The Regular Complex

Peter Davidson

Lab Architecture Studio

LAB has been deploying Mathematica in their studio work in a variety of architectural and urban design applications over the past 18 months.

In a series of large urban design master plans in China LAB has translated the complex urban planning codes into a layered series of parametric design parameters. These have enabled the development of new urban arrangements that both comply with and confound the rigid regulations. Breaking away from the prescriptive regulatory models, these new precincts offer a continuously variable and fluid spatial organization.

Although the facades of federation square were developed “analogically”, a current exhibition proposal has being attempting to approach the visual sensibility of the building facades’ dynamic and every changing pattern, though the iterative application of sequential rules describing their visual characteristics in both qualitative and quantitative means.

In parallel to this reflection on a past project, LAB has been using Mathematica to develop parametric facade pattens and systems for a number of their most recent projects. In this work, using Mathematica, LAB has simultaneously registered a series of visual parameters, environmental mediation, material constraints, and constructional criteria to develop complex building facades.  

A series of these urban design and architectural projects will present how mathematica is being applied in the development of new planning approaches acknowledging the city as a dynamic system and the emergence of an architectural aesthetic.


LAB architectural studio

LAB is renowned (in the architectural world at least) for the federation square project in Melbourne (Australia) completed in 2002. This project applied the pinwheel tiling grid developed by John Conway and Charles Radin in the design of its facades and structural framing and cladding of its glazed atrium.  

LAB was established in 1994 in London, and currently operates offices in Melbourne and Bejing. The studio’s work has been extensively published internationally in architectural and design books, anthologies, and magazines. The studio is currently working on planning and architectural design projects in China, India, the Middle East, the UK, and West Africa. The studio is also involved in furniture and product design, with a complete range of sanitary ware and taps to be released in 2007.

Peter Davidson with his co-director, Donald Bates established LAB in 1994. They have extensive experience as architectural teachers, lecturers, and visiting or adjunct professors in a number of architectural schools, including most recently the Cooper Union (NY), MIT (Boston), and UTS (Sydney).