Digital Culture In Architecture

Today’s explosive developments in digital technology have also affected architecture and the urban landscape. The new possibilities opened up by digital simulation have led to an increasingly strategic approach to planning, an approach based on generating scenarios, which thus represents a radical departure from traditional planning. From the preliminary sketch all the way to the production of individual building components, digital tools offer new possibilities that were still inconceivable just a few years ago. This volume provides a profound introduction to the important role of digital technologies in design and execution. In four chapters, the author systematically examines the influence of digital culture on architecture but also on the urban landscape as well as product design. The relationship of digital architecture to the city is also an important focus.

A cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the World Trade Center. The gigantic is everywhere, and gigantism is manifest in everything from excessively tall skyscrapers to globe-spanning digital networks. In this book, Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel map and critique the trajectory of gigantism in architecture and digital culture—the convergence of tall buildings and networked infrastructures—from the Eiffel Tower to One World Trade Center. They show how these two forms of gigantism intersect in the figure of the skyscraper with a transmitting antenna on its roof, a gigantic building that is also a nodal point in a gigantic digital infrastructure. Steiner and Veel focus on two paradigmatic tower sites: the Eiffel Tower and the Twin Towers of the destroyed World Trade Center (as well as their replacement, the One World Trade Center tower). They consider, among other things, philosophical interpretations of the Eiffel Tower; the design and destruction of the Twin Towers; the architectural debates surrounding the erection of One World Trade Center on the Ground Zero site; and such recent examples of gigantism across architecture and digital culture as Rem Koolhaas's headquarters for China Central TV and the phenomenon of the “tech giant.” Examining the cultural, architectural, and media history of these towers, they analyze the changing conceptions of the gigantism that they represent, not just as physical structures but as sites for the projection of cultural ideas and ideals.

This book offers a unique insight to the teaching and practice of architects and engineers.

From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere’s engaging volume. In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes. A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age. “This is an excellent book. It gives an almost complete overview of the main trends and view of what is generally called digital culture through the whole post-war period, as well as a thorough exposition of the history of the computer and its predecessors and the origins of the modern division of labor.”—Journal of Visual Culture

A theory of place for interaction design.

Over the last few decades the increasingly collaborative work developed among architects, urban planners, artists and media designers has developed a particular landscape of projects that engage information technology as a catalytic tool for expanding, augmenting or altering the public and social interactions in the urban space. Through the projects and prototypes presented, the book aims to dissect the modes in which spatial practitioners operate in the digital city and how information technology and media are tools for place making. Interacting, Integrating, Expanding, Networking and Hacking are the five categories that explore modes of operating in the digital city. The line of inquiry set up through the research framework of the book begins from the reading of the contemporary urban conditions as the shared, the common, the smart, and the networker.

This open access book focuses on the development of methods, interoperable and integrated ICT tools, and survey techniques for optimal management of the building process. The construction sector is facing an increasing demand for major innovations in terms of digital dematerialization and technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, advanced manufacturing, robotics, 3D printing, blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence. The demand for simplification and transparency in information management and for the rationalization and optimization of very fragmented and splintered processes is a key driver for digitization. The book describes the contribution of the ABC Department of the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) to R&D activities regarding methods and ICT tools for the interoperable management of the different phases of the building process, including design, construction, and management. Informative case studies complement the theoretical discussion. The book will be of interest to all stakeholders in the building process - owners, designers, constructors, and faculty managers - as well as the research sector.

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.