About this book
After two decades of experimentation with the digital, the prevalent paradigm of formal continuity is being revised and questioned by an emerging generation of architects and theorists. While the world struggles with a global housing crisis and the impact of accelerated automation on labour, digital designers' narrow focus on mere style and continuous differentiation seems increasingly out of touch.
This issue charts an emerging body of work that is based on a computational understanding of the discrete part or building block – elements that are as scalable, accessible and versatile as digital data. The discrete proposes that a new, digital understanding of assembly, based on parts, contains the greatest promise for a complex, open-ended, adaptable architecture. This approach capitalises on the digital economy and automation, with the potential of the digital to democratise production and increase access.
The digital not only has deep implications for how we design and produce architecture; it is first and foremost a new system of production with economic, social and political consequences that need to be taken into account. This issue presents a diverse body of work focused on the notion of the discrete: from design experiments and aesthetics, to urban models, tectonics, distributed robots, new material organisations and post-capitalist scenarios engaging with automation.
Contributors: Viola Ago, Mario Carpo, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez García, Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte, Immanuel Koh, Neil Leach, Ryan Manning, Philippe Morel, M Casey Rehm, Jose Sanchez, Marrikka Trotter, Manja van de Worp, Maria Yablonina and Lei Zheng.
Featured Architects: Kengo Kuma, Lab-eds, Plethora Project, MadM, EZCT, Eragatory and Studio Kinch.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- About the Guest-Editor
- Introduction: Discrete Architecture in the Age of Automation
- The Origins of Discretism: Thinking Unthinkable Architecture
- Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms
- Mereological Thinking: Figuring Realities within Urban Form
- Bits and Pieces: Digital Assemblies: From Craft to Automation
- Our Automated Future: A Discrete Framework for the Production of Housing
- Rubens Structures: A Different Lightness Through Performance Adaptability
- Distributed Fabrication: Cooperative Making with Larger Groups of Smaller Machines
- Discrete Flexibility: Computing Lightness in Architecture
- Et Alia: A Projective History of the Architectural Discrete
- Particlised: Computational Discretism, or The Rise of the Digital Discrete
- Complicit: The Creation Of and Collaboration With Intelligent Machines
- Discrete Sampling: There Is No Object Nor Field… Just Statistical Digital Patterns
- Series and Other Unit-Based Alternatives: Notes on Contemporary Digital Operations
- Soft Discrete Familiars: Animals, Blankets and Bricks, Oh My!
- The Discrete Charm of the Glitch
- Meta-Utopia and the Box: Two Stories about Avant-Garde Projects
- Counterpoint: There Is No Such Thing as a Digital Building
- Contributors
- EULA