Digital Design

As one of the first architecture firms in the world to recognize the transformative power of computation and its relevance to the practice of architecture, SOM defined the very nature of the concept of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the 1970s and 80s with the development of AES, a revolutionary software platform that anticipated the widespread adoption of such technology within the profession by more than two decades.

Twenty years later, computers have essentially supplanted most of the manual traditions of practice—and so SOM has turned its interest in the power of the computational paradigm to the more abstract and creative processes of design and the manifestation of performative intelligence in the built environment. Through ongoing research into the parametric relationships between architectural forms and the large numbers of multi-disciplinary forces that interact with those forms, SOM is actively developing new collaborative, cross-disciplinary processes that enable the design of highly sophisticated and performative architectural and urban form.

In addition to the more rational explorations of performative form-making, digital design initiatives at SOM are also exploring the power of computation as a creatively generative design tool. Algorithmic and rules-based design processes leverage custom-written scripts and computer programs to generate endless variations of formal studies in rapid succession, allowing designers to quickly study the effects of associating various aspects of form to various input criteria in layers of explicitly defined relationships. Finally, this common denominator of numbers and computer code is enabling new types of collaborative communication between SOM architects, engineers, and outside disciplines. Expertise from such disparate worlds as computer science, biology, chemistry, digital art, economics, and social science are now finding highly relevant seats at the SOM design table, resulting in algorithmic design processes that take the design teams into previously inaccessible regions of the architectural design space.