Perpetual Design — DAO | Algorithmic & Timber Architecture

Perpetual Design

Perspective

2016

We need to elongate our design cycle and this requires a commitment to layers of maintained organization that can be passed on to subsequent generations.

When contemplating our design ability as a species, it is informative to measure the length of time we allocate to a design solution. A residential project will typically take a month to a few years to outline, larger public projects can take years to decades, and in some more unique instances we have managed to commit over a century to a project. However, despite these lengthy commitments, they are immeasurably short relative to a persistently evolving plant that has developed for millennia. Our buildings do not grow, are not edible, and do not erect themselves. If we were to leave the planet unattended, our buildings would vanish under the propagation of photosynthesizing construction.

Plant qualities are not undesirable in architecture, they just seem unreasonable as a goal given our current attention span. To achieve a deeper, more meaningful result, we need to elongate our design cycle and this requires a commitment to layers of maintained organization that can be passed on to subsequent generations. The implications of updating one variable in the design must be apparent to the whole. This requires both a sophisticated comprehension and representation of coordination so that the intelligence of the design does not succumb to short-term goals. At first, such a project would seem ordinary as we would begin the process much like any other design but eventually as it evolved, the focused effort would cultivate a design that appeared unfamiliar. Beyond that it would become unmatchable without a similar investment of time.

Danielson Architecture Office

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