Parquet Floors: the natures that architecture imitates

The 1980s saw a bringing together of the digital and the material in architecture: architects looking at computers looking at nature. For some of these, particularly those attached to the academy, the properties of matter exposed by digital tools revealed formal possibilities. This was, however, only one version of nature-as-model-for-digital-design. There was an older, and by the 1990s, more widespread, interest in performative aspects of nature.: its generative operations (evolutionary architecture) and its measurable behaviours (environmental design). This text is a set of interrelated 'snapshots' reflecting on the relationships between architecture, the digital and nature. Rather than a linear essay, the text is a series of interconnected pieces - of a floor, perhaps, a conceptual footing. They are intended to encourage further thoughts in the reader by reflecting in a highly condensed form on some of the new relationships between architecture/urbanism and materiality/nature within ecological narratives.