BlackBox Studio
The BlackBox Studio is a team of architects, design professionals, and other unique experts whose mission is to engage in all stages of the design process across all service disciplines, leveraging the power of advanced computational design tools and methods to expose and explore new frontiers of conceptual thought and innovative form/space/place-making in the work of the SOM Chicago design studios and service disciplines.
BlackBox is an applied research resource. The group’s parametric modeling and scripting expertise is focused primarily on two broad areas of interest: the search for the “optimal” (goal-oriented) and the search for the “novel” (explorational).
In the search for the optimal, wide-ranging performance criteria may be used to define goals that drive fitness functions embedded in form-finding algorithms. These algorithms link design performance to building form to generate vast populations of “informed” building design concepts. Performance may be defined, for example, according to programmatic requirements, structural efficiency, energy consumption, daylighting quality, constructability, economic feasibility, contextual social impact, aesthetic sensibility, or by any other possible performative criteria that is related to the evaluation and decision-making of an architectural design process.
In the search for the novel, the power of computation is harnessed to effectively explore the infinity of possible design solutions and to search out pockets of that design space that yield novel ideas which might not have been found through more traditional manual methodologies. The disposition of this trajectory is open-ended, simply looking to answer the question, “What’s out there that we have not encountered before and how do we find it?” Also included in this area of interest are explorations related to the development of generative algorithms and parametric models, in which designers can author frameworks of rules that enable creative sandboxing and the testing of “what if” scenarios in very quick succession.
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