Abstract

The written production of architecture, the graphical language, the knowledge learning are all complex phenomena being linked to codification and decoding processes of an enormous amount of signs coming from the external world as well as internal world of each individual. It is thought that the fascination of the image may come from the complex structuring of the system of signs and their referent. The programs of visualization have virtually solved the problem of space knowledge showing it mathematically, through algorithms and numeric sequences that provide the spectator with rapid successions of vision points and, obviously, the simultaneity of the images corresponding to different functional parts of the architectonic volume. The Son-O-House by Spuybroek and Event and Delivery Centre of BMW by Coop Himmelb(l)au makes use of mathematic sequences in order to produce uninterrupted and continuous surfaces; the volumes are not only formally and spatially integrated but also technologically thanks to electronically stimulated sound algorithms. The designer, indeed, concentrated on the formal possibilities offered by the continuous offers generated by mathematical algorithms. Fluid forms, curves and complex geometries are produced (in particular topological geometries) being materialized in three dimensions by file-to-factory technologies (stereolitography, rapid prototyping, and other production tools based on numerical control). The reproducibility, therefore, depends on an algorithm re-proposing different but similar forms, of a non-standard series which have a common condition: the similar forms are recognizable because they descend from a unique algorithmic matrix. The digital culture meets the problem of the recognizability of forms by referring to the normative aspects of similarity and not to the visual aspects with which you proceed to the identification of equal forms in the fordist process (standard).