Parametric In architecture

Author : Ashish Singh

Designing with environment or designing environment with the needs, is what confuses most of the urban planners and architects in today’s time and eventually leads to major complications. Design is a long process, which starts with intuition and ultimately results in expression. During the whole process there are the two most vulnerable situations, where one has to judge the intuition, its rationality and the existence the expression will have in the environment
Throughout life one thing which is constant is evolution. So today after evolving for centuries we have come to the age of post modernism, where parametric design is the new system with which we are bringing all the new PEB’s (pre engineered building) and other kind of structures in the world. The pace of evolution is so fast that we hardly consciously think about the existential value of these structures in the environment. It would surely be irrational to assume that any architect would change the history. But surely every architect, for better or worse, tempers the cultural fabric of the society they work in. Anyone who builds makes an impact on nature, society and the quality of life offered by the environment.
With these parametric designs system, today we can erect any desired structure with just a random sketch of the vision in the head and see it coming alive in front of you, while there are others who still cannot connect with your vision. Things have got lot easier in terms of execution and understanding the design workability, it surely is an achievement in the field of architecture and urban planning, and it opens up a lot of opportunities to understand the vision and could help us being realistic to the approach. But in the pace with mercantilism and greed of the fast growing generation, we have got totally distracted from the actual needs of the humane conditions. In the pace of evolution, we have totally forgotten the existence of the art and culture with which the people are able to relate to their heritage and selves, and it comes totally invalid to convert humane habitat in something which is least expressive and does not give a sense of belonging to the human who’s going to be in that volume.

Parametric has surely allowed us to expand our visions and think more clearly with the practicality of the designs, but at the same time it gives us great responsibility how we utilize this tool of the generation with which we could express things in a more soluble way. In this age of architecture we should be more conscious to designing things more soluble with environment and bringing such structures in the world, which would have the sense of timelessness. Talking alone about the sustainability and leaving the sense of aesthetics and belonging to the social structures and making steel buildings and glass facades would only result in miserable history for the coming days. The major responsibility is to define the beauty of present and prove the evolution better.