click on image for slideshow (photos by Michael Hansmeyer)

What method, what system, does an architect use to design a building? How are programmatic needs and context – with their degrees of freedom and constraints – translated into architectural design?

Regardless of their complexity, the tasks and decisions involved can be formalized as an algorithm. As such, algorithms provide a framework for articulating and defining both input data and procedures. This formalization can promote structure and coherency, while systemically maintaining full traceability of all input. – Michael Hansmeyer

Michael Hansmeyer an Architect and programmer who uses algorithms to explore Architectural form. I love a  recent project Subdivided Columns in which he not only visualised but built a scale model of one of the columns he  programmed by Algorithm. They seem to kind of gothic alien organic aesthetic which I think is great. Somehow it reminds me of the apprentice pillar in Rosslyn Chapel and touches on something which Mandelbrot showed, that although beyond humans direct ability to design,extremely complex iterated patterns are innate in nature just waiting to be used.