Damien Mikolajczyk

Former student of Nikos Salingaros

Interests:  Complexity in architecture, new computer design tools

Damien MIKOLAJCZYK // Current work 061024 

The role of the new sciences in the architectural conception.

Architects are claiming to be inspired by the surrounding world… This world changed a lot during the last century, particularly sciences and techniques. Did it influence the architect? Certainly.

Techniques were radically improved; sciences were developed, re-developed; some new were even created. It seems obvious to list the changes new techniques provoked in the production of the architectural material, but how can the contemporary architect take advantage of such steps in the sciences, and incorporate them not in his production, but in his conception? That’s the purpose of my work.

Starting from ideas such as cellular automata, auto-organization, fractality, chaos theory, genetics, emergent and complex adaptative systems, the objective is to develop a simple computer tool which could be used to approximate the interactions between entities in a city, to observe the evolution of the system, and extract information such as recurrent spatial patterns in the city. This information is then used to develop better project at both urban and architectural scales, not taking the result of the program as a physical base for the plan, but learning from the evolution of the model and of its rules.

It is first about designing a program which could from basic and simple rules represent, develop and organize a certain level of complexity, and then about using that information into realistic projects, that are both combining the Cartesian observations of the program and the design choices of the architect.