Mirko Zardini Archaeologists of the Digital —Some Field Notes Where to Begin?
The obvious would have been to start from the intense debate over the digital in architecture that coalesced during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s — a debate that has accompanied most of the production and discussion in the field ever since — that has been well documented in periodicals, books and websites and assessed by countless authors and commentators. We decided, however, to suspend this natural instinct and start instead from a handful of ground-breaking projects. Our task, in line with recent works in media archaeology, focused on investigating concrete ideas and results of these foundational digital works. We inspected a series of layers — authors, machines, software, companies, related disciplines, institutions, etc. — not only to articulate a historical account but, more importantly, to better understand the context that allowed these projects (and technologies) to achieve prominence. Archaeology of the Digital is a project envisioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), curated by Greg Lynn, based on the acquisition and collection of approximately twentyfive projects. These works were produced between the late 1980s and the early 2000s and embody inventive ways of engaging the digital. This first phase — entitled Archaeology of the Digital, comprising an exhibition and this publication presents four pioneering works by Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh. In all fairness, a fifth actor should be added to this list; an inanimate actor who takes different forms and names: machine, computer, manual, software, code, script, etc. This technological constituent — sought, found, tested, modified and even invented by the architects themselves in order to realize their ultimate vision — attained a life of its own and made the production of these projects possible.
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Which Digital?
Defining what we meant by digital, when the word is relentlessly used to describe anything produced with the assistance of a computer — an almost unavoidable condition nowadays — proved to be a hard task. However, the digital we refer to in this archaeology is not defined by this pervasive usage of technology, nor is it defined solely by the use of computing power in the search for higher efficiency and speed of production. The digital we refer to is defined by experimental projects and ideas, from a specific period of time, which engaged proactively in the creation and use of digital tools to reach otherwise inaccessible results.
Why this Period?
The connection between cybernetics and architecture can be traced back to the 1960s, to places like England and the United States, and to people like Lionel March or Christopher Alexander, among many others. Early collaborations focused on analyzing complex architectural and urban problems and creating environments that brought the user and the computer closer and represented a new way of thinking about architectural possibilities. In this context, the association of Cedric Price and Gordon Pask for the Fun Palace project is a prime example. As noted by Stanley Mathews, at that moment, the latest advances in cybernetic technology appeared to hold endless promise as a means of reconciling “bricks and mortar” with the multivalent and ever changing functions and programs of the project. For the Fun Palace, Price had hoped that an autonomous cybernetic control system would allow users to shape their own environments.1 But it was during the late 1980s and the 1990s, when architectural research and development enterprises pressed for intensive investigations in technological advancement and computerbased tools, that the digital became instrumental in the definition of particular visions and a new architectural direction. Moreover,
1 For further accounts on Pask and Price’s collaboration, see Stanley Mathews, “The Beginnings of the Fun Palace,” in From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 74–75.
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the 1990s were notably defined by the field’s near-total dismissal of history and theory, which were promptly replaced by technology driven practices. This change was further intensified by the easy access to the World Wide Web, cellular telephones, software and computational capacity, among countless other tools. Interestingly, this period was also the beginning of a vanishing interest in the “public” component of architecture. This waning — furthered today by policy reforms that are weakening even Europe’s welfare states — provided fertile ground for architectural projects to be construed as interiorized tasks. The results were frequently ideas of architecture where the entity achieved leading importance, often to the detriment of multiple external circumstances that offered less and less resistance. The projects resulting from this shift are often in sharp contrast with the friction we see and experience in the world today and seem to celebrate a vision of harmonious, fluid environments devoid of conflict. Why Archaeology?
A few current trends in media studies seek to displace or exclude the social, cultural, economic and political context from research. Recent conceptual developments in architecture, usually justified by the idea that the electronic and the mechanical ages are incompatible worlds in collision, are emerging from a similarly exclusive vacuum that fosters a self-referential and hermetic discourse. According to Sanford Kwinter, continuing to think in such sterile ways can have no other effect than to hide from ourselves their political dimension.2 The archaeology in Archaeology of the Digital is then a model of exploration that provides the framework needed to inspect archives and projects. The close readings of different media, recordings, professional affiliations, tools, software and processes, offer compelling evidence that history is not a seamless, progressive story but rather an incessantly rewritten narrative, modified by new scrutiny.
2 See Sanford Kwinter, “The Computational Fallacy,” Thresholds 26 (Spring 2003), 90–91.
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A (Great) Loss?
The idea of archaeology, in the case of this first exhibition,also suggests a great sense of loss. A loss marked by the fact that most of the digital material produced for these projects — with the exception of Frank Gehry’s Lewis House — has been lost. As noted by Greg Lynn in his introduction to this book, “The iterations of digital files, the native digital objects and data-sets, as well as the tools and machines used in their production are disappearing with every migration to a new operating system, every move of an office and every upgrade in hardware.” Will it be possible to research these projects without having access to their digital files? The imminent danger of losing even more digital records compelled us to take a first step towards collecting this type of material. While we are not sure what the future of this enterprise looks like, we do believe that the work could not be further delayed and, given the challenges and scale of the tasks ahead, we look forward to seeing other institutions join and collaborate with this initiative.
Why the CCA?
The initial efforts on behalf of the CCA to examine — within a more general context — early digital experiments in architecture can be traced back to November 2004, to a seminar entitled Devices of Design, held in collaboration with the Daniel Langlois Foun dation. The scope of the meeting was to investigate the different strategies deployed by architects, during the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, in their search for new ways of imagining and building architecture. Briefly outlined, Bernard Cache’s Non-standard Digital Folding and Greg Lynn’s Going Primitive conceptually anchored the gathering, following Derrick De Kerckhove’s introduction to the subject, a reflection on the role of paper by Marco Frascari, Peter Galison’s discourse on the image and logic traditions, the role of the black screen and white paper by Mark Wigley, and an exploration on the geometry and numeric by Mario Carpo. Following the seminar was a more specific research project by Greg Lynn entitled the Embryological House. The ambition of the investigation was to rethink the notion of the manufactured
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house, from the modernist idea of a form based on parts and modules, and create a new concept, based on unlimited iterations deriving from a “primitive form.” The Embryological House was also a landmark within the CCA Collection as it was one of the first cases where we had to fully engage in working with digital material. What Next?
Archaeology of the Digital is the first of a series of exhibitions, publications, and seminars being developed by the CCA to take place over the next few years. It is an incessant collaborative project with the instrumental curatorial contribution of Greg Lynn and the work and projects of a number of architects and designers. These professionals’ steady commitment to this project has been and will continue to be critical in defining the framework for CCA’s tasks ahead, and will certainly complement the investigation, interpretation and exhibition of their work. Furthermore, Archaeology of the Digital is a transformative internal force for the CCA to rethink the approach and structure required to engage the challenges posed by digitally-produced and -stored material. It is a first step towards collecting and documenting digital material. Just as important, it is an imperative phase for the emergence of a process of cataloguing, preserving, storing and accessing digital records and related media for future researchers. Like some works on media archaeology, ours is an effort in reading the new against the grain of the past; of constructing, as Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka suggest, alternate histories with often suppressed or neglected materials that do not necessarily point to the final results and where projects, even when never materialized, have important stories to tell.3 To be continued . . .
3 See the introduction to Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikka, Media Archæology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 8.
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Too often in architecture, the word digital has been qualified by the words: in the future. Whether interactive, hyper-surface, liquid or printed, digital was described with promises. Curiously, while historians and theorists have gravitated from canonic modernism towards mid-century or post-war modernist positions and have been acute in their analysis of the impact of media, publications, television, film and advertising on design and construction, a similar study of digital technology has been very clearly avoided. The theoretical tone surrounding digital media in architecture was typically established by young designers and the periodicals that published them, which treated such work as promissory, or even worse, as proclamations of the future. Following the very tight alignment of postmodern architects with theorists, there has been a schism between design and history/ theory that roughly corresponds to the emergence and integration of digital media in the architectural field. In a vacuum of theory designers using computation began to describe their process as “experimental” without stating the hypotheses on which they were founded, making any results impossible to evaluate qualitatively. History repeated itself like so many Architectural Design special issues, with happy accidents rediscovered over and over again while mindless variety was celebrated for its own sake, without theoretical, cultural, artistic or disciplinary criteria. The book and exhibition Archaeology of the Digital assume that technology can no longer be discussed in the future but in the recent past. The engagement with digital technology in Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence (1989–95), Peter Eisenman’s Frankfurt Biozentrum (1987), Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere and Iris Dome (1988–94), and Shoei Yoh’s Odawara Gymnasium and Galaxy Toyama Hall (1990–92) reveal nothing promissory or incomplete. Even more interestingly, for these four projects the architects had already clearly formulated a role
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for digital technology as they began to incorporate new digital tools into their creative process. Each architect knew what he wanted and either sought out specific hardware and software or engaged programmers to invent the tools needed to realize his vision of a digital medium. Although the designers were all using technology in new ways that were unfamiliar to them, they were guided by a creative and critical mandate that allows for quali tative evaluation. The projects presented here are not a collection of happy accidents produced by dilettantes and amateurs but rather thoughtful developments by architects with a deep knowledge of the discipline and a great perspicacity for digital tools. Ironically, when Frank Gehry claims that he can’t use a computer and when Peter Eisenman forgets he even used one for the Biozentrum project, young architects and critics take them at their word. Gehry may have the greatest insight of any architect into the language of surfaces and patterns of panels that precipitate from digital technology and he is certainly the only architect who also runs a significant software and digital services company parallel to his design practice. Eisenman moved from procedural formal experiments reliant on manual drafting and model building directly into the medium of scripted formal pro cedures without need for even a visual interface. In each and every case Hoberman, Yoh, Eisenman and Gehry approached the digital medium with insight and intelligence, treating the digital not merely as a tool but as a new creative medium that is integral to and an extension of their design process. Architecture has always been a complicated discipline for collecting institutions as these institutions are not in the business of acquiring completed buildings but rather the evidence of critical moments in the design process: sketches, drawings, correspondence, working models, presentation models, renderings and full scale mock-ups. The products of design for an architect, as well as agreed upon medium(s) for design, elude the clean categorizations of sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, film, graphic design and industrial design. And yet the curatorial and departmental divisions found in most museums influence the range of objects that architectural curators premiate. The hand-drawn sketch, drafted plan and section, watercolour, zip-a-tone coloured print, study model and presentation model form the architectural currency of institutions and drive the research of the scholars who populate them. By now these media
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are well understood; their use can be intelligently speculated upon and potentially attributed to an architect’s intent and technical virtuosity. Historians and theorists trained in schools of art and architecture are expected to be masters of the principles and technical intricacies of these different media allowing them to discriminate whether a sketch, drawing, illustration, model or mock-up is pivotal to a designer’s creative process. Curatorial or scholarly discernment is central to the process of selecting which materials are worthy of exhibition and collection and which are peripheral or result from the rote requirements of realizing a building. So museums have been able to select which models, sketches and drawings to collect and exhibit by relying on this expertise. What is at stake in the selection of archival materials is that the institutionalized identification of relevant moments in the design process — and the objects that provide this evidence — define what we understand as architectural creativity, invention, criticality, authorship and quality. The architect’s studio encompasses partners, architects and designers, not to mention broader project teams that also include clients, officials, engineers, other design specialties, renderers and the manufacturing and building trades. Architecture can be understood as a nexus between design media and a complex and collaborative team of authors. Sculpture and painting have a long history of using measured drawings, sketches, mock-ups and geometrical description as well as employing the services of engineers, fabricators and apprentices. With the advent of digital media, more sculpture and fine art practices start to resemble architecture studios once again, as they did in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But while digital media certainly influences these art practice today, in architecture it is becoming impossible to understand the creative medium without addressing the role of the computer. It is a fact that very few, if any, architecture collecting institutions hold digital files in their native design format for research or exhibition. So the story of any particular recent design is exhibited and judged by sketches (and diagrams), drawings (and digitally drafted 2D documents), illustrations (and digital renderings), models (often laser cut, CNC manufactured or 3D printed) and mock-ups (or digitally fabricated pavilions). So digital media has slotted into all the existing categories of the architectural object; to future scholars and viewers the shift in media will be
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apparent in the form, material and perhaps precision of these tried-and-true objects. However, the iterations of digital files, the native digital objects and data sets, and the tools and machines used in their production are disappearing with every migration to a new operating system, every move of an office and every upgrade in hardware. Will it be possible to understand the development of a project using renderings, models and 2D plans without the milestone 3D digital data sets that underlay them? Can a scholar thoroughly research the archives of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman or Shoei Yoh without access to the various digital media they were producing at a certain moment in time? Although the primacy of the sketch, model and drawing may not wane, will the digital data supporting or adjacent to these objects be judged worthy of exhibition, research and preservation? Digital media is not taught to historians and theorists in the same manner that the received practices of drawing are taught. One expects a historian to understand — if not to be able to construct — technical and descriptive drawings such as one- and two-point perspective, axonometry, stereometric projection, plans, sections and elevations, and be able to coordinate models at different scales and in different media used to study different attributes of a design process. However, when it comes to digital tools, the most fundamental distinctions between spline, polygon and solid geometries were mysteries to historians and theorists who, with few exceptions, misunderstood the computer as an image rendering machine whose products were to be evaluated on a stylistic basis. Even more problematic was the story of a generation gap promoted by recent graduates who claimed to provide the digital know-how and technology as if they had emerged fully formed and without mentors or precedent. The digital innovations did not result from desktop computers being thrown into “paperless studios” for faculty and students to bang on like monkeys at typewriters. In fact, the computer was not an alien technology but more correctly an extension and invention based on many of the design methods that emerged as historicist postmodernism waned. The myth of happy accidents and unmotivated experiments could have been the product of a knowledge gap between designers and theorists or it might have had other causes. The net result was a shift from critical disci plinary use of technology to a more vocational and tool-driven
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approach that celebrated mindless variation without intellectual or cultural relevance. Archaeology of the Digital aims to dispel the story of vocational happy accidents through the evidence of the work of four architects who, at the peak of their creative and innovative output, directed the invention, development, use and artistic judgement of digital tools in the 1980s. Digital technology is well known within the field and never left architecture. The earliest digital models were made by (and with) architects whose specialty, by definition, is the geometric description and virtual modelling of physical objects. Although some of these tools migrated into aerospace and entertainment industries they did not stray far from architecture, nor ever needed re-introduction to bridge a creative or intellectual generation gap. What they did create was an intellectual curiosity gap between history/theory and design. Without grossly simplifying the work of each architect, these projects can be roughly described as marking out four very different visions for incorporating digital technology in design. For Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence, software, scanning and manufacturing technology were aligned to realize a formal expression that would have otherwise been impossible. The CATIA software used for both spline modelling and the ability to handle large data sets allowed a new language of surfaces and a new underlying structure to emerge. Point-scanning hardware used to digitize physical models was aligned with 3D printing outputs such as stereolithography and laminated object modelling to produce model components. The computer was not only used to document and deliver a project, but also influenced the development of an expressive design language for Gehry and his studio. In the architect’s sketches there is a gradual presence of wireframe-like surfaces as he notates the spline surface networks in his own hand. On the competition project for the Frankfurt Biozentrum, Peter Eisenman’s studio set out to use a computer to scale, position and iterate a formal language of amino acid symbols first in twodimensional plan and later in digitally constructed perspective and axonometric views. The digital technology to do so did not exist at the time for Eisenman, but because he was teaching at Ohio State University while completing the Wexner Center for the Arts, he had access to one of the most important computer
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visualization and modelling centres in the world. With Chris Yessios (who later founded FormZ) Eisenman developed a tool set that could generate 2D patterns and 3D volumes with a procedural formal logic; a digital counterpart to his existing vision for a rational linguistic tool capable of creating complex overlapping figures with intricate alignments, connections and scales by means of scripting logical statements that could be revised and repeated endlessly. The Biozentrum’s oscillation between written-out code and algorithms, between plotted arrays and plans drawn with adjustable triangles, and the ability to visualize the “spine” space using layers of objects based on their iterative generation was a hybrid of digital and analog design. Before the microphone was recording for the first interview with Eisenman, he claimed, “No computer was used on the Biozentrum; I was the computer.” He had to be reminded of the digital process from archival plots. Sadly, all native digital materials were lost between the Eisenman office and the Ohio State computer lab. What does remain are the pen plots, dot matrix prints, Xerox copies and enlargements, and faxes output from the OSU super computers. If Gehry and Eisenman staked out respective trajectories for high fidelity construction systems linked to new formal architectural expression, and the generation of a highly complex yet rationalized spatial and structural language, then Shoei Yoh and Chuck Hoberman had very different agendas for their uses of digital technology. Whereas Gehry and Eisenman were creating a language informed by digital technology, Yoh strove to find forms in natural and physical forces visualized by analytic digital tools. In his two gymnasium projects he used physical phenomena such as snow loads, wind forces, structural spans and natural light to create a structural frame whose pattern evoked natural forces and forms. He turned to digital technology with the ambition to express an optimized and complex pattern of the kind found in nature. The construction repertoire also relied more on structure and its expression than on massing or volume, as was the case for Gehry and Eisenman. The geometric and robotic ambition of Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere is self-evident. Less apparent is the role that digital technology played in the engineering and invention of the patented mechanisms, movements and spaces. His investigation of literal motion is distinct from the arrested or phenomenal
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motion present in the draped surfaces of Gehry’s models, in Eisenman’s dynamically unfolding notations and in Yoh’s frozen natural forces. Hoberman drafted the principles of transforming geometric motion and then wrote AutoLISP scripts to test the collisions and intersections that would define material thickness, profile and mechanism. Instead of using animation software to study the motion of objects with physical dimensions and mass, he wrote customized codes, visualized the results, revised the codes and engineered the mechanisms. These mechanisms were then manufactured at a small scale using the earliest 3D printing technology and at a large scale using computer numerically controlled (CNC) milling router tables and lathes, customizing each element of the transforming structure from aluminum billet, without tooling and casting. At the same time Hoberman was exploring the folding and bending behaviour of physical sheet materials, and their digitization, much like the geometrical origami work of the late David Hoffman. Already in the 1980s this diverse group of architects from the United States and Japan were using high resolution modelling of curved surfaces and masses; unfolding complex arrays of forms and shapes defined by algorithms and parameters; form-finding and optimizing structures evocative of natural and physical effects at an architectural scale; and testing the literal robotic motion and transformation of buildings through patented mechanisms and structures. These four projects establish a scope and variety of analog and digital materials which were then in rich dialogue with each other. Not one of the projects sprung fully formed from some software program, and in each case the digital tools were both guided by and compared to existing alternative methods so as to evaluate their quality. Three of the architects were in their late fifties and early sixties at the time. Furthermore, the impact of digital tools on drafting and the production of 2D drawings can be clearly seen in these projects. For Yoh, Gehry and Eisenman, underlays of digital centrelines were used on pin-bar printed Mylar sheets that were then drafted over manually. Across all four projects, the gulf between 3D digital models and the generation of 2D drawings was still wide and there was a lot of shuttling between plotting and manual drafting. The earlier impact of large-scale photocopiers capable of accurately scaling line drawings and images should also not
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be underestimated in preparing the creative minds of these architects. In the following pages, the use of scaling, combining and transforming drawings and images by photocopier is pre足 valent. These architects and their peers were among the earliest clients for proto-digital technologies like the photocopier, fax machine and FedEx package; all of which were already transforming the design process and creative vision of designers across the field. And the conventional narrative of the machine eventually replacing manual drafting tasks can also be found in these projects. During the design process the 3D digital data set went from points and lines in 3D space to plan and section cuts that were difficult to extract from a 3D model at the time. At first, these centre points and centrelines were manually drafted over with pinbars; later plans and sections were digitally drafted in the offices with some fidelity to the 3D digital models. Each of the designers and their collaborators was interviewed during the planning and preparation of this exhibition, much of the material has been transcribed and edited for this publication, and all of it, in digital format, is presently in the CCA Collection. The architects, the partners and designers in their studios, the specialists they worked with to develop custom software, the engineers they collaborated with for construction and the fabricators who were building their prototypes all have different perspectives on the design process and even different recollections of how work proceeded and how technology was used. The fabric of these first-person interviews is apparent not only in the video recordings but also in the objects included here. A selection of hardware annotated with specific processing, printing and depositing capacities as well as the cost of purchase, lease and operation accompanies the exhibition for comparison to technology today. It goes without saying that the smart phones carried in the pockets of exhibition visitors would outperform and store more data than the Cray supercomputers and Silicon Graphics workstations used for these architectural projects in the 1980s. But what I have found most compelling about this period is the intelligence and insight into the digital that was already present among these architects. Neither pioneers, guinea pigs, or neophytes, Gehry, Eisenman, Hoberman and Yoh would be better described as mastering the available digital technology through the strength of their
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creative and critical vision. They put new tools to use as a creative medium, and in many cases present-day designers have inherited much of their intelligence in the tools that were built by and for them.
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