Exploring Three-dimensional design worlds using Lindenmeyer systems and Genetic Programming

Since the end of the last century it has commonly been seen as decadent to simply apply aesthetics to the structure
of a building to make it beautiful (with the exception of the deliberately ironic, although irony itself would have
been thought decadent by the stern moralists of the modern movement ).
Architects such as Louis Sullivan, Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and so on used the example of engineering
to help to explain the relationship between form and function. Based on the simplistic assumption that engineers
do not design form, but that it emerges from the correct solution to mechanical realities (cf. the Eiffel tower,
Brunel's bridges and the "dom-ino" concrete frame) the modern movement declared such objects as pure and
right . The functionalist tradition has suffered many blows in the last 50 years, partly because it was always an
oversimplification, and partly because technology has now reached a point where the constraints of structure
have almost vanished, with form becoming the precursor of function rather than it's determinant, ie. anything is
possible (cf. Utzon's Sydney Opera House, The new Bilbao gallery etc.)
The study of evolutionary algorithms allows us to get back to a more rigorous analysis of the basic determinants
of form, where the global form of an object not only should not but actually cannot be predetermined on an
aesthetic whim. Thus with genetic algorithms we have an opportunity to experiment with the true determinants
of form in a way that the pioneers of the modern movement would have relished - an aesthetic of pure function
whose outcome is totally embedded in the problem to be solved.