Parametricism: Order or Chaos?

Abstract

Parametricism is defined as a groundbreaking discovery in today’s digital world. It claims to be the single style for avant-garde architecture, spreading its domains into architecture, planning, and allied design genres such as product design. While parametric architecture looks aesthetically dynamic, it doesn’t follow straight-line geometries which are deemed so important by architects such as Le Corbusier. As Corbusier very clearly says in his book The City of Tomorrow, it is the man who follows the straight path, while it is the donkey who meanders; his idea of “order” clearly suggests linear arrangements to the fractal level. Parametricism, on the other hand, lays it down as one of its ground rules that it abstains itself from the usage of linear geometry. It disregards linearity as rigid and considers it its sincere responsibility to break through it. With such strong emotions against Corbusier’s idea of “order”, how, then, does Parametricism justify order within itself? Or is there no inherent order which is followed by this new style that considers itself the next big movement in architecture after modernism? The route to finding an answer to this question lies in the Theory of Chaos. One of the things that the theory says is that chaos doesn’t mean a lack of order; apparent randomness, generated as a result of mathematical expressions with various parameters, only seems random because it has an inherent order which is too complex to be comprehended by the human mind at a single glance. Hence, cases were taken up and studies were done accordingly, leading to the finding that every aspect of parametric design derives its form by virtue of some running parameters, which are fed into computational software, thus generating the form which then falls under the parametric style of architecture; and that no aspect governing the design is arbitrary. Hence, it is proved that parametricism does have a sense of inherent order as is existent in chaos, which, though radically complex and principally contrary to the idea of order that Corbusier had, still holds valid on the grounds of the Theory of Chaos.