digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2012 - 12:00PM - 1:30PM
Open: History/Theory
Vittoria Di Palma, Columbia University
Blow-Up: Architecture and the Technology of
Contemporary Art
Nora Wendl, Portland State University
Isabelle Wallace, University of Georgia
The contemporary architectural reading of technology as instrumental
is far removed from the Greek origins of the word, techne,
knowledge related to making. The danger—and the opportunity—
of such instrumental thinking is that it reduces architectural practice
to a series of specialized strategies or operations that can be
done by anyone, opening it up to appropriation. Appropriating the
strategies and operations of architecture has been, for artists from
the 1960s forward, the most direct method of institutional critique,
a radical turn on the historical relationship between art and architecture
through which art has often been the necessary vehicle, the
technology, by which the perception, representation and the making
of architecture is transformed.
Over the last twenty-five years, art has become more than a technique
to embellish or advance architectural form, it has become a
site for architecture’s analysis. For, although architecture has always
been a motif within the visual arts, in increasing numbers, and as
if in response to architecture’s own willingness to picture itself—a
willingness that begins in the Postmodern era— architecture is now
the explicit subject of much visual art across media. Consequently,
and as this paper will examine, a certain faction of contemporary art
can be viewed as a silent compliment to the acknowledged history
of the built environment—a non-verbal form of architectural history,
a legitimate site of interpretation, criticism, and analysis—and, as this
paper will argue, a technology through which architecture is experienced,
theorized, historicized and disseminated.
Digital Ecstasy: Architecture in the Post-Fordist era
Elie Haddad, Lebanese American University
Nadir Lahiji, Pennsylvania State University
For three decades, academia and professional architectural establishments
have euphorically embraced exactly what this ACSA conference,
in celebration of its hundredth anniversary, has termed as
“digital aptitude.” Without a doubt, the imperatives of the postmodern
culture have brought to the fore a gifted generation with an incomparable
skill and talent to manipulate new digital technologies
for design practices. But, significantly, the same gifted generation
has demonstrated a parallel talent corollary with the first, which we
shall call “political inaptitude.” We claim that this political inaptitude
is the dialectical opposite, or the negative obverse, of the same digital
aptitude underlying postmodern design practices. In this paper
we will attempt to critique this new design approach, which simultaneously
displays both sides of this dialectic. We begin by posing this
question: should the digital aptitude be necessarily accompanied
by a separation from the ‘political’, a separation that is one of the
symptoms of our society of the spectacle? Our initial answer to this
question is an emphatic No! We will argue against this inauspicious
separation and examine some of its theoretical causes.
Leftovers: Residual and Risk in “Our Digital Present”
Jasmine Benyamin, Texas A&M University
Despite the so called ‘post-critical’ moment of our digital present,
those of us who are more involved in thinking about buildings than
in their making may find opportunities for critical inquiry after all,
thereby avoiding the risk of disciplinary extinction. In this essay I
propose possible avenues for a critical re-engagement with current
practice, through the lens of residual and risk. Further, I argue that
how we write and talk about buildings needs to undergo a paradigmatic
shift, since the way buildings are made has fundamentally
altered. In fact, given the current emphasis on process over
representation, we have a renewed responsibility to inquire about
the changing paradigms of authorship in current practice, but also
in our thinking about practice. What are the implications of collaborative
process-based practice on (singular) authorial subject?
Does the notion of process itself so central to emergent technologies
risk the loss of the author? Can authorship be re-defined and
re-inscribed in process if not in outmoded notions of intent? This,
after all, must not kill that.
Digital Apptitutes + Other Openings - Boston, MA - 7