Digital Technology and Architecture: Towards a Symmetrical Approach

T A D 6 : 1 Digital Technology and Architecture: Towards a Symmetrical Approach Should we take technology as an external factor impacting design literally from the outside? For the past 50 years, science and technology studies (STS) have insisted on the inseparability of technology and the social. This has fostered a better understanding of how technology and society are “coproduced” to use Sheila Jasanoff’s concept. But despite the academic success of this approach, there is still a tendency to consider technological development as an external factor in domains like architecture and urban design. This is not only detrimental to the understanding of the true nature of the relationships of technology and architecture, hampering a proper grasp of episodes like the various attempts made to industrialize building construction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also limits our understanding of the agency of architecture, of what it truly achieves at a scale broader than buildings. In other words, the relationship between technology and design still appears asymmetrical. This article challenges such asymmetry by arguing one should envisage technology and design as partners in broad social and cultural changes. The tendency to treat technology as an external factor is especially pronounced in the case of the digital. The dominant narrative argues that the computer became of common use in architectural design only in the mid-1990s, hence the seminal role attributed to episodes like the “paperless” studio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, which explored the possibilities offered by the machine for architectural education. Even if this narrative is repeatedly criticized for reasons ranging from its disregard for previous experiments to its particular focus on the North American scene, as if the digital culture in architecture had been only an American endeavor from the beginning, it still exerts a pervasive influence on how the digital is understood in architecture. The very notion of a “digital turn” in architecture is usually described from this perspective. It has been accompanied by a discourse on neo-digital avant-gardes which continues to this day. Historian Mario Carpo’s work is emblematic of this direction. His book, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011) is supportive of a series of avant-garde architectural practices exploring the possibilities offered by parametric variation. In The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017) he showcases a series of designers considered as representative of the new perspectives opened by the introduction of artificial intelligence in architecture.