Digital culture in architecture : an introduction for the design professions

Today's explosive developments in digital technology have also affected architecture and the urban landscape. The new possibilities opened up by digital simulation have led to an increasingly strategic approach to planning, an approach based on generating scenarios, which thus represents a radical departure from traditional planning. From the preliminary sketch all the way to the production of individual building components, digital tools offer new possibilities that were still inconceivable just a few years ago. This volume provides a profound introduction to the important role of digital technologies in design and execution. In four chapters, the author systematically examines the influence of digital culture on architecture but also on the urban landscape as well as product design. The relationship of digital architecture to the city is also an important focus.

Author Notes

Antoine Picon is an engineer at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, a teacher of architectural history and theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and an internationally recognized authority on digital technology.

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This book is one of the first accounts of the current dereliction of traditional design caused by the severe and profound influence of digital culture. The work concentrates on architecture but also illustrates interior, landscape, and urban design, all fluid, anamorphic, and parametric in nature. Picon (Harvard Graduate School of Design), a leading scholar of the French Enlightenment, extrapolates the 18th-century combination of engineering and architecture into the current digital maelstrom, identifying it, idealistically, as "a second enlightenment." Picon is French, and he normally writes in French. Inadequately edited, this book suffers from errors of ordinary grammar and vocabulary. The book is aimed at very advanced design students--not general readers--as a kind of analgesic, Derridean Talmud. It is filled with fascinating accounts of blobs, nurbs, catastrophes, perfomativity, parametricism, anamorphoses, deformational morphologies, topological singularities, genetic-inspired algorithmics, and biomachinic mutations--among other things. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students and researchers/faculty. P. Kaufman emeritus, Boston Architectural College

Introduction	p. 7
People, Computers and Architecture: A Historical Overview	p. 15
The emergence of the society of information	p. 16
The rise of computer epistemology	p. 24
Cybernetics in architecture and planning: patterns, systems and networks	p. 32
The formalist turn in postmodernism and critical theory	p. 45
Digital culture, space and sociability	p. 48
Architecture as interface	p. 55
Experiments in Form and Performance	p. 59
The seduction of innovative geometries	p. 60
Diagramming Complexity	p. 73
The surface as architecture	p. 84
From animation to algorithmics	p. 94
Intricate or minimalist elegance?	p. 100
Digital age subjectivity, performance and meaning	p. 104
From Tectonic to Ornament: Towards a Different Materiality	p. 115
Contemporary technology as Landscape	p. 116
The crisis of scale and tectonic	p. 124
From memory to oblivion	p. 133
Reinventing ornament	p. 138
A different Materiality	p. 143
Materials by design	p. 159
Design strategies and professional perspectives	p. 162
Will robotization take command?	p. 164
The City in the Digital Sprawl	p. 171
Urban features in the digital age	p. 172
A City of individuals	p. 177
An augmented urban reality	p. 185
Events, simulations and scenarios	p. 191
Towards a splintered city?	p. 205
Conclusion	p. 209
Material Continuity and the Design Practice
Index	p. 217
On the Author	p. 224

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Author Notes

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Table of Contents