Architecture in the Age of Digital Representation

Conference: International Conference on Architectural Research - ICAR 2012Volume: Proceedings - ICAR 2012, 2012

The unprecedented contemporary expansion of knowledge brought forward a requirement to adopt a new mentality and a sense of urgency in bridging disciplines which, by the middle of twentieth century, gave rise to multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Mankind has always used intelligence to address problems that life and society have generated. The same planet with the same resources needed to support the life of an exponentially growing population. In response to these requirements, the science and the technology have also grown exponentially, giving rise to cybernetics, mathematical theories that aim to translate the nature at macro and microscopic levels and theories that had the potential of being useful in generating new solutions in architecture. The emergence of computers, of digital technology, of complex graphics and visualization techniques streamlined the approach to architectural solutions and proved useful in satisfying both the pragmatic constraints that make architecture a science and the features that make it an art. This paper investigates the design of digital processes and how they can improve the thinking process at the project concept stage and the rethinking of the relationship between architecture, sciences and, inevitably, a highly technological society. Also present is a sub textual issue as to what extent these current trends are found in Romanian schools of architecture.

2012

The paper examines the gradual shift that has occurred in architectural authorship with the introduction of digital intelligent tools that aid in the process of creation and production of architectural space. By examining the nature of digital architectural design tools starting from their very beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, one can observe a certain pattern of transfer of both capabilities and decision, in the process of creation, from the designer towards the artificial intelligence of the machine. This transfer has rendered the software instrument, the driving will behind the power of the computer, into a veritable extension of the human intellect. This of course, has empowered architects, as well as other professions, to extend the reach of the architectural art and science to previously undreamt extents. Looking at the nature of the architectural software tool in its numerous declinations(the CAD program, the plug-ins, the script, a difference between the instrumental nature of the traditional facilitators of architectural design (like the drawing instruments and medium, pen and paper) and the new digital ones becomes evident. This paper aims to show that the gradual departure from the muted neutrality of the tradition towards the empowering new abilities gained through the digital shift has both immense advantages but also pitfalls that need to be navigated with skill and wisdom. To achieved that, a brief recourse to the history of architectural creation with regard to the digital shift will be made. This will help to prove that architectural authorship connected to the architectural notation (digital or analog) has always been in question, well before the first real applications of computers in the creation of architectural space. Secondly looking into the nature of the new digital architectural tools and especially into those belonging to the new digital wave, we need to acknowledge and accept that the extended ability to design, now ubiquitous throughout the profession, comes at a price. The architect, now user of digital tools, produces designs that are (in some cases) more the result of the particular instruments used than of the architect's own creativity. This raises the question of shared authorship of the architectural design with the creators of architectural tools. In the paper some typologies of digital architectural creation, with various degrees of shared authorship are analyzed and discussed. For a beter understanding of the changes arising from the deeper integration of algorithmic tools and thinking into the architectural design and workflow the paper looks into the phases of architectural authorship of the design. The post-architectural phase gathers everything that happens with the design after it is outside the control of the architect-designer. Usually here we find all the normalization changes needed for the physical production/building of the architectural artifact. These usually do not impact major aspects of the design and therefore can be considered to have low to insignificant influence on authorship. The architectural phase, although using a strict name, does not refer to design changes initiated by the author architect. It refers to changes made during the period when the design process directly involves the architectural author. The pre-architectural phase is of most interest to our endeavor because it is located at the very beginning of the creation process. This is the part where the inception of architectural form starts and also where the first ties are created between the author and its work. The digital intelligent tools of today incorporate prepackaged wisdom that unlike the simple tools of our analog past facilitate, but inevitably also suggest the path for the design. This is what can be called the pre-architectural phase, the creation of the intelligent architectural tool one capable of extending the reach of the human mind but also constraining its ability for picking its own cretive direction. Another important point in the paper is made by analyzing the way digital tools are helping the creative profession extend the reach of the human intellect in the quest for more and better design. A critical look reveals a number of steps that both designers and digital instruments took in relation to one another all in the service of better architectural design. The paper build upon the a chronology proposed by Robert Aish[1] . The first stage was the early CAD era when digital tools were used only as faster and more exact analog ones. First the new design instruments were included in the existing design paradigm. The second stage or the blob era was the first real digital augmentation of the creative architectural mind by harnessing the power of differential calculus and making it available to the (mathematically untrained) designer through an interface. The next stage, the BIM era, is a return from the digital formalism and exuberance of the '90s towards a more practical use of digital power, performance of the process. This in Aish's view marks also a return to a forced formal restraint embedded in the instruments. The last stage and the most important from out point of view is the computational design also known as algorithmic or parametric design. In computational design a critical step is the pre-architectural phase when the designer or design temp creates the bespoke instruments that will facilitate the design As Robert Aish [1] states in the same text, computational design creates a critical distinction between the generative description of a building and the visual or textual description of the result, the final form. This becomes a critical disjunction between design as static form and design as a process with multiple outcomes, the design that builds potential versus the design that builds form. Based on this idea the paper proposes that architectural authorship is also split between the creativity placed with building the instruments and the one spent using them to create the design. In order to support this the paper looks deeper into the ways a favorite technique of algorithmic design, scripting, is helping architects and splitting architectural authorship. The result of this endeavor hopes to prove that digital multiple-authorship of architectural design is the next big leap in design. It is what is gradually happening in the architectural profession after the primal digital enhancement of the architectural mind through computers and software. Now architectural expertize and inspiration receives a new dimension. From parallel evolution and ulterior cross-fertilization, design is slowly becoming serial and infinitely additive, all as a result of the new embedded intelligence of the digital architectural tool. Building from the finds of this investigation the paper concludes that the architect profession needs to accept the dilution of intellectual property of the design between the user-architect and a new breed of instrument-creator-architect a big part of the future of real creativity. References [1] Aish R. First build your tools. In eds. Bradley Peters, Terri Peters. Inside Smart Geometry Expanding the Architectural Possibilities of Computational Design. John Wiley & Sons, pp. 36-49. 2013

2018

This paper aims to trace the historiographies of image-technologies as a means of evaluating how major technological developments in the sphere of media are bound to the development of architecture of the same period. It focuses on the essays of Walter Benjamin (1931, 1936, 1955) and Hal Foster (2002, 2011) that reflect on the image-technologies emerging at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, aiming to open a dialogue between their essays and the two historical periods. It is perceived that examination of Benjamin's and Foster's historiographies of image-technologies can provide further insight into the changing relationships of architecture, image and media technologies, specifically through two historical processes; first, the intersection between image-technologies and the subjugation of architecture and; second, the intersection between image-technologies and the commodification of architecture. The relevance of this is to provide a critical perspective on the increasing penetration of technology in architecture around the turn of the centuries, and by extension, the paper effectively expands the understanding of the changing manifestations between architecture and technology. This paper is meant as a contribution to an already rich field of scholarship attending to the interaction between contemporary architecture and image-technologies. Through the explicit development of a historical dialogue between Benjamin and Foster, the paper argues that much of contemporary writing on the interaction between image-technology and architecture remains deeply bound up in questions raised at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, despite the overwhelming conflation of image and media technologies with contemporary architecture, the overview of this conflation is still often negative, and as this paper argues, reductive, particularly witnessed in Foster's essays. We argue for expanding beyond the predominately negative critiques of image technologies to create 285 broader understanding of the increasingly complex intertwined relationships between architecture and image-technologies.