Important for the success in architecture was the early integration of the technology, mathematical scripts that relate structure and architecture in the start of the design process. The Arup AGU multidisciplinary team, with mathematicians, engineers,  architects and computational designers, aimed for buildings where structure and architecture evolve in a close harmony. Used in this process was the link with biology, for relation between patterns and geometry including the use of mathematical description of form in relation to structure and has changed the way we design architecture now.

Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology works with materials, devices, and other structures with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres and is a key technology for the future. The emergence of nanotechnology in the 1980s was caused by the convergence of experimental advances such as the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1981 and the discovery of fullerenes in 1985. [wiki]

In relation to architecture nanotechnology enables to create new materials from the molecular level. Composite materials that can alter their stiffness, like done in shells of a lobster. The ability to create a material to answer our demands.

Graphene, as the Nobel winner Andre Geim explains in an article by Tim Carmody in Wired, “is stronger and stiffer than diamond, yet can be stretched by a quarter of its length, like rubber. Its surface area is the largest known for its weight.” (1) Needless to say, graphene holds tremendous promise for the future on so many levels.

http://sensingarchitecture.com/6779/uses-of-nanotechnology-for-architectural-design-the-graphene-skin/

This could give new means to adaptive skins, bi-stable structures or flexible moulds.

Design process.
Interesting in both cases is how they altered the way of designing architecture.

In Cecil Balmonds case, the integration of the engineer in the beginning of the project, linking structural geometry through maths with manufacturing / construction and engineering changed the input we have at the start of the design and enabled to build architecture that would have not been thought of before. A multidisciplinary and technical architectural approach.

Nano technology also enables us to change the way we design, as one material can now perform different and specific roles at ones. Think about the smaller amount of elements, time to build, as well as the notion of adaptive structures.

I’ve just finished reading Banham’s masterly introduction to early modern architecture, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, and was struck in particular by the above quotation. It seems to encapsulate the central problematic of not only that heady age, but our own.

 The choice, as Banham frames it, is between Futurism and Academicism, between a framework emptied of history and one overflowing with it. Banham takes for granted (his later work notwithstanding) a mythical future age in which technology and architecture are in symbiosis, one in which Buckminster Fuller has been declared prophet and messiah, and the Futurist dream of disposable buildings has been realized. But it seems this future would also require the dissolving of disciplinary boundaries.

Intervening years have found architecture unwilling to submit, instead refocusing on the discipline’s “interiority” through several iterations of postmodernism. In the end, Banham’s was interpreted as just one more piece of what Manfredo Tafuri would come to call “operative criticism,” a motivated and subjective history meant to direct rather than document. But this Structuralist hyperbole has long since become untenable, and perhaps it’s time to reconsider Banham’s polemic. 

Though it’s quite clear architecture and technology have maintained their delicate balance since Banham wrote these words, change has come in recent years to representation, not just realization. As many have observed, the modern movement was brought on by a critical mass of advancements to construction, but the technology of representation remained the same throughout it’s period of dominance. Like construction technologies, the digitization of drawing cannot help but have a revolutionary effect on architecture. 

A more apt temporal model for the transformation currently underway might be the Renaissance, when technologies advanced to a degree that drawings could be reproduced in print. Mario Carpo has written that because of this shift, “the architectural forms being built throughout Europe changed in a sudden and radical way–but without any corresponding change in either materials or construction procedures.” (Architecture in the Age of Printing, 5) 

That being said, what has Banham’s analysis to teach us? In short, to quit being so stubborn and acquiesce. Resistance to the onset of new methods is not only futile but untenable. 

Banham faults the moderns for inadequately transforming architecture and ultimately returning to old modes of thought and composition. Change in construction methods was inadequate to transform modes so deeply ingrained. The modern movement fell short of transforming architecture at a structural level, maintaining the conventions of pictorial representation and of line, plane and volume as compositional elements. It’s revolution was both social and aesthetic, but failed to change the way we conceive and describe our buildings. 

One might say technologies of digital representation have already allowed some to conceive of an architecture of points, an architecture no longer based on two dimensional drawings but on descriptions as complex as the buildings themselves. Greg Lynn says that this is the age of calculus, and perhaps he’s right. But we can’t fall into the same trap as the moderns, whose machine-mania was based on only a base understanding of the machines they championed; they jumped to conclusions, and ultimately only represented rather than transformed.

But there comes a certain amount of amateurism whenever architects proclaim an interest in anything but buildings; we are ultimately laypersons at everything else. Perhaps the expectation that architecture be transformed is based on a less-than-complete understanding of architecture itself.

In his last completed essay “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” Banham posits that architecture, as he understood it, is a mode of designing, one “recognized in its output but unknown in its contents.” (A Critic Writes, 293) Architecture, by his definition, isn’t building design, nor even “good” building design, but a mysterious modum architectum in which some makers of buildings act. He states that architecture, after all, isn’t defined by what is done, but how it’s done; Architecture, with a capital A, is only “the making of drawings for buildings in the manner practiced in Europe since the Renaissance,” and nothing more. (298) A transformation of this mode of doing architecture, then, would mean the end of architecture itself. 

Now we know what’s at stake. We can either play the Futurist and discard the weighty cultural burden we carry, or keep our “professional garments” and ultimately be left behind. Neither seems terribly attractive.