Complex Modelling

This Special Issue of International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) Complex Modelling examines the future of the digital design model. It assembles five papers that examine the underlying infrastructure of advanced computational models, asking what methods need to be developed to be able to operate in an information-rich design environment.

Architectural practice has successfully matured the first generation of digital design technologies. With the development of Building Information Models (BIM) and shared classifications systems (Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)), we have established common protocols that allow for stronger interdisciplinary collaboration and the passing of information along the digital design chain. However, while these methods are successful in optimising existing building practice, it is clear that to support true innovation in the building industry and find new methods that can change the way we engage with our environment, our building practices and our materials, we need to reconsider the configuration of digital design practice.

Contemporary research culture is in the process of prototyping these methods. Across academia and in practice, we are witnessing a proliferation of research environments dedicated to understand and develop digital design methods. Here, advanced computation is understood as a central keystone in developing new methods by which we can design more intelligently and more informed. From the scale of the city, across structure and down to the composition of materials, the ability to integrate intelligent design systems that can analyse, process and transform design challenges how we understand our practice. New apertures are being built that transcend the boundaries of our practice and bridge to other fields and their embedded knowledge cultures. Fundamentally transdisciplinary, whether at the scale of environmental science, city planning, structural engineering, fabrication or material science, these new practices and their associated tools are expanding what it means to be an architecture in the future.

The aim of this Special Issue of IJAC is to present different perspectives into this new practice. By bringing together cases exploring integrated analysis, form finding, multiscale modelling, sensing and machine learning, we ask the following:

What is the nature of the information-rich model?

What methods can effectively be employed to intelligently parse information and inform design?

How can architecture expand its understanding of the model moving from the tradition of the singularity of geometric representation to the inherent plurality of the network information model?