As forests are populated by trees that have grown from seeds to synchronize with their precise location, we can populate a city by articulating different architectural seeds.
Nature relies on DNA as a fundamental tool to store critical rules of construction and organize methods to permit variation for tailored results. As a result, depending on your genealogy, social pressures, climatic experiences, etc. your body could be tuned to manage a densely populated arid setting more effectively than a wild, unpopulated temperate region – without neglecting the fundamental rules to include one brain, one heart, and a pair of lungs. For obvious reasons, the risk of inhaling sand cannot justify the deletion of an oral apparatus necessary to ingest food. Due to this delineation of critical rules and flexible rules, we can evolve a resiliency for a specific habitation over many generations without dismantling our entire cellular logic.
Architecture on the other hand has become exponentially more complicated as the volume of information we can assess exponentially grows. Now, the resolution of each project depends on a greater number professionals who are expected to coordinate libraries of information. Each new project is also ambitiously unique meaning previous strategies are constantly re-researched and re-developed.
If we instead start to compile architectural DNA as a semi-flexible logic, we can build-in a superior design intelligence and reuse it to propagate the environmental, social and technological benefits inherent within. This strategy is now possible with parametric tools. Foundational criteria from the Living Building Challenge or the Building Code can be established as critical rules that are automatically followed and subsequently set aside. We can then make every project unique as we focus on a flexible response to the variation in local topography, economy, program, client, etc.
As forests are populated by trees that have grown from seeds to synchronize with their precise location, we can populate a city by articulating different architectural seeds. Just as forest boundaries can be demarcated, architectural flora will naturally develop their own ideal regions and mark an evolution in our performance as designers.