Week 2

Modern humanity is an ever evolving cyborg, unable to function without it’s social structures and human implication appendages, equally so it’s technological and computation appendages, raising debates of control and emancipation through the streams of humanity and technology. Antoine Picon questions whether history and architectural development is relevant in a technological age of design, commenting in an ever reminiscent fashion of Jean-Louis Cohen on the impact of the industrial revolution upon the built environment and social constructs. However he draws conclusion that the implementation of digital tools are a hybridisation of the current human condition resulting in the notion “a home for cyborgs”. Thus Picon constructs his three themes that will serve as trends for design in the digital age.

Digital technologies have a tendency to alter the physical realm; Picon believes that “materiality as a way to understand our world both distinct and direct to us.” Noting the revival of ornament as a surface condition rather than a localised element, digital interaction will no doubtably trend towards an altered interaction with the physical realm, giving the designer the ability to engage sensory inputs and perceptions.

The individual by definition is a highly unique object, Picon criticises the segmentation of individuals through design which is all to enticing given the trend of blogs, social networking and targeted advertising. He prophesies that architects should view the individual in the context of its environment, alluding to historical notions of city design and the public shared realm, concluding that the individual is an extension of the natural environment and that segmentation is a determinate for the established ignorance of social inequities.

Lastly, Picon conjures up the theme of occurrence, events and scenarios as a perpetuating factor of future design. The use of precedence is ever important in the evaluation and evolution of space, Picon believes that digital modelling of scenarios is key to urban development and that designers should pay attention to their frequency. However I personally feel his grasp of this concept lacks the inclusion of historical geo-political occurrence, where social upheaval or collective trauma give way to a renascence of social behavior that the built environment must accommodate for.

Through these themes there is an ever present interaction between humanity and technology in a day to day environment, highlighting the true reality of the cyborg, not as a fictional dystopic character with aspirations of human demise but as a reality of humanity’s dependence on the ‘device’ ever since the invention of the personal computer. Picon then prescribes the true nature of the future built environment where the digital and reality are connected as an indecipherable hybridised state.

Week 1

Mario Carpo forebodes the ever present stagnation among the architectural profession to a computational design driven practice. Critiquing the financial and egotistical driven want for individual project authorship, where practice is devoid of revolution due to a repression of ideas and technique. “Yet individual authorship has long been such an essential aspect of modern architecture that one can easily understand the mixed feelings of the design professions vis-à-vis a techno-social development that many feel might threaten or diminish the architect’s traditional authorial role.” He laments the days where architects were the pioneers of the digital frontier from Gaudi to Gehry there seems to be a pause since the late 90’s where BIM has become the computation that we can all settle for.

By comparison, Jean-Louis Cohen’s schizophrenic approach to computational design is left unresolved. Driven by the beauties of craft, Cohen forms a critical view towards revolution and architecture, struggling with the established mass; wether that be social hierarchy or city structure, industry or the family. The use of mechanical imagery and metaphor conveys the disjointed, compartmentalised structures of working and family life “What becomes of the family in these conditions?”…”The machine we live in is an old crate of a plane riddled with tuberculosis.” A shift is ever-present in the text where by the downfalls of industry upon society are judged favourably as tools that give humanity the ability to rectify the now. By extension we can stretch these tools quite whimsically, as an ever expanded palate to which a modern and future designer can draw upon to further design. And yes I do speak towards that dropdown menu that is ever fashionable on the software runway. Tools are the new black, and where would we be without them!

Cohen clearly highlights the need for open-source design and toolset to enable a better form of architecture and general productivity, Carpo similarly wishes for a mass migration towards collaborative design through computation, while clearly defining the line between BIM and Computational design as a true form of collaboration. However the root of both essays are very general and clear, ‘there is still more to go’ like computers, both writers realise that technology and humanity is constantly evolving and to never settle for what is the current, or society will bare the shortcomings.