Digital Tinkering

The traditional boundaries of architecture have been greatly expanded by technological advancement in detecting, measuring and visualising the energy forces transforming our environment—forces that were largely invisible to the architect’s eye until two decades ago. Over the same period of time, the so-called ‘digital revolution’ brought to architects the tools to design buildings that are potentially capable of responding to these underlying forces with unprecedented precision and resolution. Interestingly, these new powerful tools came to fruition in the midst of an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions, giving architects the opportunity to play a central role in solving the energy challenge. Zero+ Yearbook presents selected projects by students from the Graduate School of Architecture at the Politecnico in Milan. Students were asked to design housing that goes beyond the building envelope to include systems of food, energy and waste (FEWs). Each site had an existing context—social, geological, ecological, urban, climatic, and political—which became the structuring element for the projects. The food, energy and waste systems, therefore, were intimately tied to the context—or “ecology”—of the site. Collectively, they explore the potential for computational design to construct a one-to-one relation between environmental forces, building form and energy performance.