Instabilities and Potentialities Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.

Instabilities and Potentialities

Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture

Edited by Chandler Ahrens & Aaron Sprecher with Michael Wen-Sen Su

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chandler Ahrens & Aaron Sprecher - On the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture

Forewords

Georges Teyssot – Gilbert Simondon’s Key Points

Part 1. Images

Chandler Ahrens & Aaron Sprecher – Images: Effect and Affect in the Digital Representation of Architecture

Mark Linder – Episodes in the Emergence of Imaging Practices

David Freeland and Brennan Buck – Objective Perspective

Dana Cupkova – interview

Viola Ago – The Line, the Drawings and the Model

John Carpenter – Multispectral 4D imaging of heart formation and c-looping in Tg embryos

Nicholas de Monchaux – The Complexity of Complexity, or, Life Attracts Life

Part 2. Objects

Chandler Ahrens & Aaron Sprecher - Objects: Topological evolution of the architectural entity

Martin Bressani – In Medias Res: Atmospheres and Hauntings

Volkan Alkanoglu – In Pursuit of Novel Form: Super Light

Thom Mayne – interview

Alvin Huang – Objects: Technology, Technique, Techné: Creation vs Contingency in Computational Design

Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa – Post-Digital as Design Authorship In Informed Material Processes

Alessandra Ponte – Mapping in the Age of Electronic Shadows

Part 3. Disciplines

Chandler Ahrens & Aaron Sprecher – Disciplines:Transdisciplinarity and Potentialities

Laurent Stalder – Machine/ Architecture

Satoru Sugihara – Design Outside of the Frame: A Role of Architects in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Greg Lynn – interview

Tom Shaked and Uri Dubin – Exercises in Style: A Transdisciplinary Discussion

Jose Sanchez – From an Autopoietic to a Symbiopoietic Architecture Discipline

Theodora Vardouli – Dissimilar at First Sight : Structural Abstraction and the Promises of Isomorphism in 1960s Architectural Theory

Postscript

Antoine Picon – Digital fabrication, Between disruption and nostalgia

Biographies

Index

Acknowledgements

Chandler Ahrens is an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis as well as a co-founder of Open Source Architecture (OSA), which is an international transdisciplinary collaboration developing research and commissioned projects. His focus is on the intersection of material investigations, environmental phenomena and computational design processes. He was on the board of directors for Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). His work with OSA has received several design awards and is part of the collection at the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) in Orleans, France. He was a co-curator of the Gen(h)ome Project and co-chair for the exhibition, Evolutive Means, ACADIA2010.

Aaron Sprecher is Associate Professor at the Technion Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. In parallel, he is co-founder and partner of Open Source Architecture, a collaborative research group that brings together international researchers in the fields of design, engineering, media research, history and theory. Aaron Sprecher taught at Syracuse University School of Architecture and McGill University School of Architecture. His research and design work focus on the synergy between information technologies, computational languages and digital fabrication systems, examining the way in which technology informs and generates innovative approaches to design processes. He currently leads the Material Topology Research Laboratory (MTRL) at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He is co-editor of the book Architecture in Formation—On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture (2013).