Precision in building was pursued and achieved well before the rise of modern science and technology. This fact applies to the classical tradition as well as to medieval architecture, and is particularly evident in architectural drawings and design from the Italian Renaissance onward. In this essay, I trace the shift from geometry-the primary tool for quantification in classical architecture- to numeracy that characterizes Renaissance architectural theory and practice. I also address some more general aspects of the relation between technologies of quantification and the making of architectural forms.
Is the term ‘ornament’ set to become redundant in architecture? With the sinuous lines produced by CNC milling machines giving way to the ever more weirdly figural products of algorithmically controlled 3D printing, decoration is increasingly an integral part of form, rather than supplementary to it. Mario Carpo – Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London – investigates this voxellisation, and how it drives architecture beyond human comprehension.
Architectural historian and theorist Mario Carpo examines the status quo of digital innovation. Whereas the espousal of animation software in the 1990s placed architects conspicuously at the forefront of new technologies as early adopters and adapters, in the new millennium they have less enthusiastically embraced the participatory opportunities of Web 2.0 and open‐source modes of working. Could the desire for single authorship be holding designers back?
New technologies, by definition, change fast, as does our cultural awareness of our use of them. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), explains how in the course of the last few years much of our discourse on new technologies has been driven by an unexpected and, in many ways, inexplicable development: the availability of almost unlimited data storage and data‐processing capabilities at ever‐decreasing ‐ and often almost negligible ‐ costs. As digitally intelligent designers and structural engineers have not failed to notice, this simple, almost banal technical development has the potential to disrupt the way we design and calculate almost everything.
The first digital turn in architecture changed our ways of making; the second changes our ways of thinking. Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn, Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted—no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new technical logic of the digital age: digital mass-customization (the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost) has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything, and the same technology applied to commerce at large is now heralding a new society without scale—a flat marginal cost society where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. But today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind.
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