Rebecca Allen visuals for Kraftwerk concert at MoMA // 2012. Rebecca Allen is the current creative director for Nicholas Negroponte’s projects. image courtesy of MoMA (source)
assigned reading: ‘Toward a Theory of Architecture Machines’ by Nicholas Negroponte , 1969.
Today, the widespread use of computer-aided design has created a paradigm shift in the way architecture is conceived, represented and fabricated. The expressive and constructive potential of the digital has been -and still is- thoroughly studied by theorists and architects who’s position towards the digital is one of admiration or skepticism or both. It is obvious that machines have enabled designers to overcome the traditional constraints of thought and set the grounds for a higher level of formal and programmatic complexity with numerous aesthetic, functional and performative implications. But even with these advantages, architecture still remains in the hands of the architects who carry the professional expertise to successfully translate the user’s needs and desires into design. This disciplinary enclosure is further accentuated by the growing sophistication of digital architecture. Often it deploys an unfamiliar vocabulary, emphasises the role of the “expert” and makes the process of architectural design increasingly inaccessible to the user.
