Parametric analysis of existing-building geometry: Generative, dissective, and morphological approaches

This project contributes to architectural epistemology – that is, the study of ways in which architectural knowledge may be created, organized, and disseminated. Within that context, the project addresses digitally modeling existing buildings for the purposes of conducting geometrically-based analysis. The project focuses on parametric analysis, defined here as a way of examining and foregrounding latent formal conditions within digital models of existing buildings. Parametric analysis encompasses three approaches: generative, dissective, and morphological, which seek, respectively, to explain, uncover, or transform inherent logics, hidden geometries, and dynamic morphologies, in ways that may inform critical understandings of existing buildings. While the approaches differ in their assumptions and methods, they are unified in using parametric modeling as an analytical tool to gain insights beyond that which is available through geometrically accurate representation of built form. A set of buildings designed by the architect Le Corbusier is considered here as a test case.