ABSTRACT
Praxis: Your career has spanned the emergence of digital technologies in archi-
tecture. You began practising in the late 1980s, before the computer became
readily available as a design tool, and yet today digital technologies are so
thoroughly embedded in your creative process that your work seems almost
inconceivable without them. It is fascinating then that Mark Burry, with whom
you have collaborated extensively over the years, recently wrote that there is
continuity from pre-to post-digital in your work. How has the incorporation
of these technologies affected your design? Do you feel your work is differ-
ent from that of architects whose exposure to architecture always included the
technique. Technology, or technological change, is most essentially a stretch-
ing of cognitive aptitude to assimilate a changed technical standard. It is, of
course, a deeply philosophical issue, but might be thought as: what is the
desire for technology in architecture? We’re trying to understand the mental
aptitude that is proffered within the broad range of architecture’s operations
under the infl uence of ‘the digital’ – creative process, formal potential, fabri-
cation technique. Historically, technological assimilation has not necessarily
been made by people with technical profi ciency in the new medium (Rodin
claimed to having captured movement where Muybridge hadn’t!), and we
would do well to recognize that technology is not just mastery of technique
but a mental assimilation of the new, a fundamental cognitive shift (Rodin
‘doing cinema’ in bronze . . .)
Certainly digital technologies have changed our work markedly, both
in the way we approach design as well as in the technical mandate that we
increasingly pursue. Our recent work is virtually inconceivable without digital
processes. But I feel fortunate to be bridging different modes of praxis, as we
learned to draw with one technology and then had to expand our creative
capacity to appropriate another. As a result, we may be more cognizant of this
shift than architects and designers who emerged in parallel with digital tech-
nologies. But whenever new technologies emerge, certain capacities are lost
and others are gained, and nostalgia in this regard is really misplaced; simply
a new standard is in the offi ng that intellect has need to explore. Our work
absolutely exists between two modalities of praxis, and purely digital practi-
tioners will emerge with different aptitudes and different sensibilities.
