Genetic algorithms in design: theory and application

This paper examines the complex encounters between digital media and the current discourse in architectural theory and practice. Although virtuality has been seen as an agent of alienation from the material reality of architecture, it has so far proven to have the reverse effect: reconditioning the nature of built form and reasserting the way we design it. The paper considers the points of overlap in the autopoiesis of architecture, Adorno\´s "mimetic impulse", and Benjiamin\´s concept of fetishism, to explore confusions of identity between the mental or virtual and the physical, the organic and the inorganic. New norms of spatial identification are established - that of surface and genetic algorithmic structure as a three-dimensional space.