The Audacity of Design: A History of Architecture and Its Technologies

Architectural design today is undergoing a momentous shift. Computationally based practices of design and construction, and the often-inscrutable building forms that result, present an enormous interpretative challenge. While some find this new work to be utopian, finding within this style of architectural design the promise to mend architectural schisms and reassert the field's socio-cultural relevance, others find an apocalyptic foreshadowing of architecture's future, one in which the discipline has been completely dismantled. Read separately, such sense-making insights can each convince, but together, their oppositional stances muddle any understanding of the current moment. This book offers a better way to understand today's dizzying architectural change by locating it within the longue dur e of architectural design. Rather than something new and without precedent, it relocates computational design as part of the ebb and flow of a larger and longer epistemological shift, a shift which architecture has been responding to throughout the last two centuries. Further, similar shifts which link design with great cultural innovations have happened before, most notably during the early Renaissance when the adoption of specific drawing techniques helped to spur the development of the architectural profession. To fill out our understanding of such shifts, this text compares these two moments, exploring how and why the adoption of certain new technologies can bring about radical changes to the field. This comparative approach allows for a finely grained exploration of both the medieval-Renaissance shift and the transition currently underway. Such a focused comparison allows us to reflect on how, during both periods, architecture emerged as a player in the complex dance of influence and reflection between culture, science and technology. This larger point leads to the book's overarching thesis that major shifts in the central questions and methods of architectural

Dr Kristina Luce, Independent Scholar, United States of America