ABSTRACT
Architecture is undergoing epochal changes as drawing is replaced by digital design technologies. These technologies, chiefly building information modeling and computational design, are rapidly becoming the chief media of architectural design and communication. The salient characteristics of these technologies are (a) their use of a “three-dimensional” digital model as the design interface and (b) their incorporation of design parameters and building data in addition to building geometry. Such models are simulations, not only in the visual sense but also in the larger sense that they replace reality with its operational equivalent. 1 As simulations, such models both demand and produce in their users a new mode of visual perception. This has given rise to a positive feedback loop of advancements in the technology and increased reliance on the simulations it creates. Architecture is reaching a point of no return. Representational modes of seeing and thinking are going extinct and are now found primarily among an aging generation of architects whose activity and influence are on the wane. Architects are increasingly preoccupied with pre-experiencing their designs in realistic renderings and animations. They experiment with immersive environments and other types of virtual reality and eagerly adopt each new development of such technologies to endow their pre-experience with ever-greater degrees of realism. This elision of image and experience has profound consequences for architectural design and ideation.
