Christoph Gengnagel – författare

This book reflects and expands on the current trend in the building industry to understand, simulate and ultimately design buildings by taking into consideration the interlinked elements and forces that act on them. Shifting away from the traditional focus, which was exclusively on building tasks, this approach presents new challenges in all areas of the industry, from material and structural to the urban scale. The book presents contributions including research papers and case studies, providing a comprehensive overview of the field as well as perspectives from related disciplines, such as computer science.

The chapter authors were invited speakers at the 7th Symposium “Impact: Design With All Senses”, which took place at the University of the Arts in Berlin in September 2019.

This book reflects and expands on current trends in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries as they respond to the unfolding climate and biodiversity crisis. Shifting away from the traditional focuses, which are narrowly centered on efficiency, this book presents a variety of approaches to move the AEC community from a linear, extractive paradigm to circular and regenerative one.

The book presents contributions including research papers and case studies, providing a comprehensive overview of the field as well as perspectives from related disciplines, such as computer science, biology and material science.

In this book, the authors describe the findings derived from interaction and cooperation between scientific actors employing diverse practices. They reflect on distinct prototyping concepts and examine the transformation of development culture in their fusion to hybrid approaches and solutions.

The products of tomorrow are going to be multifunctional, interactive systems – and already are to some degree today. Collaboration across multiple disciplines is the only way to grasp their complexity in design concepts. This underscores the importance of reconsidering the prototyping process for the development of these systems, particularly in transdisciplinary research teams.

“Rethinking Prototyping – new hybrid concepts for prototyping” was a transdisciplinary project that took up this challenge. The aim of this programmatic rethinking was to come up with a general concept of prototyping by combining innovative prototyping concepts, which had been researched and developed in three sub-projects: “Hybrid Prototyping” developed new prototyping approaches to validate and evaluate holistically developed systems with their services, infrastructure and business models. “Blended Prototyping” addressed a new technique whereby prototypes for user interfaces of software applications can be generated from hand drawings and immediately be tested. “Beyond Prototyping” examined the issue of the prototype in connection with algorithmically generated design for producing

This book publishes the peer-reviewed proceeding of the third Design Modeling Symposium Berlin . The conference constitutes a platform for dialogue on experimental practice and research within the field of computationally informed architectural design. More than 60 leading experts the computational processes within the field of computationally informed architectural design to develop a broader and less exotic building practice that bears more subtle but powerful traces of the complex tool set and approaches we have developed and studied over recent years. The outcome are new strategies for a reasonable and innovative implementation of digital potential in truly innovative and radical design guided by both responsibility towards processes and the consequences they initiate.

This book aims at finding some answers to the questions: What is the influence of humans in controlling CAD and how much is human in control of its surroundings? How far does our reach as humans really go? Do the complex algorithms that we use for city planning nowadays live up to their expectations and do they offer enough quality? How much data do we have and can we control? Are today’s inventions reversing the humanly controlled algorithms into a space where humans are controlled by the algorithms? Are processing power, robots for the digital environment and construction in particular not only there to rediscover what we already knew and know or do they really bring us further into the fields of constructing and architecture?

The chapter authors were invited speakers at the 6th Symposium "Design Modelling Symposium: Humanizing Digital Reality", which took place in  Ensa-Versailles, France from 16 - 20 September 2017.