448 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
is that these new techniques are ultimately concerned primarily with the production
of a new generation of architectural forms. A brief glance at the exquisitely beautiful
images selected at the two editions of Architectural Design devoted to morphogenesis
would seem to confirm this suspicion. It as though the images of natural morpho-
genetic processes have been selected largely on the basis of aesthetic criteria. This
same suspicion also comes to haunt the architectural forms produced in the name
of morphogenesis. In other words, the discourse of performativity and form-finding
often appears as little more than a masquerade for the generation of new forms,
based on proliferating systems or mutating fields, that can easily be generated with
the use of new digital tools.^13
Behind the morphogenetic concern for process and structure, then, there seems to
lurk a paradoxical concern for appearance and ornamentation. It is perhaps to nature
itself that we should turn for an example of how we might address this paradox. Greg
Lynn, in his defence of the use of ornament in architecture, cites the example of how
the surface patterning on animal skins – as with a zebra or a leopard, for example
- always corresponds in some sense to the armature of bones and muscles beneath,
so that the pattern will vary at points of performative intensity, as at hip or shoulder
joints: ‘Decoration... is not applied but is intrinsic to the shape and mathematics
of the surface, and in this way the ornament accentuates the formal qualities of the
surface; like the pattern of an animal that intricately responds to the shape and
structure of an animal's form.’^14 Lynn articulates this in terms of the corrugations or
corduroy-like patterning developed in his use of CNC milling machines. These surface
patternings, for Lynn, should always bear some relation to structural concerns.
In the context of debates about ornamentation, Lynn would always hold that
ornamentation must in some sense ‘invite’ structuration and vice versa. Inevitably
this would imply an understanding of ornament beyond the simple post-Ruskinian
sense of the term as applied decoration. Indeed, we should go back to a more complex
understanding of ornament, as was articulated by Leon Battista Alberti. ‘In the whole
art of building,’ he notes, ‘the column is the principle ornament without any doubt.’^15
Yet, for Alberti, the column was always to be seen as a structural element – a part of
a wall: ‘A row of columns is nothing other than a wall that has been pierced in several
places by openings.’^16 From this we can detect that, for Alberti at least, ornament is
always structural, and structure always ornamental.^17
Hence there is something to be said for approaching the whole question of mor-
phogenesis in a more dialectical manner. For we should recognise that performance
and appearance, like aesthetics and function, or ornament and structure, should
ultimately be linked. The one presupposes and anticipates the other. The one bears
the imprint of the other; the one compliments the other. Beauty must never be
ignored.^18
The ideal way, then, in which to read the designs being produced today under
the aegis of the morphogenesis – these performance-based designs whose beauty is
somehow never fully acknowledged by their designers – is to recognise performance
within appearance, but so too appearance within performance; the aesthetic within
the functional, but so too the functional within the aesthetic; the structural within
the ornamental, but so too the ornamental within the structural.
Perhaps the real contribution of this new paradigmatic shift in architecture is not