Processing Nature

Modern dichotomies exacerbated human nature from non-human nature, what is made from what is born. But “artificial” (as opposite to “natural”) is just an abstraction of our mind. All is natural, and the notion of artificial is to be intended as “artificium”, a result of craftmanship. Nature is not the picturesque and inheritably good “grass-covered hills with cow” myth, but a complex system made of (mostly emergent) processes. Things in nature (and nature itself) are not intrinsically good. Neither living beings are in a static balance with their environment: on the contrary, shift and change are the usual, living beings are complex homeostatic systems that work far from equilibrium and only because of their intrinsic ability of being able to compute (process information) they can react and regulate the economy (interrelation) with the environment. Any kind of operation made in the environment is a process in the system. Therefore language and design (and so architecture) are processes. Whenever we design a project we operate an environmental differentiation in order to create specificity, we start and drive a process. Digital technologies are tools that enable us to understand the process, manage the huge amount of required data and, from design to fabrication, they help us in keeping the process open in order to achieve results that are more integral, heterogeneously continuous and closely related with our environment. We are processing nature. Processes involve a code and algorithms. Genetics is the field of science that aims to the study and understanding of the code that lies behind the physical appearance of things: the real concept of nature (as stated by A. N. Whitehead) is not in the substance of things but in the interrelations established among the various elements; this web of relations is the form (the logical structure) that shapes all things in nature, it is the code. Operating as architects under this concept requires a deep understanding of biology (starting from its very base, genetics) for its application in architecture through appropriate tools, processes and materials in order to define new and more sustainable relations between man and environment. Shapes in nature are the evolutionary, emergent result of complex simultaneous interactions of forces acting upon material systems, generating patterns in space and time organized in multi-level hierarchies of morphological complexity. Complex morphologies are thus an efficient response for the maintainement of a dynamic environmental economy. Digital tools give us the opportunity to cope with the high level of complexity of those morphological processes, simultaneously operating for multi-performative goals. Information management and processing is a crucial point, both in the analysis and modulation of environmental stimuli and in the interaction processes during lifetime, or in a different expression, to drive metabolic processes of growth and energy. Generative tools which rely on algorithms should be deeply integrated with environmental analysis and associative geometry tools, not only as post-design optimization but in order to develop and evolve multi-performative efficient design build more comprehensive environmental and behavioral models for architecture.