Arch Design

Arch. Design“The interference of the digital and the appropriation of the new technologies as a means and a support are equally being felt at the level of the environment of the project (that is, at the very level of the architec-tonical conception), which is showing the strain of the pressure of information technology and informatiza-tion that it has been undergoing for two decades now, to the extent that new instruments, methodologies and organizational practices are appearing in the carrying out of the architectural project. Architecture which has a parallel history to that of the instruments it tames is presently appropriating the new technologies. Even if diverging opinions may be aroused, it is doing without traditional instruments in favor of an efficient envi-ronment of computerized machines that plan to evolve into a ‘self-generative and self-referential’ system – a new digital environment that offers methods and ap-plications whose aim is to enable architectural activ-ity. […] In that process the development of the CAD sector should be pinpointed, understood as an instru-mental development but, most of all a methodological one, which holds the promise of an environment pro-vided with intelligence and intervention, able to pro-vide imaginative models, generative procedures (in-corporating dynamism in representation) and systems of thought based on casuistry. The new technological paradigm [also] affects working practices, which are now real networking collaborations, but also the way buildings are built and even how they function. With three-dimensional modulation supported by interfaces of instant visualization and experimentation, as well as management and manufacturing software (the ‘para-metric CAD’ and the ‘CADCAM’), the frontiers be-tween conception and production, collapse. […]. Ar-chitecture is also reconfiguring itself […] It is moving towards coexisting with new forms of human interac-tion and incorporating technologies that make possible connections to the telematic environments […]. Today we are beginning to focus on the idea of an Intelligent Architecture and to reflect upon the limits of architec-tural prosthesis. The new building valorizes the incor-poration of technology, self-regulation, interactivity and connection to cyberspace, pointing to a profound reformulation of architectural practice which, accord-ing to Ted Krueger, is centered on the behavior and the interfaces of the intelligent and interfaces of the intelligent and interactive environment. […] Ted Krueger, for his part, in “Metadermis as a second skin” claims […]: ‘Instead of an architecture that ar-ticulates intelligent impulses, we can imagine an ar-chitecture that articulates intelligent impulses, we can imagine an architecture that possesses intelligence”: Real intelligence, far from being a mere optimized management of the building. It also seems legitimate to affirm that, in a particular sphere of architecture that is not indifferent to the range of new possibilities, [in Krueger words] ‘the core of the project is moving away from shape to concentrate on the behaviors and interfaces required by intelligent and interactive envi-ronments’.”

IN:
Gonçalo Furtado, Notes on the space of Digital Technique, Oporto: Mimesis, 2002, pp.


(See also:Ted Krueger, Metadermis as a Second Skin”, in: Gonçalo Furtado and Rui Afonso (eds), Architecture-Machine and Body: Notes on the new technologies in Architecture”, Oporto: Faup Publicaçoes, 2006, pp.91-102)