societal function of architecture is to order/adapt society via the continuous provision and innovation of the built environment as a system of frames.” Frames are providing, in each instance, the definition of the social situation. Before a specific interaction event can commence, relevant participants must find each other, gather and configure into a constellation germane to the desired interaction scenario. Their respective expectations, moods and modes of behaviour must be mutually complementary, i.e. they must share a common definition of the situation. It is thus the spatially pre-defined situation that brings all actors into a conducive position, with their respective complementary social roles. The built environment thus delivers a necessary precondition of determinate social interaction.
For this to succeed the built environment must be legible. The participant can then respond to the spatial communication that is broadcast by the designed space, e.g. by entering a space and joining the accommodated social situation. As a communicative frame, a designed space is itself a communication as premise for all communications that take place within its boundaries.
The designed spaces deliver the necessary pre-definition of the respectively designated social situation, thereby reducing the otherwise unmanageable excess of action possibilities that exist in our complex contemporary societies. They ‘frame’ social interaction. The organisation and articulation of these framing spatial communications is architecture’s core competency. The social meaning of a space can usually be guessed from its location, shape and stylistic markers. The core architectural task of framing communicative interactions can be broken down into two related sub-tasks, namely spatial organisation and morphological articulation. Articulation, in turn can be broken down into the subtasks of phenomenological articulation and semiological articulation.
These three domains of learning therefore define three agendas and parts of every architectural design project: The spatiological project, the phenomenological project, and the semiological project. Together these three parts constitute the methodological structure of the design project and process, for the design of both physical and virtual environments. These three subtasks and domains of expertise might be further defined and characterized as follows:
‘Spatiology’ is concerned with spatial organisation and plots out the geometric premises, sets the scene as it were, for the other three agendas of phenomenology, and semiology. Spatiology guides the distribution of places in space with respect to distancing, adjacencies and connections. This task dimension involves the selection of strategies of spatial organisation like axial ordering, grids, stacking, nesting, overlapping etc. An expanded spatiological expertise might draw on conceptual and computational resources provided by the mathematics of network theory.
‘Phenomenology’, as understood in this essay (and in the author’s theory of architecture in general), is concerned with morphological articulation and addresses the problem of the perceptual tractability of complex spatial/social scenes, i.e. the task of maintaining legibility in the face of complexity (Schumacher, 2012). The psychology of perception in general, and the subfield of spatial cognition in particular, provides a key resource with respect to this task dimension.
‘Semiology’ is concerned with communication via signification. The meaning of spaces and designs coincides with the social interactions they frame, i.e. meaning is or anticipates social use (Schumacher, 2012). The semiological project sets out the task of increasing the information-richness of the built environment by means of crafting a spatio-visual language or system of signification that is empowered by the combinatorial potency of grammar. Here linguistics serves as a fertile source domain for conceptual inspiration.
Architecture Upgrades its Powers in Line with Progress
Spatiology, phenomenology, and semiology identify and define central aspects of architecture’s task domain. These aspects of architectural learning respond to key challenges contemporary architecture faces with respect to its need to adapt its intelligence and design resources to the density, complexity and dynamism of 21st century social life. While the primary dimensions through which the built environment contributes to the order and functioning of society are transhistorical aspects of all built environments, the particular societal challenges that must be addressed and met in different epochs are historically specific. With respect to our complex and dynamic ‘postfordist network society’ the design task of framing implies now: Complex, dynamic, dense, and diverse (but legible) information-rich environments that are to facilitate orientation, navigation, and recognition (the identification of specific social situations) for an interaction-rich, productive, communicative, collaborative social life process.
Until the second half of the 20th Century the complexity of social institutions remained modest enough to be grasped via schedules of accommodation and controlled via a set of static plan descriptions. This started to change during the second half of the 20th Century and increasingly so since the 1980s.
World society’s mode of material reproduction has dramatically shifted in recent decades due to the advance of computation and telecommunication which in turn transformed forms of economic organisation and work. The transformation has been described and analysed in terms of the transformation from Fordism based on mechanical mass production to Post-fordism based on computationally empowered flexible specialisation and computationally empowered forms of communication. The technologies of Fordism were rigid without agile adaptivity and without the ability to quickly absorb and utilize innovations. In contrast, the new numerically controlled systems like robotic fabrication, 3D printing as well as the massive new field of software-as-a-service (SaaS) are capable of absorbing unlimited numbers of innovations. This in turn dynamizes business and business organisation and pulls workers away from assembly lines into R&D, marketing, finance etc.
Within contemporary post-fordist network society, the productivity of everybody depends on being plugged into professional and cultural networks that exist only in cities. What each of us is doing needs to be continuously recalibrated with what everybody else is doing, directly or indirectly. While this continuous adaptive re-calibration of economic activity is facilitated by the system of prices in the case of the ongoing output of products and services, in the R&D arena – where prices are not yet active – this requires inter-awareness via the intervisibility of research and development work and via communicative interaction. All further productivity gains depend on this, and it requires a new level of communicative density that is only available in cities. This is an important component of what economists measure as ‘agglomeration economies’.
Urban economist Edward Glaeser investigated what he called innovation clusters and emphasized the proliferation of productive ideas that cities throughout history had incubated and he observed that “even in our age of information technology, ideas are often geographically localized”(Glaeser 2011, location 812). As striking evidence Glaeser refers to a study that found patents exhibit a strong tendency to cite other patents that originated in geographically close proximity.
Since the neat division into work and leisure has disappeared and we feel the vital urge to remain connected to the network 24/7, it is as important for us to live in the city as it is inevitable for us to work in it. Everything piles into the centre, the more the better. This spells a new desire for an unprecedented degree of urban intensification.
Productivity advantages of concentration, as hinted at above, are referred to as agglomeration economies. There are two kinds: direct economic benefits via firm-to-firm cooperation and indirect benefits of urban facility sharing. Agglomeration economies thus include transport efficiencies, wider and more diverse amenity sharing, the benefit of large labour pools enlarging the skill-base for companies, larger service markets with more variety of specialized services (long tails), increased innovation potential due to knowledge and technology spill-overs within and between industries, and most importantly cooperation between complementary firms/activities allowing for specialized knowledge industry hubs.
The demand for networking, knowledge exchange and ramifying cooperation is so great that urban concentration, business travel and internet-based telecommunication increased simultaneously. Urban concentration and the intensification of densely networked patterns of communication and collaboration in knowledge economy hubs posit new vital tasks for architecture and urban design. Urban university campuses, corporate campuses, start-up incubators, co-working spaces cluster and network in ways which are hard to anticipate. Deep office landscapes that stretch across multiple levels, connected via atria and connected across buildings via bridges are an expression of this insatiable neeed for communicative connectivity.
This increasingly complex and dynamic processes of social interaction within advanced contemporary knowledge economies can no longer be anticipated via schedules of accommodation nor evaluated via the scrutiny of plan lay-outs. The only hope for the architectural design profession to regain its competency, i.e. a measure of anticipatory control over the social performance of buildings, is via agent-based occupancy and life-process simulations. To recuperate the architect’s competency on the new level of complexity and dynamism of contemporary social processes it is not enough to rely on the crowd simulations developed so far by fire and traffic engineers. In contrast to engineers, architects must reckon with architecture’s users not merely as physical bodies but as perceptually orienting, socialized actors who navigate a space encoded with social meanings. Accordingly the designer must start to work explicitly as much on the symbolic inscription of action protocols as on the physical accommodation of activities.
The functions of architecture are now parametrically variable event scenarios. Their accommodation requires the design and application of a system of signification, and their testing requires agent-based life-process modeling with socially differentiated agent populations that read their behavioral options out of the information-rich environments designed in accordance with a semiological code. The development of this new, enhanced level of competency is the aim of the author’s design research programme which he termed ‘agent-based parametric semiology’.
Architectural Semiology Empowered by Agent-based Simulations
The research programme of architectural semiology aims to analyse the active semiological codes that already operate within the built environment via spontaneous semiosis. There is also a design ambition to upgrade the communicative power of the built environment, project by project, via the design of information-rich systems of signification that aid navigation via way finding systems and aid interaction via the differentiation and nuanced spatio-visual characterisation of interaction offerings. (The success of such an endeavour obviously depends on the user uptake.) This project of a systematic, semiologically informed design in large, complex environments that are to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration. Examples might be the design of a university or corporate campus, where life is communication intensive, where orientation and inter-awareness is non-trivial, and where the value of knowledge transfers and collaborations puts a premium on ramifying social participation. The question arises how the communicative performance of large, complex designed environments might be evaluated. The research project ‘Agent-based Parametric Semiology’ builds, investigates and applies a new form of crowd or occupancy modelling as an answer to this question.
The general underlying aim is to move architectural design practice beyond its current craft-like, intuitive/tacit competencies towards explicit, scientifically accountable and reproducible competencies. While every architect has an intuitive grasp of the normative ineraction protocols that attach to the various designated areas that the design brief indicates and usually knows enough about the expected and desired user occupancy patterns, such intuitions cannot give a secure guidance on the relative social performance of alternative designs for large, complex corporate environments. Intuition must here be substituted by occupancy simulations that can process thousands of agents interacting across an environment of hundreds of spaces. When quantitative comparisons and optimization is aimed at, then intuition fails already in much smaller, simpler settings.
The simulation methodology developed under the research agenda ‘Agent-based Parametric Semiology’ is conceived as a generalisation and corresponding upgrade of the kind of crowd simulations currently offered by traffic and engineering consultants concerned with evacuation, circulatory throughput, the identification of bottlenecks and zones of congestion etc. These crowd simulations conducted by engineers are operating at the border between architecture and engineering. The demarcation criterion the author has proposed elsewhere suggests that architecture is in charge of the built environment’s social functionality while our collaborating engineering consultants are concerned with the subsidiary technical functionality of the built environment, solving the technical problems posed by the spatial solutions architects offer to facilitate the social functionality desires of clients and their end users. The problem of circulatory optimization is on the edge between the two disciplines. Mere physical throughput which treats users as physical bodies and simulates crowds like a physical fluid might be regarded as an engineering question. The demarcation criterion between engineering and architecture can be rephrased in terms of how each respective discipline conceives of the end users its design considerations cater for. The engineering disciplines are concerned with users only as physical and physiological bodies of a certain size, weight, and with certain physiological requirements in terms of temperature, air change and lux levels. In contrast architectural design considerations are concerned with socialized actors who orient within a semantically coded environment and read the designed spaces as communications. The core competency of architecture is the ordering of social processes via designed environments with a differentiated panoply of designated zones, dedicated to different social situations, activities and interaction scenarios, each with its own eligibility conditions and participation protocols. Accordingly, the simulations that must be developed to get a handle on this ordering contribution of the designed environments and their facilitation of various desired social interaction scenarios will have to be quite a bit more elaborate than the current crowd models testing circulation processes.
The most obvious difference is the expansion of the menu of action types that must be considered, beyond walking and standing: this includes not only various social-communicative types of walking or standing like pacing, strolling, lingering, or more specifically window shopping etc. Further activities or interaction situations to be considered, for instance within the domain of office life, are concentrated work, teamwork, formal meeting, formal presentation, greeting, casual chat, more in-depth socialising etc.
The second major difference of these architectural simulations is that the agent population should no longer be homogenous. Rather it should be socially differentiated. For instance within the domain of corporate office life, the agent model should distinguish various types of agents, in accordance with their organisational role, rank, departmental or team affiliation, or whether they are staff, collaborating consultants or clients etc. Because of this expansion of action types, including multi-user interaction types, and because of the differentiation of the agent population into various social types and roles, the author proposed to talk about life-process simulations rather than crowd simulations.
The third significant difference of architectural life-process simulations in comparison to the engineer’s crowd simulation is the location and designation dependency of the agents’ behaviours. Within the architect’s perspective, in accordance with his responsibility and core competency, the designed environments are always semantically encoded and zoned in the sense of specifically designated areas and subareas. The general formula of order – a place for everything and everything in its place – applies also here, in the case of the spatial ordering social processes. For the agents this implies that they have a whole stack of behavioural rule sets and depending on where they are or which threshold they cross, a different rule set is activated and applies. When various actors enter the same designated zone or space, they should be able to infer the designation from the relative position of the space in the overall matrix of spaces as well as from morphological clues. They thus recognize the kind of social situation possible here and all participants are, as it were, brought onto the same page, with aligned expectations, dispositions and rule sets. Due to the semiological inscription of designations and behavioural rules, these agent-based models might also be termed semiological models or simulations. Only within such a spatially differentiated and semiologically encoded order can specific social purposes be readily accomplished.
This insight opens the design research perspective of enhancing the information-richness of the environment via the design of a semiological system as spatio-visual language with increased expressive power that can empower the navigation and orientation of agents for the benefit of both individuals and the overall productivity of the cooperative process. This thus implies a fourth enhancement, namely the elaboration of an agent system with information empowered, language competent agents.
The fifth aspect that distinguishes these architectural-semiological models from the circulatory crowd models is the following: Congenial with contemporary cultural conditions the underlying presumption of these models is that agents are largely self-directed, rather than running on pre-scheduled tracks, and do self-select their actions and which interactions they participate in. These selections are guided by multi-dimensional, dynamic utility functions that can utilise contingent opportunities that are encountered within the environment these agents browse through. These utility functions are implemented in the decision processes that control the agents’ actions on the basis of internal states due to prior actions and environmental offerings perceived. Within the preferred societal domain investigated by this research project – the domain of corporate working life – the increasingly widespread use of non-territorialised, activity based office landscapes is most congenial to the assumptions and capacities of the life-process simulations promoted here. It is under these rather fluid conditions that the necessity of agent-based simulations becomes most compelling, as an intuitive grasp of the effects of various possible configurations becomes quite obviously impossible. Without simulations the architect is here condemned to ignorance and thus incompetence, and the more so, the more complex the overall collaboration process is.
This leads us to the sixth significant difference, namely that the focus shifts from the aggregation of parallel individual actions to the simulation of social interactions. This extension of the simulation scope from individual action to social interaction is to some extent implied in all or most architectural spaces, and all function types. However, it is most expressed in the case of corporate space working spaces, as well as in university life or in the case of conferences etc. This feature is less expressed in institutions like museums, in retail environments or in residential “communities” where individual lives and actions are running in parallel rather than integrate into complex, dynamic social scenarios. It is the interesting challenge of these latter social scenarios, where global interaction patterns must be generated from individual, rule-based interactions that has led the author to focus the research project on the domain of working life, an inherently collaborative life-process proceeding via integrated, synergetic lives. In contrast to circulation processes which are effectively zero-sum competitive processes, the processes of facilitating encounter and communication density are essentially non-zero-sum interaction processes.
The seventh important differentiating aspect of this new methodology of generalized life-process simulations is the fact that there can be no single generic agent model that could be transferred from project to project. In contrast to current crowd models concerned with mere circulation, life-process models need to be tailor made for each specific domain of life, for each type of institution, and at least heavily adapted and customized for each specific client within a given domain of life, especially with respect to corporate work life. The model should attempt, as much as possible with respect to available information, to model the actual user group, its differentiation into status groups, roles, even its established network relations as might be retrieved via questionnaires or various electronic communication records. This customisation of the agent model serves to enhance the veracity of the simulation, as well as the information richness of the simulation results and the related ability of the methodology to home in on particular success criteria that might involve interaction facilitation between particular status groups, roles or even the empowerment and accessibility of important individuals.
Here is the summary list of innovations that the research group is working on and that must be delivered by a generalized and semiologically informed life-process modelling:
- expansion of action/behaviour repertoire
- differentiation of agent population
- designation dependency of behaviours
- information empowered, semiology competent agents
- agent decisions via dynamic utility functions
- focus on social interactions and event scenarios
- domain tailoring and client customization
All these differentiating features imply challenges and necessary complications, or positively phrased, necessary sophistications for this much more ambitious modelling and simulation effort.
The new simulation capacity we are developing is analytic in character. It comparatively appraises various design proposals with respect to the relevant, desired encounter frequencies (intra-departmental, inter-departmental, within and across disciplines as well as within and across hierarchical levels) and how the ration by which encounters are being converted into various types of communicative exchanges, dependent on the location of these encounters and the ready availability of spatial features and props that support such conversions. However, this new simulation capacity by itself does not generate the design options it tests. The functional efficacy of the overall methodology of performance optimisation depends as much on the generative expansion of the solution space as it depends on the effectiveness and veracity of the simulation and testing procedure. This is where the question of the underlying generative heuristics of the solution search comes in.
This is the point where we must reflect upon the repertoire of elements (primitives) and compositional moves (rules of combination and manipulation), as well as the values and heuristic criteria of selection, the design discipline brings to the task of generating design options (that might then be put to the test). Even if we want to advance the methodology to become an automated evolutionary optimisation algorithm that iterates and integrates generate and test cycles, the question of the underlying constitution of the generative processes remain to be answered. The question might best be posed as follows: In which style should we design the population of design options?
Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, all design efforts operate within the constraints of a presupposed repertoire of elements and design moves, as well as with a set of evaluative selection criteria. The crystallisation of an explicitly named and characterized/canonized style can only empower the discipline and its protagonists. It invites critical reflection and the potential expansion of the repertoire and a revision of the value systems underlying selections and design decisions during the design process. The concept of style in architecture and design is thus an indispensable orienting category without which discursive self-reflection and self-steering within architecture is stunted.
The Power of Parametricism and Tectonism
This transformation from a fordist mass society to a post-fordist network society finds its congenial reflection in the paradigm shift from modernism, via postmodernism and deconstructivism, to parametricism, the currently most promising style in architecture. Parametricism is a well-established, widely circulating label for a broad movement in architecture that has gathered pace and influence since the mid 1990s. The term was first coined by the author in 2007. Parametricism can be defined as a style where all elements of an architectural composition are parametrically malleable in the pursuit of internal variation and correlation as well as external adaptation. This is achieved via scripts and parametric models that integrate malleable parts into networks of interdependencies. Tectonism is the latest stage of parametricism. It’s essential innovation is the utilisation of generative algorithms that integrate various form-finding techniques based on engineering logics, including structural optimisation, environmental engineering logics, as well as new robotic fabrication logics.
Under contemporary conditions of societal complexity, differentiation and dynamism, only parametricism, and in particular tectonism, can fulfil the necessary task and societal function of architecture and the design disciplines, namely to frame and thereby order, articulate and facilitate the rich variety of simultaneous coordinated social communication scenarios. Design frames social interaction. This was always so, and without an articulate built environment and world of artefacts (including dress systems), no ordered societal process can function. This is a human universal that all human cultures have to deliver. The built environment is a societal information process and ordering text. The contemporary versions of this text must be formulated in the language of tectonism. All older languages lack the requisite variety and expressive power and thereby keep urban humanity’s progress below its potential, relative to an unleashed super-eloquent, empowering parametric-tectonic urban and architectural environment.
The style of Parametricism, and especially its latest instantiation via the subsidiary style Tectonism, delivered an unprecedented expansion of the designer’s repertoire as well as a massive expansion of the designer’s generative productivity via the employment of generative algorithms. In principle every property of every element or complex is subject to parametric variation. It uses scripting to lawfully differentiate and correlate all elements and subsystems of a design. The goal is to intensify the internal interdependencieswithin an architectural design as well as the external affiliations and continuities within complex, urban contexts. Parametricism offers a new, complex order via the principles of differentiation and correlation. The key technique for handling this variability is the scripting of functions that establish associations between the properties of the various elements.
The designer can always increase the coherence and intricacy of his/her design by inventing further variables (degrees of freedom) for the compositions’ primitive components. There is always scope for the further differentiation of the arrays or subsystems that are made up by the elemental primitives. This differentiation can be increased with respect to the number of variables at play, with respect to the range of differences it encompasses and with respect to the fineness and differential rhythm of its gradients. There is always further scope for the correlation of the various subsystems at play in the multi-system set up. Ultimately every subsystem will be in a relation of mutual dependency with every other subsystem, directly or indirectly. The number of aspects or properties of each subsystem that are involved in the network of correlation might be increased with each design step. Further there is always the possibility (and often the necessity) to add further subsystems or layers to the (ever more complex and intricate) composition. Also: it is always possible to identify further aspects or features of the (principally unlimited) urban context that might become an occasion for the design to register and respond to. Thus the context sensitivity of the design can be increased with every design step. Thus the heuristics of parametricism direct a trajectory of design intensification that is in principle an infinite task and trajectory. There is always a further possibility pushing up the intensity, coherence, intricacy, and beauty of the design. As the network of relations tightens, each further step becomes more elaborate, more involved as all the prior subsystems and their trajectories of differentiation should ideally be taken into account. Arbitrary additions show up conspicuously as alien disruption of the intricate order elaborated so far. Each additional element or subsystem that enters the composition at a late, highly evolved stage challenges the ingenuity of the designer, and more so the more the design advances. The complex, highly evolved design assumes more and more the awesome air of necessity or quasi-nature. However, the design remains open-ended. There can be no closure.
Furthermore, whole new compositional moves have been introduced, like layering, overlap, interpenetration, the blurring of boundaries, gradients (smooth transformations), morphing, compositional interdependency networks (parametric models) etc. All these new versatile design moves allow the designers to build up relevant organisational complexity of the kind required by contemporary social systems, as well as enabling the designers to articulate and visually communicate these organisational complexities in ways that maintain legibility in the face of this complexity. The solution space has not only been massively expanded so that the richness and diversity of designs options that can and have been generated within the paradigm and style of parametricism/tectonism far exceeds the richness/diversity of designs options of all prior styles put together, but the solution space also has a certain character and coherence comparable to the endless forms of nature. Further, the particular characteristic features of parmetricism are congenial to the characteristics of the spatio-morphological requirements and design tasks posed by the most advanced arenas of contemporary knowledge-based society.
Tectonism made significant advances over prior versions of parametricism. While the overarching general design agenda remains parametricism’s pursuit of adaptive differentiation, tectonism pursues these with a much richer set of parametric drivers and constraints than earlier versions of parametricism. These drivers originate in sophisticated computationally empowered engineering logics that are now available to architects at early design stages via the structural form-finding tools mentioned above.
As a substyle of parametricism, tectonism partakes in the superior social functionality of parametricism with respect to the purposes and challenges posed by our fluid contemporary societal conditions. This superiority resides in the adaptive versatility of parametricism with respect to the complex programmatic mixes that need to be intricately woven into complex urban sites. This implies complex, irregular forms, interpenetrating spaces, multiple simultaneous contextual affiliations and gradual spatial transformations etc. This is what we might call spatial topology in the service of social topology.
Parametricsim has the formal repertoires to shape and fit buildings so as to meet these complex requirements in ways that can also maintain legibility in the face of these unprecedented complexities. Tectonism can do all this and more: It can achieve all this while simultaneously meeting structural and environmental optimisation criteria. The morphological versatility and thus expressive potency of tectonism exceeds much of what had been generated within older versions of parametricism and therefore offers a much enhanced palette of articulation for the semiological project.
Furthermore, the morphologies that result from this pursuit gain – as if by serendipitous coincidence – additional visual legibility advantages due to the increased rigour and distinctness of the various rule-based formation processes. It is the very rigor of the engineering logics that ruthlessly impose their selection criteria at every point across the overall form and that thus not only sponsor a formal unity across the project but also insure that the morphological variations are rule-based and thus predictable despite their complexity. The increased number of specific laws of formation and their sensitivity to contextual and programmatic input conditions increases the inference potential and thus the information content of the designed environments.
The style, paradigm and methodology of tectonism thereby offers a massive expansion, and notwithstanding, simultaneously a strategic heuristic limitation, of the search space within which solutions can be generated and then tested by the life processing simulations introduced above. Together these advances promise a momentous increase in the power of architecture to advance the productivity and more generally the progress of society.
The expectation that parametricism/tectonism achieves hegemony as global epoch style for the 21st Century has not materialized but remains on the agenda as all other competing styles are mere retro-styles and parametricism/tectonism is the only style able to fully exploit the contemporary computational power. The hegemony of parametricism/tectonism will finally deliver for the 21st Century the total remake of the physiognomy of the global built environment that modernism had delivered for the 20th Century.
References:
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Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems, Stanford University Press
Murray, Robin, Fordism and Postfordism, in: Stuart Hall & Martin Jacques, New Times, London 1989
Parsons, T. (1953). Toward a General Theory of Action, Havard University Press
Schumacher, P. (2009). Parametricism – A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design. In
N.Leach & H.Castle (Eds.) AD Architectural Design – Digital Cities, Vol 79, No 4, July/August 2009
Schumacher, P. (2010). The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.1: A New Framework for Architecture, Wiley
Schumacher, P. (2012). The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Vol.2: A New Agenda for Architecture, Wiley
Schumacher, P. (2016). Advancing Social Functionality via Agent Based Parametric Semiology Published in: AD Parametricism 2.0 – Rethinking Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century, Editor: H. Castle, Guest-edited by Patrik Schumacher, AD Profile #240, March/April 2016
Schumacher, P. (2023). Tectonism – Architecture for the Twenty-First Century, Images Publishing – The arts Bridge, Melbourne