ABSTRACT
With the rapid evolution of digital capability in design and construction comes an emergent engagement with “performativity” in architecture, understood to be the direct engagement of the occupants of architectural space with its behavior. But viewed more broadly in the context of how architecture is conceived and made tangible and useful—the paradigms of project delivery—performativity is more profound. With increasingly powerful computers, data models, and algorithms, design methodology and its parallel processes in construction become more reliant on information, computation, analytics, and simulation, and their results become simultaneously more projective. This chapter proposes a theory of performative delivery and explores how technology thereby enables design and construction to be more precise and predictable, and as such much more broadly relevant to architects, builders, clients, and users of buildings by transforming the processes, risks, and rewards that are the systemic foundation of architecture itself.
