Greg Lynn: How calculus is changing architecture

http://www.ted.com Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

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[nikanj]

There may be a mathematical explanation for how bad his shirt is.

[locusSol]

Math! Architecture! Woot!!!

[tito1894]

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[onhauser]

1. King's Cross was not designed by Christopher Wren

2. Gothic architecture did not come after calculus. It began five centuries before in the 12th century. Calculus was introduced in the 17th century.

How can we believe this guy?

[ruornil]

@nikanj nice catch from "a beautiful mind" movie, but in the movie russel crowe used it referring to a tie and there also be a mathematicl explanation for how bad his tie is.

[troutssaver]

I don't want to troll this video but... you want to use rigid "logical" rules of calculus to design a human structure.. I would be more in favor of the Gehry's approach of evaluating the aproppiateness of a design using the human instruments: eyes-brain. At the end of the day Lynn will have to do it because he will have to choose the specific logical rule that he will apply to his design, so I can't see the point of having the restriction of the logical rules in the first place.

[arquiteuthis]

My first comment was not to champion Lynn, but to place the work done by him and his peers in context in regards to Modern through contemporary theory, and to speculate where that may take us next. As consumerism ruined Modernism, the benefits of digital design will soon be lost to fab-fags that fabricate any and every prototype they design because they can, rather than using the digital as a mitigation between synthetic environments and their connection to local ecologies and communities.

[arquiteuthis]

Modern architecture was inherently based on a revolution in construction, and has since been reduced to a "style" that "designers" refer to on HGTV and in magazines. A Wal-Mart is the epitome of the revolution Modern construction brought forth (see Corbusier's "Five points"), yet "modern" (note the lowercase 'm') lofts in bourgeois cities are high-priced real-estate when the historical precedents they are based on were post-World War II social housing projects for expatriates and refugees. 

[arquiteuthis]

Greg Lynn does not use his knowledge or penchant for calculus based architecture as a crutch for explaining the meaning of purpose of existence or to justify a fetish for "efficiency", but rather as a perspective for presenting an ornamental form of architecture, as ornamentation remained essentially non-existent in the 20th century Modern movement. As Modernism was inherently about a construction process, Lynn re-investigates process and craft through the use digital fabrication and software.

[Understandtheimage]

By mentioning a final trait in the style of contemporary life whose rationalistic character clearly betrays the influence of money Simmel writes"by and large one may characterizethe intellectual functions that are used at present in coping with the world and in regulating both individual and social relations as calculative functions.Their cognitive ideal is to conceive of the world as a huge arithmetical problem,to conceive events and the qualitative distinction of things as a system of numbers