‘Production industries for the engineering of cars, ships
and aircraft are geared to minimise tooling costs by creating
a range of standard models from mass-produced custom
components. On the other hand, construction industries for
the architecture of buildings aim to create one-off custom
designs, but with an economy based on the use of
standardised components. Of course, this is a simplistic
historical view. However, it aims to highlight the different
approaches of the two industry sectors. Both achieve a variety
of products while exploiting standardisation in different ways
to achieve efficiency. The advent of digital fabrication
techniques has made possible the concept of “mass
customisation”, which is blurring this distinction and thereby
allowing industries to learn from each other and also to
borrow technologies. But the core technology for the shift
resides in software engineering.
‘The success of a piece of software is about the match or
mismatch of assumptions between the software designer and
the users. We can say that we all learnt from the assumptions
made by the software developers of these other parametric systems for other industries. We learnt about what was
transferable to architecture and we learnt what additional
functionality would be required if the transition of parametric
design to architecture was to be successful. There are two
important characteristics of parametric design applied to
aircraft or ship design that are not present in terrestrial
architecture. The first is that concepts and configurations
change relatively slowly. Secondly, a single design, with some
minor variations, will be used for a production run of ten,
hundreds, or possibly thousands of instances. Therefore, there
is the time and resources to invest in the proper “genotype”
and ensure that this can support the anticipated variations in
the phenotypes. Contrast this with buildings where, in the
main, each one is unique. There is no time or need to develop
a highly adaptive genotype. There is only one instance so
there is no need for a genotype that can support variations in
the phenotype.