Architecture In The Digital Age

Submission by Marc Krawitz_Temple University Thesis Student

As architecture dives deeper and deeper into the digital revolution, and falls farther into ‘explorations’ in digital modeling and fabrication, at some point we as architects must look back on what we are doing, and the mode of working that we are engaging in.  It seems that this notion is being increasingly forgotten - that architecture and design is a product of process.  This stated does not simply refer to the figurative sense, but the literal one, regarding the idea that the way in which one works (material, technique, resources, philosophies, pedagogies, etc) directly guides how one makes and thinks about designing architecture.  It seems that research in scripting, 3D modeling, and parametric design processes (coupled with digital fabrication) are more often than not attempting to remove the hand of the designer from the results of the work through computational logic.  It, however, goes without saying that these designers will still emphatically claim not only ownership but also intellectual property over a disembodied design process.  This means in certain terms that the idea of a computational logic is kind-of bundled up within the constructed notion that architecture must rest on certain methodological or "inspirational" foundations - that architecture came from somewhere we did not invent. Be this from the 'natural' [architecture from nature], to the computational - or these days - the parametric, architecture has been removed from its origin as a divine work of human hands into a speculative array of process and production that rejects capricious ideas for the sake of argument.  An architect no longer says “good, this [thing] satisfies the divine order of the gods” but rather nowadays: "good, none of this is arbitrary," or "look how the logic of this thing comes from somewhere else."  One must question in this moment if we are really saying in aesthetic appeal: "look how many times I hit the random button until the computer produced something that I thought looked nice.”  It is appropriate to say that this argument isn't touching upon either the aesthetic or anti-aesthetic notions of form.  Merely, it states that we as designers must be fervent in how we structure these modes in which we design.  One cannot, with certainty, look back on their past and argue for why they chose to do this, rather than just saying that comes from a higher place; a deep love and passion for the making of things. It is in this way that architecture, or perhaps just design, can be understood as an arbitrary decision in and of itself.  It is therefore wholly unfair to judge the arbitrary position of architecture in the vacuum of a design process, since the quest for the arbitrary is fundamentally a structuralist quest for the origins of the work, which, if for this moment we can trust deconstruction, is an abysmal search in its simplest form.  It was one thing to employ the technology that we have invented in the means of figuring out or discovering new ways to build and new methods of thinking, but entirely another to support the production of building that utilizes a 3^rd party computational approach. To add to this issue, the production of these architectures often falls on the laser-cutter and cnc router to simply fulfill the crutch of people who don't actually know how to make or craft what they have produced on the computer.  In simple terms, if architects would like to continue to stand behind their work as "Architects" then they should be able to demonstrate beyond their capacity to simply be highly adept computer programmers.

It's not the nostalgic idea of the architect-craftsman that necessarily drives this argument, but rather a recognition that technology should be understood in its capacity to assist [as a tool], and not in its capacity to invent as a demiurge. I am not necessarily calling for a specific theoretical camp to overtake architecture.  Rather, I would like to call upon the people conducting this digital research to tell me at what point the computer stopped making their decisions for them and when they themselves started designing their buildings.