ABSTRACT
THE COLLECTION OF ESSAYS included here span a 15-year period, 1990-2005,
which in many ways has been a remarkable time for the architectural fi eld
as digital technologies have become assimilated by universities and practices
globally. dECOi Architects has operated throughout this time as a research/
praxis initiative, alternating between academic and professional roles, some-
what disenfranchised in being a UK practice established in France, a country
with a notoriously idiosyncratic professional protocol. dECOi’s small size (typ-
ically three to fi ve people), together with the experimental opportunities it
has been presented with (innovation frequently mandated by clients/cura-
tors), has allowed it to respond to such digital uptake with unusual alacrity
and fl exibility – for example, in the ability to liaise extra-contractually with
technical researchers at foreign universities, or to involve mathematicians and
programmers, even robotic engineers, within its projects. Such ‘alacrity’, how-
ever, has had a diverse yet essentially ‘practical’ bias, given that such research
has been motivated by real-world projects, albeit often research initiatives
such as artworks; which has meant that ‘academic’ assessment has been
somewhat sporadic and happenstance. Yet throughout the period I have been
motivated to write about ‘praxis’, by which I mean the broad sweep of archi-
tectural endeavour, from creative impetus to actual fabrication. Sometimes my
analysis has been a ‘contextual’ assessment of a particular line of research,
but frequently it has taken the form of prospective and exploratory texts,
themselves the inquiring probe into new territory that then impelled design
exploration. Such writing has fi gured quite signifi cantly in the emergent dECOi
praxis, as very much part of the creative impetus. Many of the early texts, in
particular, yearn for an as-yet inexpressible cultural shift, and I include them
for their nascent sensibility.
