Bleed combines nature and generative art to develop identity for Blank Architects

Bleed is an independent design consultancy based in Oslo and Vienna, formed in 2000 by Svein Haakon Lia and Dag Laska and its latest project sees them combining nature and generative art in an identity for Blank Architects. The Moscow based architects asked Bleed to reflect its body of work but also highlight its willingness to experiment and innovate, communicating their attitude towards nature, process and architectural principles.

Bleed began by breaking down Blank’s attitude to nature: firstly, a big part of Blank’s ethos is its environmental and social responsibility with regards to materials in times where scarcity of resources is a pressing issue. Secondly, the respect and understanding of nature as a dynamic force that creates as well as restricts meaning the architects always have to create with a given parameter. “Being both environmentally aware and drawn towards the modern and the futuristic, it was clear from the outset that the new identity needed to reflect both the organic and the clear-cut technical,” say Bleed.

The design studio decided, as a result, to focus on three concepts within nature to create visuals that embody the architects’ manifesto. These three concepts were line of flight, pedestrian flow and “look deeper into nature”. They started by creating a “straight and uncompromising” logo and stationary to make room for a series of code-generated pieces that represent the three chosen concepts. “Turning these concepts into code was a very interesting exercise because it allowed us to think a bit more in-depth about the techniques we employ on a daily basis, but maybe don’t pay all that much attention to,” Kristoffer Lundberg, senior designer and developer at Bleed told It’s Nice That.

First they tackled line of flight, a concept developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that expresses something that is not just fleeing but also leaking, flowing and disappearing into the distance. Bleed developed a generative piece that produces parallel lines by flattening points to a [0,0,0] value in a three-dimensional geometry. The lines are then increased by expanding its points incrementally one by one mimicking another Deleuzian concept: the rhizome. This process of drawing lines within a set framework is a metaphor for Blank’s ability to create with limited resources.

Pedestrian flow was an attempt to illustrate how architecture can affect public flow by being both an attraction and an obstacle. Bleed assigned each particle – representing a pedestrian – a start and end point and let users create invisible obstacles to observe changes in movement, speed and relations.

Lastly, with “look deeper into nature” Bleed wanted to emphasise how human minds have the ability to observe patterns and structures within nature using numbers and geometry. “As far as science is a means of investigating and understanding, there is also that highly creative aspect of constructing with incomplete knowledge, building with what we have,” explains Bleed on its website. As a means of illustrating this creative process of constructing with representational ideas, Bleed took the Albert Einstein quote “look deeper into nature, and you will understand everything better,” as a concept but also a tool so that every time a character from the sentence is typed, a sphere is formed using a certain amount of triangles.

The visuals created by each of these generative pieces were implemented not just on the printed stationary but also on the architects’ website, displaying a new generative header every time the page is refreshed.