Algorithm and Geometry

Just until recently, the notion of space remained Cartesian. The determinant shift from high modernism to today’s notion of architecture is the replacement of the background with fixed ordinates and coordinates by a new notion of space and matter acting as a single entity. This turning point has modified architectural thoughts and designs and redefined architecture as a material fact.
The Cartesian paradigm has lost its influence on current architectural philosophy and the existence of its universal space is redefined as a material field of omnipresent difference. The universe, now a matter field, replaces the unchanging essences of a fixed field with interactive entities. Architecture incorporates speeds rather than movements and therefore becomes “as much matter and structure as it is atmosphere and effects.” (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Resier + Umemoto, p.23)
Architecture involves assemblages of multiple models, surfaces, and materials, and therefore not continuous anymore but rather composed of several organizational models operating at different scales. Architecture must perform with a series of techniques in order to provide the right balance between material and force.
The notion of hierarchy in the modernist projects is currently used in an innovative way such that the order is not just constrained to the scale or to what lies above or below it. In fact, instead of processing in a top-down order from the general scheme to the specific detail, the new concept of hierarchy allows the particular to influence the universal and reciprocally. Indeed, inventive architectural organizations and effects emerge out of entities or wholes, which cannot be reduced to their parts, and become readable not as elements to a whole but as whole-whole relationships.
Typology is significant in the material practice and allows for a wide variety of architectural organization. When selecting a specific typology, a correlation between a rough typology and a practical or structural criteria is possible. Typology is therefore not just used as a mean of classification at the end of a process but also used in its rough state as a device during the design process. Typology is less a “codification” than it is the source for a method of controlled material expressions.
Geometry used to be thought by the modernist architect as an abstract regulator of the materials of construction and is now perceived as a notion that unites matter and material behaviors. In contrast to the prior concept of geometry as a regulator of the irrational or accidental state of matter, the latest theory “must be understood not as a supercession of measuring but as the interplay between intensive and extensive differences.” (Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Resier + Umemoto, p.74)


David Deutsch explains that quantum mechanics should not as a predictive tool but as an justification for how the world works. If we are to take quantum theory at its true value, we must come to the conclusion that our universe is “one of many in an ensemble of parallel universes” that physicists frequently call the “multiverse.” Deutsch believes that the photons in the two-slit experiment are prevented from falling on some parts of the film because they are being obstructed by invisible ''shadow'' photons from a parallel universe.
The “multiverse” version of quantum theory is one of the most developed theories od Deutsch along with theory of computation: the idea, developed by the mathematicians Alan Turing, Alonzo Church and others, that all material procedures can be simulated on a computer. Also essential is the theory of evolution and an “epistemology” (theory of knowledge) that takes science not as a human build but as an ever-improving diagram of the world.