Digital Architecture Now

Presenting the hottest architectural visionaries from around the world, Digital Architecture Now celebrates the conceptual architects who are pushing digital design and software to their limits. In his introduction and concluding essay, Neil Spiller places this contemporary work in the context of recent developments and considers the future direction of digital architecture. The heart of the book features architects' best projects, presented in vivid, colourful and breathtaking detail through texts, plans and renderings that challenge our assumptions about 3-D space and redefine the future of architecture.

Presenting work by some of the most innovative practices across the globe: inspiring ideas for a world of more beautifully designed outdoor spaces Despite its importance to place-making, urban planning, and the environment, landscape design has often played an inferior role to architecture. Typically, as little as three percent of a project’s construction budget is allocated to the space that surrounds a building, but that is changing. A greater desire to blend buildings into their contexts, ecological considerations, legislation, and new definitions of “scaping” have opened up exciting possibilities. Coinciding with heightened social sensitivities, advances in material application, data-driven mapping techniques, and digital technologies and construction methods, landscape designers are producing a new wave of work around the world, reshaping gardens, public squares, leisure areas, and industrial parks. Among the practices included in this survey are designers who have bridged modernism with newer forms (Emergent, West 8); architects whose work fuses with the earth’s contours (Zaha Hadid, MVRDV); and a generation of designers only just emerging from universities. Nadia Amoroso is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto and has lectured at Harvard and Cornell universities.

Architecture in the Digital Age addresses contemporary architectural practice in which digital technologies are radically changing how buildings are conceived, designed and produced. It discusses the digitally-driven changes, their origins, and their effects by grounding them in actual practices already taking place, while simultaneously speculating about their wider implications for the future. The book offers a diverse set of ideas as to what is relevant today and what will be relevant tomorrow for emerging architectural practices of the digital age.

With the increasing sophistication of CAD and other design software, there is now a wide array of means for both designing and fabricating architecture and its components. The proliferation of advanced modelling software and hardware has enabled architects and students to conceive and create designs that would be very difficult to do using more traditional methods. The use of CAD technologies in the production of physical models, prototypes and individual elements is increasingly widespread through processes such as CAD/CAM, CNC milling and rapid prototyping. This translation of computer-generated data to physical artefact can also be reversed with devices such as a digitiser, which traces the contours of physical objects directly into the computer. This book focuses on the inspiring possibilities for architecture that can be explored with all the different technologies and techniques available for making complete designs or their components.

Architecture in Formation is the first digital architecture manual that bridges multiple relationships between theory and practice, proposing a vital resource to structure the upcoming second digital revolution. Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians and theorists look at how information processing informs and is informed by architecture. Twenty-nine experimental projects propose radical means to inform the new upcoming digital architecture. Featuring essays by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher, Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Ingeborg Rocker and Christian Lange, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges and Martin Bressani. Interviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, CiroNajle, and Greg Lynn. Projects by: Diller Scofidio and Renfro; Mark Burry; Yehuda Kalay; Omar Khan; Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab; Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa; Anna Dyson / Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE); Philippe Rahm; Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros Tsamis; Neeraj Bhatia, Infranet Lab; Jenny Sabin, Lab Studio; Luc Courschene, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT); Eisenman Architects; Preston Scott Cohen; Eiroa Architects; Michael Hansmeyer; Open Source Architecture; Andrew Saunders; Nader Tehrani, Office dA; Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis; Reiser and Umemoto; Roland Snooks, Kokkugia; Philip Beesley; Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger SPAN; Michael Young; Eric Goldemberg, Monad Studio; Francois Roche; Ruy Klein; Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.

But it's not just about articulating a variety of responses. Asking a question like "When is the digital in architecture?" can produce millions of stories in response and millions of digressions and redirections that narrow in focus and change geographies, producing a Tristram Shandy of the digital as the CCA continues to build its digital archive and make it increasingly accessible to researchers. If this novel of digressions is distributed across future research projects and extended with studies of new archival material, so much the better for the reader, in our opinion.

This book shows how to best present theoretical-technical information, data and images, making this title itself a cutting-edge additon to literature on the subject. The impact of digital technology on architecture has reshaped how may architects and designers work, software and hardware developments allow a greater degree of articulation and experimentation, advance visualisation of contextual impact and use can help to solve or avoid problems, and the technical advantages of applied digitisation are many and take many forms. These issues examined and discussed fully in this volume.

This book looks at relationships between the organization of physical objects in space and the organization of ideas. Historical, philosophical, psychological and architectural knowledge are united to develop an understanding of the relationship between information and its representation. Despite its potential to break the mould, digital information has relied on metaphors from a pre-digital era. In particular, architectural ideas have pervaded discussions of digital information, from the urbanization of cyberspace in science fiction, through to the adoption of spatial visualizations in the design of graphical user interfaces. This book tackles: the historical importance of physical places to the organization and expression of knowledge the limitations of using the physical organization of objects as the basis for systems of categorization and taxonomy the emergence of digital technologies and the twentieth century new conceptual understandings of knowledge and its organization the concept of disconnecting storage of information objects from their presentation and retrieval ideas surrounding ‘semantic space’ the realities of the types of user interface which now dominate modern computing.