Architecture in Formation- On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture

Architecture in Formation

On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture

Edited by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher

© 2014 – Routledge,   352 pages | 348 B/W Illus.

Table of Contents

1. Structuring Information: Toward an Architecture of Information Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Rocker-Lange Architects, Antoine Picon 

2. Information Interfaces: Data and Information George Legendre, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Bury, Yehuda Kalay, Omar Khan, Jason Kelly Johnson, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa, Michael Wen-Sen Su 

3. Responsive Information Alessandra Ponte, Anna Dyson, Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Philippe Rahm, Lydia Kallipoliti, Alexandros Tsamis, Neeraj Bhatia, Jenny Sabin, Luc Courschene, Chris Perry 

4. Evolutionary Information Karl Chu, Eisenman Architects, Preston Scott Cohen, Michael Hansmeyer, Chandler Ahrens, Andrew Saunders, Alexis Meier 

5. Extensive Information: Material Information Ciro Najle, Nader Tehrani, Saturo Sugihara, Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto, Roland Snooks, Philip Beesley, Achim Menges 

6. Information Affect Greg Lynn, Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger, Michael Young, Eric Goldemberg, Francois Roche, Ruy Klein, Martin Bressani, Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter

INTRODUCTION: [excerpt]

Architecture in Formation comprises a dialog among architectural theorists, historians, and experimental architects based on the many and complex relationships between information processing and its representation. This collection of historical examinations, critical essays, and design projects provides a cross analysis that aims to re-conceptualize the current state of the discipline of architecture as it has become, of late, increasingly structured around advances in computation.

We follow the trajectory of a critical, alternative axis deviating from the way digital technology has usually been understood since its widespread adoption in the 1990뭩. While previous trajectories privileged a visual logic, thus repressing digital architecture to a merely representational role, we emphasize the architectural specificity of a disciplinary potential, which recognizes the role of computation in actually processing the relational capacity of systems and structures. Our ambition is to produce both a historical venture against the mere actualization of technology and an intellectual understanding of the digital project through the more generalized notion of Information. However, we are not proposing to dismiss visual and formal logic. Rather, we hope to foster the integration of these levels of cognition and representation with deeper, usually inaccessible, relational structures. 

An architecture of information implies the constitution of a critical, intermediary, and abstract interface-space that is capable of transforming the discipline by mediating the relationships among cognitive structures, codes, information processing, and form. The associated disciplinary shift drives a general movement towards engaging an emergent, formal aesthetic that is based upon profound structuring relationships. In particular, due to the increasing ease of writing and manipulating computer programming codes, the architecture community recently began to question the hidden, form-giving roles of software developers, thereby precipitating a new 밺econstruction� of software structures to produce novel, unexpected modes of architectural design. Yet, this questioning also provoked the emergence of a form of structuralism, one that would have to be displaced in order to avoid the idealistic dimension of the architectural object � even as the object itself becomes invisibly embedded into reactive and dynamic systems. Such an object-system, then, would necessarily consider architectural design in terms of latent possibilities. 

In this volume, the architectural questions inferred by information structures and interfaces have been framed through our combined dialectical and editorial voices, the result of which necessarily redefines both the limits and nature of the discipline. Specifically, our dialectical positions address the intrinsic, disciplinary notions of representation, information standardization, and formal autonomy, as well as extrinsic notions regarding the boundaries of the discipline. This dialectical approach is investigated in three forms: interviews, curated essays, project essays and experimental projects, the summation of which generates the necessary conflicts, contradictions, and continuities capable of reorganizing certain fundamentals of the discipline as it continues to expand through computation.

This book consists of six chapters. Each chapter in this book begins with an interview and ends with an extended, critical essay. Together, they frame the chapter뭩 specific discourse Inquiring the nature of information. By specifically fostering a progression from conceptual to perceptual structures, each chapter reveals a particular cartography of influences and cross relationships of the featured theorists, historians, and practitioners. This cartography takes the form of a crowdsourcing diagram depicting the informational content of each chapter, thereby offering alternative, formal readings of the chapter. The six chapters are:

Chapter 1, Structuring Information introduces the historical, theoretical, and conceptual backgrounds underlying current architectural explorations of various information systems, codes, and cognitive structures. In this chapter, architectural historians, theoreticians, and experimental practitioners question the multi-layered role of information in architecture. 

Chapter 2, Information Interfaces explores the nature of abstract systems that process data and induce information. This chapter includes an overview of relational systems in architecture � in particular, the mathematical principles and protocols that layer information. 

Chapter 3, Responsive Information investigates interactive systems in the context of the contemporary production of spaces and environments. This third topological level features experimental projects and essays expressing the potential of responsive systems in terms of their spatial and programmatic organizations. 

Chapter 4, Evolutionary Information addresses questions regarding both the use of evolutionary protocols in architecture and the innovations arising out of evolutionary, time-based architectural systems and topologies. 

Chapter 5, Material Information focuses on the extensive aspects of information systems through an investigation of the various processing logics derived from forces acting upon materials � even as these systems challenge categories and intuitive assumptions.. 

Chapter 6, Information Affect extends the preceding discourse on materiality, while also scrutinizing the role of deep structures � both relative to the output of information, and within the context of spatial perception.