Parametric Architecture

Text: Bálint Botzheim

Luigi Moretti: Modell of a futball stadium, 1960

Luigi Moretti may have been the very first architect to use the expression „parametric architecture”. In his essays written in the 1940s he focussed on this topic. In his view, parametric architecture studies architecture as a system with the primary ambition to find the architectural components and dimensions which are independent of parametres. Patrik Schumacher argued that parametricism is going to evolve into the greatest style of the 21st century. Reading the brief definition phrased by Schumacher one may realize the need to use the new non-euclidean geometry which can be grasped by computers as well as coding as a parametric system generating geometric components that define the building. Parametricism sets the goal to act as the engine and organizing drive of post-Fordist society. It ambitions to create a complex spatial order with the help of coding in which the components of design and its sub-systems tend to grow differently and enter in an interplay with each other.