Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design

During the three decades following the Second World War, before the advent of the personal computer, government investment in university research in North America and the UK funded multidisciplinary projects to investigate the use of computers for manufacturing and design.

Documenting the eponymous exhibition, Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design explores this period of remarkable inventiveness and traces its repercussions on architecture and other creative fields through the work of computational architects, designers, and artists working today. Alongside a compelling visual archive showcasing hundreds of unpublished or lesser-known computational images, drawings, films, and software, the book features essays by architecture, media, and science and technology scholars offering close readings of specific images, as well as conversations and interviews with historical protagonists and contemporary practitioners. Together, these materials illuminate in unprecedented detail the confluence of technical innovations in software, geometry, and hardware with a fledging technological imaginary of design and creativity, tracing the emergence — and reimagining the potentials — of a vibrant field of interdisciplinary research and practice.

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of numerous publications, exhibitions, and technologies exploring the interplay of design and computation including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, published by Routledge in 2015.

Theodora Vardouli, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University. She is co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, published by Routledge in 2020, and author of a forthcoming book with the MIT Press entitled Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons.

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of numerous publications, exhibitions, and technologies exploring the interplay of design and computation including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, published by Routledge in 2015.

Theodora Vardouli, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University. She is co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, published by Routledge in 2020, and author of a forthcoming book with the MIT Press entitled Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons.