ABSTRACT
The integration of digital technologies into architectural design methods has resulted in changes beyond the immediate and pragmatic concerns regarding modes of production. This sense of shifting of historical foundations is further accentuated by the fact that the contemporary visual arts—which include architecture, sculpture, performance, media installations, graphic design, film, and the Internet—have pluralized and hybridized their once-separate disciplines. By drawing on philosophy and design theory and methods, as well as a history of art and architecture, the status of the architectural image has been examined from the standpoint of an inner logic of the design process that underlies all architectural expression. The architectural image is exceedingly important as it communicates a mode of thinking. The image, however, was found to be a slippery signifier. An ethnography of the architectural image has shifted its focus over time from the idealized representation to the indexical trace, to now the computational model endowed with generative capacities.
