The Ebb and Flow of Digital Innovation: From Form Making to Form Finding ‐ and Beyond

Abstract

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?

Organization, atmosphere, and digital technologies: Designing sensory order

“…This talks to Carpo’s argument of digital technology challenging Modernist principles by letting ‘ornamentation’ back in (2016) and architectural authorship (2013). Following Carpo ‘ornamentation’, as excessive algorithmic shapes and forms, tends to create a ‘feeling of alienation’ (Carpo, 2016: 83).…”

“…Following Carpo ‘ornamentation’, as excessive algorithmic shapes and forms, tends to create a ‘feeling of alienation’ (Carpo, 2016: 83). Likewise, digital technology opening for collaborative practices, constitutes a threat for the architect’s authorial status as it reduces the architect to curator and form finder (Carpo, 2013: 60).…”

“…Forms are becoming less and less about conscious formation, and when mediated digitally, we have digital simulations that allow the relatively unskilled to rapidly generate different models until intuitively one just fits. For Carpo (2013),digital tools favour and foster the elimination of humanistic and modern authorship: in one case, to the advantage of social actors and networks; in the other, to the advantage of the equally unpredictable forces of nature and of their capacity to evolve and self-organize. (p. 60)…”

“…The atmosphere is created through relational interaction, which is of both a social and sensory order, a sensory and affective spatial process that disassembles the mimetic representation of space. These changes in digital technology, according to Carpo, challenge both core Modernist architectural principles (2016: 83) and architectural authorship (2013: 58).…”

Architecture as symbolic reverence for nature: case studies: Seed Cathedral – 21st Century and Pigeons’ Monastery – 16th Century

“…It then elevates the aggregation of a small piece to a monumental scale. Along with New Materialist discourses which consider matter to have morphogenetic capacities [13], brick has exhibited a vibrant range of such spontaneously inclinations. As a singular object it has an innate tendency to connect and unite to shape a coherent whole.…”