Abstract
Since the Nineties architectural thought employs the new language of software to describe, design, predict, simulate and evaluate form. Lately, digital technology has been enhancing new productive equipment: the virtually designed forms become prototypes and physical models. Computational design bequeaths a post-digital need for material and for fabrication: it’s the File-to-Factory age. Digital fabrication technologies actually have a deep impact on the fulfilment of architecture and on its design methods, above all. These facilities increase the level of control that architects have over the designed and consequently materialized architectural form. “Digital materiality” (Digital materiality in architecture, Zürich: Lars Müller Publishing, 2008) turns the digital into physical. This story telling uses some explanatory design experiences relating to the challenge of the traditional thinking of design. It explores the real changes in the way architects design and build the physical environment and foresee how to bring them into the real architectural practice.
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Notes
- 1.
S. Giedion with his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941) added time to the three dimensions of space (both real and virtual): these four aspects with information are the founding features of digital architecture.
- 2.
“After” is used following the meaning previously suggested by Davidson and Bates [1].
- 3.
Computational tools implement Genetic Algorithms (GA) to mathematically translate the natural rules of evolution; therefore architects can improve design with an open-ended form finding. The evolution process directly involves many cornerstone of biology, as fitness, genotype, and phenotype, own of performance-based design.
- 4.
S. Kwinter first published this statement in Thresholds (2003). He expresses a deep disjunction between the use of computerized methods in design and the computation. Therefore, the theoretician considers the increasing pervasiveness of computation in architecture. As a mechanistic process, Kwinter explains, the numerical processes become over-abstractions of physical processes. The consequence is an imposed order whose reality can be realized only through means of translating the representational to the physical.
- 5.
The main feature of computer language is that it is an iteration of procedures: as an a priori schema, based on Alexander’s logic diagrams, digital design shapes a potentially endless evolution. Digital culture lends a scientific aura to design practice, so architectural design is both deterministic and continuous. However, when researchers acquire digital logics as one’s own, they build up a system, which is totally different from the reductive use of software to draw architecture.
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Quartara, A. (2018). Architecture After the Digital Turn: Digital Fabrication Beyond the Computational Thought. In: Rossi, M., Buratti, G. (eds) Computational Morphologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60919-5_9
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