WOOD, CAD AND AI: Digital modelling as place of convergence of natural and artificial intelligent to design timber architecture

The contemporary development and digital culture in architecture, from the idea to the realization, lead to a rewriting of the coordinates of the deep relation between model and pre-figuration, especially in the timber structure field. Artificial intelligence opened new potentialities that rewrite the project paths through the evaluation of computational design, with a model set as the place of simulation and experimentation, in order to locate solutions for more and more high requests made by architecture. Wood’s natural intelligence inspires artificial intelligence’s principles, and it is projected as the new frontier of the research, in its possibility of defying optimized solutions also in function of multiples objectives and parameters. Wooden architecture design correlated to a history of tradition, which is established on descriptive geometry, finds today multiple application fields for the research. In this sense, representation supports the knowledge and the innovation, able to continue and express its operative aspect full of culture and, at the same time, its tecné sense, which etymologically it is meant as art and technique. The present chapter shows different ways to apply the contemporary principle of descriptive geometry in digital wood design research, in a multidisciplinary and contaminated learning environment. In all the illustrated cases, the generative design has a central role, in an integration addressed to the need of optimization of architectural form, using Genetic algorithms in order to analyze and to understand the relationship between form, geometry, and construction.