Collegiate Times

During an internship in Shanghai last summer, Melenbrink experienced firsthand the time saving qualities of the program as he worked with a team of four of architects to design a bridge.

“(Scripting) ended up saving a lot of time,” he said. “We could sit down as a group and get a week’s work done in a day.”

While Melenbrink and his colleagues remain staunch advocates for the program and its time saving qualities, they also recognize that it has received some criticism.

“One of the biggest critiques of scripting is you are only going to be using it for patterning or something that doesn’t really mean anything or doesn’t really add anything to the design,” Melenbrink said.

“It’s flashy sort of fashion, a lot of architects use fashion sort of as a derogatory term. It’s just fashionable.”

Stolz said that some of the criticism behind scripting comes from whether or not the program even serves a practical purpose.

“Also, although people are challenging this now, scripting has been used in the past mainly to create really crazy surfaces that have a huge wow factor but aren’t appropriate design solutions for that situation,” he said. “People are often showing off the technology but not asking themselves if it is really necessary ― scripting is not the end-all solution to architecture, it is one of many and works only for certain situations.”

He explained that while scripting may be an up-and-coming technique, the idea behind it is in fact very primitive.

“What scripting laws do is make an assembly of very basic rules as recipes for design. The algorithm is the very ancient Greek idea,” he said, “and now that we had the processing power of computers they’ve allowed us to use this really new aesthetic identity with this very old idea.”

However, the adaptation of this ancient idea into such a modern technology is a gradual process.

“In the real world (scripting) has the potential to save a lot of time, but in academia it is being used very experimentally,” Melenbrink said. “It is something you see and not think of as architecture; it’s very abstract.”

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