ABSTRACT
In the decades following the end of World War II, the fields of architecture and computing became conceptually and operationally entangled. Emerging computational concepts and practices inflected design discourse, while design methods and spatial concepts influenced theories and practices of computing. A “medium” is not a stable category with definite characteristics and predilections. A medium can be a tool, but it also can be useless. It can be an object, but also an infrastructure. What a media approach does to the study of digital architecture is to provoke a change of focus: it shifts attention from the interpretation of buildings or artifacts made using digital instruments to the study of the technics, instruments, and processes that mediated their making. Talking about media necessitates consideration of the field they modulate, the infrastructure that supports them, the industries that produce them, the anthropo-technical conduits around them, the older media before them, and the techniques and theories embedded in them.
