Ordering the Aesthetic (A+) in Architecture: Advancing a Theory of Modular Computation

Aesthetic content is perhaps one of the least understood, and discussed, concepts in architecture. Our purpose here is to demonstrate the efficacy of a computing environment created for the purpose of instantiating aesthetic content as a context for ideation in the architectural design process. A four-part approach is taken: We first abstract, from historical sources, a definition of “aesthetic sensitivity” founded in the evolutionary structure of psychological adaptations of the human mind. This definition asserts an essential human need for positive (A+) aesthetic environmental content. Next, similarly, from historical resources, we form a compendium of aesthetic concepts, attributes kinetically associated with aesthetic sensitivity, that can be reasoned with to describe formal properties of real world objects. We limit our object field to an architectural context. Thirdly, the analyses which derive aesthetic concepts are formalized as generative processes. Lastly, these processes are converted into algorithms, to interpret and subsequently instantiate aesthetic concepts as formal geometrical productions. For this purpose, we demonstrate a software tool that generates modular constructs in 3-space, which reflect the aesthetic influence of its algorithms (in contrast to the aesthetics of the formally generated object per se).