For the first time in my short life, I am starting to feel old. Not because I have physically aged all that much—my skin still has a great deal of elasticity—but because I cannot figure out Grasshopper. No, not the natural variety of grasshopper that jumps around the yard, but the generative modelling software by the same name.

Unable to design via generative algorithms, I am forced to rely on antiquarian inventions such as the sketchpad and pen, along with my primitive Homo sapien brain (there is also the marginally more advanced Autocad and unadulterated Rhino). When confronted with those rare design problems that cannot be solved through any other means, there is always that last fallback, which is to take advantage of perceived aged-ness and demand the help of that younger more tech savvy generation, also known as “the intern”. This feat carried through in confidence, with the knowledge that someday they too will stumble upon their own Grasshopper and the cycle will begin anew.

E. Sean Bailey

In the supposedly $300 million science-fiction movie Avatar, audiences are taken to the phantasmagorical world of the moon-like planet Pandora where the nine-foot tall, blue-skinned Na’vi live. The 3D computer-generated sphere of Pandora is an immersive, brightly-colored forest, containing trees with mile-long branches, floating mountains and a stunning tropical flora.

James Cameron and other moneyed producers are not the only non-architects generating imaginary landscapes out of twenty-first century digital software. Many young artists and filmmakers, who take a DIY approach, are producing work which makes it possible to understand architecture in ways that drawings and photographs alone never could.

In the English artist Thomas Lock´s piece Breaking Points—triggered by Paulo Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology—grand melancholic photographs of weather-beaten war bunkers on the French coast have been coded, through the use of the open source software Open Framework, in such a way so that they are randomly selected from a bank of hundreds. The result is a moving image, which, just like the topography surrounding the bunkers, continuously destructs and constructs itself. With a similar dynamism, the French artist Thomas Léon’s film Living in the Ice Age is created with the 3D animation programs Lightwave 3D and Blender. In it an abandoned building is placed in the middle of a frigid landscape and as the sun rises and sets, skyscrapers appear and disappear behind it.

These artists are self-taught, with a thorough understanding of their tools, using them as a carpenter would use a hammer. This direct, almost mechanical relationship, to digital technology, something that John Roberts would call the “transformative agency of the hand”, makes their architectural visions, although utopian, possible to imagine.

Josefine Wilkström