Carpo - The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2010

The Digital Turn in Architecture 19922012

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Executive Commissioning Editor: Helen Castle
Project Editor: Miriam Swift
Assistant Editor: Calver Lezama
Design by Artmedia, London

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the authors who authorised the republication of their texts and images, often retrieving old originals; to Caroline Ellerby who collected, collated and researched the original illustrations; to Henry Ng who scanned and transcribed some of the texts and captions; to Megan Spriggs who edited my English; and to Helen Castle who patiently supervised the whole operation.

Research on the history of Architectural Design (AD), and on some of the AD essays republished here, was carried out by Joseph Clarke, Kyle Dugdale, Steven Lauritano, Masha Panteleyeva and Eduardo Vivanco during doctoral seminars I taught at the Yale School of Architecture in 2010 and 2011. I am grateful to them all, and special thanks are due to Kurt W Forster, Director of Doctoral Studies, and to Dean Robert AM Stern, Yale School of Architecture, for their support and advice.

Editorial Note on Presentation and Editing of Texts

With the exception of new introductions for each chapter, the texts in this anthology are verbatim reprints of published texts. Captions may not be identical to the originals, having been reformatted, and in some cases rewritten to reflect the current copyright status of the images, these include pages 21, 46, 83, 119, 121, 126 (t), 144, 167, 168, 171, 177 and 178. On page 159 the original image and caption have been replaced. Typographical and bibliographical errors have been corrected when discovered in the anthologised texts, but idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation remain unchanged. The bibliographic sources for all essays are in the copyright lines at the end of each chapter.

Introduction

Twenty Years of Digital Design

Building a multistorey car park these days typically involves more digital technologies than were available to Frank Gehrys office for the design of the Guggenheim Bilbao in the early 1990s. Yet few of todays car parks are hailed as examples of digitally intelligent design. In fact, in the first instance, a meaningful building of the digital age is not just any building that was designed and built using digital tools: it is one that could not have been either designed or built without them. Alert designers have ideas about what the new tools are and what they can do, and this intelligence among many other things inspires them to imagine unprecedented solutions.

Following from these premises, and looking for salient ideas, we scoured the last 20 years of Architectural Design, and chose 26 essays on digital design matters published from 1992 onwards. They are republished here unabridged and unedited (except for some typos), accompanied when possible by the original illustrations, and in chronological order, so the sequence illustrates the unfolding of digital design theory over time. For sure, not all that matters in digital design was published in AD; but a lot of it was. Since Andreas Papadakiss purchase of the magazine in the late 1970s, AD was for long the main venue for debate on architectural Post-Modernism, and at times almost the official organ of the movement. Fifteen years later, having mostly missed the Deconstructivist turn, and shortly before Papadakiss departure, AD started to embrace digital design with an enthusiasm almost equal to that of its pristine endorsement of the PoMos a commitment to the digital cause that has continued unabated to this day. The original footnotes of the articles included frequent references to other relevant titles on digital matters, and some bibliographic notes have been added in the introductions. All together, and in spite of evident limits to the range of sources and number of entries, this reader represents, we believe, a comprehensive synopsis of the recent history of digital design and its theory.

As some of the earlier essays evince (see in particular Eisenman, pages 1622 and 237, and Frazer, pages 4952), the beginnings of the digital turn in architecture were first and foremost a matter of inspiration and perhaps fascination. Electronic technologies in the early 1990s were changing some thought, revolutionising society, economy, culture and almost every aspect of daily life. So much was changing and so fast that some architects started to think that design should change too. No one quite knew how back then, and the first design experiments, in the spirit of the time, assumed that virtual reality, and cyberspace, would represent a radical alternative to the physical space of phenomena, existence and building. Some also concluded that many activities and functions would soon migrate from physical space to cyberspace, and that the design of new electronic venues in bits and bytes would soon replace the design of traditional buildings in bricks and mortar.