Introduction

Architecture in Formation comprises a dialog among architectural theorists, historians, and experimental architects based on the many and complex relationships between information processing and its representation. This collection of historical examinations, critical essays, and design projects provides a cross analysis that aims to re-conceptualize the current state of the discipline of architecture as it has become, of late, increasingly structured around advances in computation. We follow the trajectory of a critical, alternative axis deviating from the way digital technology has usually been understood since its widespread adoption in the 1990s. While previous trajectories privileged a visual logic, thus repressing digital architecture to a merely representational role, we emphasize the architectural specificity of a disciplinary potential, which recognizes the role of computation in actually processing the relational capacity of systems and structures. Our ambition is to produce both a historical venture against the mere actualization of technology and an intellectual understanding of the digital project through the more generalized notion of Information. However, we are not proposing to dismiss visual and formal logic. Rather, we hope to foster the integration of these levels of cognition and representation with deeper, usually inaccessible, relational structures. An architecture of information implies the constitution of a critical, intermediary, and abstract interface-space that is capable of transforming the discipline by mediating the relationships among cognitive structures, codes, information processing, and form. The associated disciplinary shift drives a general movement toward engaging an emergent, formal aesthetic that is based upon profound structuring relationships. In particular, due to the increasing ease of writing and manipulating computer programming codes, the architecture community recently began to question the hidden, form-giving roles of software developers, thereby precipitating a new “deconstruction” of software structures to produce novel, unexpected modes of architectural design. Yet, this questioning also provoked the emergence of a form of structuralism, one that would have to be displaced in order to avoid the idealistic dimension of the architectural object – even as the object itself becomes invisibly embedded into reactive and dynamic systems. Such an object-system, then, would necessarily consider architectural design in terms of latent possibilities. In this volume, the architectural questions inferred by information structures and interfaces have been framed through our combined dialectical and editorial voices, the result of which necessarily redefines both the limits and nature of the discipline. Specifically, our dialectical positions address the intrinsic, disciplinary notions of representation, information standardization, and formal autonomy, as well as extrinsic notions regarding the boundaries of the discipline. This dialectical approach is investigated in four forms: interviews, curated essays, project essays and experimental projects, the summation of which generates the necessary conflicts, contradictions, and continuities capable of reorganizing certain fundamentals of the discipline as it continues to expand through computation. With regards to current, alternative scenarios, this collection of essays and projects also aims to critique the current dialectical reasoning that has emerged with the pervasive use of computer codes and information processing. Rather than presenting a counter argument, however, we have sought to organize discourses relative to deeper conceptual and perceptual structures without privileging one for the other, the result of which is the integration of different arguments into a more complex spectrum of architectural

INTRODUCTION

performance. In response, Architecture in Formation proposes addressing both of these perspectives with the objective of achieving a potential synergy between the two, especially with respect to the experimental projects featured in this book. Considering this collection of projects and essays, one may well question whether the architecture of these experimental practitioners actually indexes technological or cultural questions relative to architecture. For us, the more interesting problem has been that all of the participants in this book deal with technology in such a way that for any decision they made, there was an associated aesthetic appreciation dependent upon these topological levels. For instance, architects working with visual logic tend to dismiss the underlying structuring of form, which is also structured by technology through representation, while architects merely dealing with relational logic tend to dismiss the autonomy of form once it is constituted, thereby dismissing the quality of the constituted object and its capacity to affect reality. This book consists of six chapters. Each chapter begins with an interview and ends with an extended critical essay. Together, they frame the chapter’s specific discourse inquiring the nature of information. By specifically fostering a progression from conceptual to perceptual structures, each chapter reveals a particular cartography of influences and cross relationships of the featured theorists, historians, and practitioners. This cartography takes the form of a crowdsourcing diagram depicting the informational content of each chapter, thereby offering alternative, formal readings of the chapter. The six chapters are:

Chapter 1, Structuring Information, introduces the historical, theoretical, and conceptual backgrounds underlying current architectural explorations of various information systems, codes, and cognitive structures. In this chapter, architectural historians, theoreticians, and experimental practitioners question the multi-layered role of information in architecture – all the way from its most abstract layers to the most concrete ones relating to bodily affection, by reflecting upon the many and complex relationships between information processes and architecture. The resulting discussion forms an initial topological level, which is used to organize the overall structure of the remaining chapters.