WEEK TWO READINGS

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL

• the process of designing buildings became entangled with three dimensional computer modeling around 1990.
• there is a healthy, strong, and rarefied architecture outside of modern medicine
• Urban and architectural design should “demand more body movement and fitter lifestyles,”
• “forcing users to climb steeper stairs, walk longer distances and avoid elevators”
• spatial history of medicine is cogent with practices of control by segregation, historians show, exclusionary practices arise as much from social contexts as they do from medical science
• varied, vulnerable, disorderly, and hybrid bodies are inspiration for radical new approaches to architecture and urban design.
• artifacts from the studios of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh in order to argue that the core ideas of digital architecture today, notions such as tiling, complex surfaces, optimized structures, and parametricism, were already fully formed twenty-five years ago.
• Today we have to confront the multiple forms of digital documents
• Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh’s offices were considered to have architectural ideas suited to digital exploration
• They used the computer as a new ‘creative medium’ instead of ‘a tool’
• Only hoberman sat at a computer to design
• None of the four architects programed a computer
• Using a modicum of architectural history to advance a critical stance

DIGITAL CULTURE IN ARCHITECTURE (An introduction for the design professionals)

• 15years ago there weren’t many computers in architectural offices
• Design was done by hand – initial sketches and rendering
• 1992 Columbia University Paperless Studio = one of the first large scale attempts at using computers for architectural design
• Architects were confronted by the advancing tide of electronic equipment and software applications
• Today no architectural practice could do without digital technology
• Staggering scope of change has triggered diverse reactions
• No longer about whether it is good or bad, rather the direction architecture is taking under its influence
• The diffusion of digital equipment and software seems linked to a series of shifts in the definition and content of architecture
• TO BE CONTINUE