from Delirium
Andrew Ghusn
There was a time when everything was told via mouth or picture. Stories, however, spread like wildfires regardless, and we are still being lit by their embers. The architecture of the past, the far past, was a form of storytelling we couldn’t live without. A way to share talk about our origin, we chronicle the way we live because we find it oh-so important to let people know of our right-doings. Stories of famines and wars and love and loss enclosed to a city (or even a room) for us to feel a lifeforce that passed but didn’t move on. Walls and apertures and the spaces between monumentalize the minutiae of daily activities better than a diary or video footage. Documenting life is a different story to tell than defining it. Architecture defines life; your life.
We, simply put, are bound to how we live and use the buildings that surround us. It’s a beautifully inescapable link between the ever-changing human and the ever-permanent building. But how ever-so-changing are we? Since we started gathering with each other we have not stopped. We eat the same foods and tell the same stories and have the same fights and feel the same emotions and and and as we always have. And all the things that have changed humanity are not modifying humans themselves, but rather modifying how humans live. Buildings, on the other hand, are not as permanent as we think. They fall down (an obvious feat but a necessary one). They become marked with technology. The difference between them and us is that technology actually changes them. Buildings now kiss the moon and hold hands with the sun. They changed because we wanted them to, because we wanted to do it.
When buildings undergo this change, when they become contemporary relics of the passing of time, they become representative of zeitgeists and cultural beliefs. There is no escaping the social magnitude of a building’s construction: it has and will forever continue to mark civilization at its moment. They embody the identity of the designer and the commissioner, the performer and the observer. Users of all kinds flock to a new build like bread breaking the surface of the pond to be the first to relish in all its glory. They want to see how their story has been captured and sealed in a bottle, ready to be opened to reveal its secrets. Without new buildings, we are stagnant. Still.
Still, as architecture continues to document and scribe our past, it (un)knowingly changes it. When stories are passed from generation to generation, do they not alter? Are they not different? Buildings are living the way humans are. They need to be maintained and cared for or they will fall apart. And when they talk with each other it’s no wonder they start to change the stories they represent. Identities and origins become misrepresented and true. Ideological differences are cast aside or reinforced and the consequences mark the surrounding built environment at the hands of civilian architects. Maybe stories are meant to be changed. But who is allowed to change them? Why?
In another life, in another world, in another universe, the buildings we build continue to tell the stories as is. We do not live in that life or world or universe. But with the advent of technology and the introduction of contemporary work practices, we find that these stories are not being changed naturally. There is no more accidental miscommunication mutating histories and redefining pasts but, rather, the intentional production of new stories. The buildings that are starting to polka-dot the earth are no longer recapping why or how we did it but rather why or how we will do it. A competition with no winner—who can design the next greatest building—has scorned the built environment, leaving tumultuous scars on a fabric that has been weft and woven for centuries.
The self-afflicted curators-of-the-future label graciously handed to any architect with a dream bigger than a door hinge categorically divides the field into those who have changed the future and those who will. There is a power wielded by architects in shaping decades of change that rests on their impositions. Think: new housing typologies. Think: new forms of healthcare and new forms of education complexes and reimagined urban networks and and and… (the list is endless). It’s a beautiful thing, watching the world change. Have you ever stood in a room that had alabaster lining the windows? The slight haze and almost-foggy feeling throughout the room and you can tell where you are and what you’re doing but there’s a piece of you that is lost in it because the haze isn’t real and when a cloud covers the sun it’s just another room again. In the palm of our hands and at the movement of our fingertips, we can build new ways of life that are inherently familiar but different.
When buildings no longer look or feel like where we came from but start to follow the form of where we are going, it’s hard to conceptualize how that can affect us. We are, whether we like it or not, adaptable. We find ways to make new things feel old and old things feel antiquated. Our ideas of who we are get replaced with who we want to be; our sense of identity is moved from past to present to (eventually?) future. It’s about how you take it. Slightly salted or as it? Do you want to take it?
from Delirium
Charles Louis Lafon
Architecture’s relationship to technology is dynamic, but that doesn’t mean it has always been obvious or readily understandable. One factor contributing to the separation between architects and the technology they rely on is that new technology rarely originates within the discipline. This is not a new phenomenon: Bramante’s Santa Maria presso San Satiro and the cortile del belvedere both exploit the concept of linear perspective, a technique developed by Renaissance painters, to achieve architectural effects. Such examples highlight how the ramifications of major technological advancements in other fields— fine art, manufacturing, geology, airplane design—are rarely lost on architects. Rather, they adopt and adapt these advancements to serve architectural ends, or at least reference them in their work to express the contemporary zeitgeist.
Our view of technology is further complicated by its exponential rate of change. Not only is our technology advancing, but our expectations for its advancement are being repeatedly out-done. Timelines are miraculously moved up, and cost-prohibitive processes become democratized. In the span of a generation, 3-D printing has gone from an advanced and experimental process, to something accessible enough to be performed at a student’s desk between classes, to a feasible method for actual construction (with 3-D printed houses already underway). How is the curious and eager designer supposed to grapple with the premonition that the tools they are even now struggling to grasp will already be obsolete by the time they are mastered?
We are desensitized to technological change, and as a consequence it is easy to forget the impact already-established technologies have had on the discipline. Students at many schools of architecture are trained in CAD applications from their first day of studio, never even made aware of the highly-developed hand-drafting tools these programs replaced. Architecture as a whole has had barely more than a century to adapt to the sea change brought about by steel-frame construction, yet this is considered old news—contemporary theoretical discourse moves on, even if the subject has yet to be exhausted. Such cases promise a fruitful point of departure, not for understanding the past, but for considering technology in the present. Past innovations become embedded in the discourse, losing relevance as they are compressed by the weight of more recent technology; it is up to the archaeologists to bring these technologies back to life.
Beginning in the last century, the discipline has increasingly presented to the outside world as a sort of black box; the recent development of computer-aided design, the more recent buzz around parametric design, and of course the very recent fervor (not to say paranoia) about artificial intelligence, have all contributed in some way to the increasing opacity of the architectural process. What was once done sequentially by hand can now be done simultaneously and instantaneously with the click of a mouse, the motion of a slider or the adjustment of a text prompt. The formal outcomes of these processes look nothing like what has existed in all the previous millenia of architectural history: buildings informed by contemporary technology can be panelized, smooth, asymmetrical, or voxel-like. They appear scale-less and sometimes completely site-less, existing neither in brick-and-mortar nor on paper. Instead, they are read in a new digital space, as model screenshots or as augmented- and virtual-reality simulations. Designers today inhabit an Oz-like dreamscape of technological plentifulness, where “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” is the prevailing ethos. Technology, in a sense, has donned a heavy veil—its beauty not erased, only concealed, even forbidden.
Of paramount importance is the access to see behind this veil. Who decides what architectural technologies get developed, and in what direction they move? Is it the architects who use advanced technologies, like parametricism and AI, in their design? If so, we should be questioning at what levels of the discipline and profession these technologies are deployed; i.e. do they serve only the largest firms, who can afford to employ technology specialists? Or does the development of architectural technologies democratize complex design processes, enabling practitioners on the margins to create disruptions, subvert narratives, and push the envelope? An increasing rate of technological change in the discipline can mean a “wild west” landscape open to plucky pioneers, but it can also mean a consolidation of essential resources into the hands of those with preexisting structural advantages.
Or could it be that only the developers—that is, the non-architects—working at Autodesk, McNeel, or Midjourney truly understand the inner workings of their respective softwares? If so, are architects justified in placing so much trust in the work of people outside of the discipline? For a grumbling Marxist, to do so would be to give up the means of production; for a more contented neoliberal, to do so would be to give up one’s stake in the product. It is not insignificant to the economic foundations of the profession that many softwares, including previously open-source AI tools, are now moving towards subscription-based models, essentially charging rent rather than offering the practitioner ownership. The tech companies architects are most familiar with may not be as threatening as, say, Microsoft or Google (who nevertheless exert a control on data that affects architects as much as anyone), but their power as capitalist enterprises reduces the architect to a role not dissimilar from that of the machine operator in a production line: pull this lever, punch this button, and your building will come out just fine. To whom is the credit then owed? And when the built environment fails, whom are we to blame?
Any discussion of the impossibly vague term “technology” will be influenced by the hype and the doomerism of mass media (and social media). There was a time when nuclear power heralded apocalypse, and when cryptocurrency fanatics believed they might overthrow the world monetary system, but those reactions came and went even as the technology remained, quiet and unfeeling. All technologies—whether for form-finding, representation, manufacturing, or construction—are ultimately fated to be forgotten as they are replaced or taken for granted. Perhaps it is pointless to pass judgment on tools, and better to judge those who wield them: our reaction to the presence of a veil precludes reflection upon ourselves.
Our view of technology is further complicated by its exponential rate of change. Not only is our technology advancing, but our expectations for its advancement are being repeatedly out-done. Timelines are miraculously moved up, and cost-prohibitive processes become democratized. In the span of a generation, 3-D printing has gone from an advanced and experimental process, to something accessible enough to be performed at a student’s desk between classes, to a feasible method for actual construction (with 3-D printed houses already underway). How is the curious and eager designer supposed to grapple with the premonition that the tools they are even now struggling to grasp will already be obsolete by the time they are mastered?
We are desensitized to technological change, and as a consequence it is easy to forget the impact already-established technologies have had on the discipline. Students at many schools of architecture are trained in CAD applications from their first day of studio, never even made aware of the highly-developed hand-drafting tools these programs replaced. Architecture as a whole has had barely more than a century to adapt to the sea change brought about by steel-frame construction, yet this is considered old news—contemporary theoretical discourse moves on, even if the subject has yet to be exhausted. Such cases promise a fruitful point of departure, not for understanding the past, but for considering technology in the present. Past innovations become embedded in the discourse, losing relevance as they are compressed by the weight of more recent technology; it is up to the archaeologists to bring these technologies back to life.
Beginning in the last century, the discipline has increasingly presented to the outside world as a sort of black box; the recent development of computer-aided design, the more recent buzz around parametric design, and of course the very recent fervor (not to say paranoia) about artificial intelligence, have all contributed in some way to the increasing opacity of the architectural process. What was once done sequentially by hand can now be done simultaneously and instantaneously with the click of a mouse, the motion of a slider or the adjustment of a text prompt. The formal outcomes of these processes look nothing like what has existed in all the previous millenia of architectural history: buildings informed by contemporary technology can be panelized, smooth, asymmetrical, or voxel-like. They appear scale-less and sometimes completely site-less, existing neither in brick-and-mortar nor on paper. Instead, they are read in a new digital space, as model screenshots or as augmented- and virtual-reality simulations. Designers today inhabit an Oz-like dreamscape of technological plentifulness, where “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” is the prevailing ethos. Technology, in a sense, has donned a heavy veil—its beauty not erased, only concealed, even forbidden.
Of paramount importance is the access to see behind this veil. Who decides what architectural technologies get developed, and in what direction they move? Is it the architects who use advanced technologies, like parametricism and AI, in their design? If so, we should be questioning at what levels of the discipline and profession these technologies are deployed; i.e. do they serve only the largest firms, who can afford to employ technology specialists? Or does the development of architectural technologies democratize complex design processes, enabling practitioners on the margins to create disruptions, subvert narratives, and push the envelope? An increasing rate of technological change in the discipline can mean a “wild west” landscape open to plucky pioneers, but it can also mean a consolidation of essential resources into the hands of those with preexisting structural advantages.
Or could it be that only the developers—that is, the non-architects—working at Autodesk, McNeel, or Midjourney truly understand the inner workings of their respective softwares? If so, are architects justified in placing so much trust in the work of people outside of the discipline? For a grumbling Marxist, to do so would be to give up the means of production; for a more contented neoliberal, to do so would be to give up one’s stake in the product. It is not insignificant to the economic foundations of the profession that many softwares, including previously open-source AI tools, are now moving towards subscription-based models, essentially charging rent rather than offering the practitioner ownership. The tech companies architects are most familiar with may not be as threatening as, say, Microsoft or Google (who nevertheless exert a control on data that affects architects as much as anyone), but their power as capitalist enterprises reduces the architect to a role not dissimilar from that of the machine operator in a production line: pull this lever, punch this button, and your building will come out just fine. To whom is the credit then owed? And when the built environment fails, whom are we to blame?
Any discussion of the impossibly vague term “technology” will be influenced by the hype and the doomerism of mass media (and social media). There was a time when nuclear power heralded apocalypse, and when cryptocurrency fanatics believed they might overthrow the world monetary system, but those reactions came and went even as the technology remained, quiet and unfeeling. All technologies—whether for form-finding, representation, manufacturing, or construction—are ultimately fated to be forgotten as they are replaced or taken for granted. Perhaps it is pointless to pass judgment on tools, and better to judge those who wield them: our reaction to the presence of a veil precludes reflection upon ourselves.