John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

them as a means of categorisation. The practitioners surveyed by the researcher
considered that one of the key benefits offered by computer-based design and
fabrication technologies was the ability to create objects of a complexity not
possible to produce by other means. ‘Complexity’ would appear to be the result
of two (or more) subsequent categories. The first of these is scale. Using the
example cited above, clearly Gehry’s museum is of a higher order of complexity
than Rashid’s bucket. Even the museum’s plumbing alone is more complex
than the risers and waterlines in the injection moulding tool used to produce
hundreds of thousands of bins. Therefore, these two objects can only be
compared by scale at the point where Gehry’s preliminary massing-model is
digitised by a laser scanner (see section 2.5). Only on the outer surface or form
of an object can comparisons be made across scales. Consequently, the
researcher chose not to apply a value to this category. Instead, four descriptive
categories were applied by which the relative sizes (Scale) of the objects could be
organised. These are: handheld, furniture, vehicle and building – nothing other
than the approximate dimensions of the objects are implied by this category.
The second attribute that would appear to contribute to the complexity of an
object is its structure. Here more specific determinations can be made. Again,
using the example above it is apparent the trash can consists of a single object
(Part). The museum is not just a combination of parts (Assembly) but it is a
group of interrelated elements comprising a unified whole (System). Values are
assigned for the increasing complexity as follows: Part = 1, Assembly = 2 and
System = 3. We therefore arrive at a value for the complexity of an object thus:
Complexity = Scale (0, descriptive term) + Structure (1-3).
Figure 28: ‘Blur Building’, 2002. Diller + Scofidio
- 131 -