It is a rare architect who doesn't want his buildings to be built. But Skylar Tibbits, a Philadelphia-based generative architect, experiments with new ways of creating space, and he doesn't care whether or not his process yields habitable structures. Tibbits is interested in mathematical logic, and he develops algorithms that generate three-dimensional structures based on principles like fractals, recursion, and tessellation. Since he works directly from the math, Tibbits never knows what his end result will look like, and his designs rarely conform to conventional notions of buildings — one resembles a roller coaster, another looks like a pair of wings. "It's never initially about developing space," Tibbits says. "You're developing relationships or organizations or scientific rules, and out of that comes space." < Back | Continue >

Tibbits recently became interested in artificial intelligence and started using the mathematics of networks, swarm logic, and clustering to create abstract shapes and patterns. To generate this piece, which comes out of the logic behind networking, Tibbits started with a set of points and generated a series of closed curves, or loops, based on how far each point was from its nearest neighbor: the farther the neighbor, the larger the curve. After the piece was completed, Tibbits was surprised to find that his new structure looked like a flower. Only then did he title the piece "Chrysanthemum." < Back | Continue >

In "Transient States," Tibbits uses abstract computer modeling to tackle a very concrete problem: defining national borders in a way that will minimize conflict. For this piece, Tibbits located optimal borders based on the physical location, population desires, and flux of the Hutu and Tutsi people of Rwanda. He found data on these three categories — where the peoples were located, what they valued, and how frequently they were born and died — across a 10-year period, and he plugged it into a computer model. If this model were manifested in the real world, boundaries would fluctuate based on tribe-movement patterns. < Back | Continue >

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