The Second Digital Turn

Abstract

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.

Merging Physical and Digital in the Initial Design Stages of Architecture

“…Thompson first coined the term morphology as a way to study the deformation of form in living creatures through mathematical formulas [15,21]. In the architectural design context, morphology describes the topological continuity and the diversity of form and its continuous alteration [4,21].…”

Mereological Thinking: Figuring Realities within Urban Form

“…But, as has already become part of architectural history, advancing resolution had its second turn. 4 In the end, a computation is not a solitary function but framed by two states, or data assets: the input and the output. With increasing quantity and complexity, it is not the transforming calculus that is decisive, but its input and output: the states at its side, the quantity of these states, and the character of their distribution.…”

Fast wind prediction incorporated in urban city planning

“…The Digital Revolution, a jump from analog designing to digital, has enabled the processing of immense amounts of data and efficiently employing it in designing. 2 Creating architectural or urban designs requires considering multiple criteria, and, in the era of climate change, mainly those impacting the environmental performance. By leveraging hardware and digital design software, excessive sunlight, extreme cold or wind, and high air pollution, the motion pattern of people or vehicles can be incorporated into the design process and affect the character of architecture.…”