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Title
Year
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations. Gazing at Early Computational Fluid Dynamics Drawings from Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center
2024
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2024
Rules, A Short History Of What We Live By, A book by Lorraine Daston
2024
Survey and characterisation of the archaeological landscape of Lovo
2024
Stoclet 1911 - Restitution
2024
Stoclet 1911 - Hypothesis
2024
TV Show: 3D Digitization and Built Heritage Preservation
2024
Drawing air: the evolution of the representation of air in architectural drawing from the industrial revolution to the present
2023
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2023
Analysis, Systems & Composition
2023
Code Tracing
2023
Maison du Peuple full scale experience on its original site
2023
From projection to building and vice versa
2023
[x] Emergence of pre-digital algorithmic design
2023
Comparing Randomness
2023
Anthropic Units in Baroque Architecture, the Gallery of the Palazzo Spada and the Roman Palm
2023
Workshop Glyph
2023
Re-presentation as an analytical tool in Baroque Architecture
2022
Crossed Experimentations of Low-Altitude Surveys For The Detection Of Buried Structures
2022
Chamber Music Hall of Horta's Palais des Beaux-Arts: 3D Hypothesis
2022
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Algorithmic Music II/II
2022
Misreading, once again...
2022
Perspectives on Dwelling : Architectural Anthropologies of Home
2022
Workshop (fig.22)
2022
Towards a multi-scale semantic characterization of the built heritage
2021
De l'incarnation de la protoarchitecture
2021
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Algorithmic Music I/II
2021
Noise
2021
(Close) Reading Morphosis
2021
Jeu d’échelles / échelles du jeu
2021
Pohlke
2021
Workshop (fig.)
2021
Perspectiva Virtualis
2021
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2020
Exploitation des numérisations pour l'analyse urbaine en contexte archéologique
2020
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - The Algorists
2020
Urban Planning Representation
2020
Projection built into Sketchpad III: origin of a critical field in computer graphics
2020
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2019
Exploitation de numérisations hétérogènes pour la représentation et l'analyse d'un site archéologique de grande échelle : Pachacamac 1532
2019
Relecture de vocabulaires d’architecture : apport de la complexité des représentations numériques dans la caractérisation de formes architecturales
2019
Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple 3D restitution hypothesis
2019
Architectural Analysis and Graphic Representation - Morphosis in the 1980s
2019
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Medley II/II
2019
Histoires de Représentation
2019
Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple 3D restitution hypothesis
2019
Building Drawings : Decoding and Recoding the Graphic Projection Algorithm in Architectural Representation
2019
Places Royales Françaises. Réflexion d’une logique d’édification à travers une corrélation entre une analyse sémantique et un signal géométrique
2018
Virtual Systems – Actual Objects: Rendition of Morphosis ' Compositional Principles in the mid 1980s
2018
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Medley I/II
2018

Emergence of pre-digital algorithmic design

Author(s): Denis Derycke

Contribution to the book Architectural Design Instruments (Edited by Sébastien Bourbonnais) from the collection Conditions of Appearance, Modes of Appropriation and Reconfigurations of Practices, London: ISTE & Wiley Editors.
Published in English & French

Abstract:
In the mid-1990s, digital technology, 3D software and algorithmic design took center stage internationally. A certain avant-garde explored new formal and spatial registers through the generation of architectural proposals resulting, no longer from a work of modeling or sculpting the form, but from the combination of parameters automatically composing the geometry within 3D programs, sometimes emanating from the field of animated cinema. This new approach had an impact, not only on the form, but also brought multiplicity and unexpectedness in the architectural configurations thus generated. Growing exponentially, the computing power of computers contributed greatly to making this new territory of experimentation possible. Before the appearance of 3D modeling software and even the generalization of digital computation , some architects had already begun to shift the stakes of design, from the architectural object, to the process likely to produce it. Influenced by structuralist thought, such an approach could be observed in many fields of creation from the 1950s onwards, and took different turns depending on the times and places where it was developed. Towards the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, some architects, mainly American, developed design processes that anticipated the digital approach that would characterize the 1990s. Although totally based on analog graphic tools, these processes demonstrated a type of system capable of generating architectural objects of a very complex formal register. According to their authors, these objects were not the direct result of their imagination, but from the composition process established beforehand. Beginning with a few elements of context, this chapter proposes – after a passage through the work of the New Yorker Peter Eisenman – to observe graphic documents and conceptual artifacts of some projects from the 1980s of the Californian group Morphosis, of which Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi were the principal associates at that time. The aim is to examine how the approach of these architects was intrinsically systemic while being based on analog graphic tools, and thus prefigured the digital algorithmic approach that emerged in the decade that followed.

Link to the book's introduction