Digital Signifiers in an Architecture of Information: From Big Data and Simulation to Artificial Intelligence

This book proposes a new critical relationship between computation and architecture, developing a history and theory of representation in architecture to understand and unleash potential means to open up creativity in the field.

Historically, architecture has led to spatial representation. Today, computation has established new representational paradigms that can be compared to spatial representations, such as the revolution of perspective in the Renaissance. Architects now use software, robotics, and fabrication tools with very little understanding and participation in how these tools influence, revolutionize, and determine both architecture and its construction today. Why does the discipline of architecture not have a higher degree of authorship in the conception and development of computational technologies that define spatial representation? This book critically explores the relationship between history, theory, and cultural criticism. Lorenzo-Eiroa positions new understandings through parallel historical sections and theories of many revolutionary representational architecture canons displaced by conventional spatial projection. He identifies the architects, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers that were able to revolutionize their disciplines through the development of new technologies, new systems of representation, and new lenses to understand reality. This book frames the discussion by addressing new means to understand and expand architecture authorship in relation to the survey, information, representation, higher dimensional space, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence – in the pursuit of activating an architecture of information.

This will be important reading for upper-level students and researchers of architecture and architectural theory, especially those with a keen interest in computational design and robotic fabrication.

Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is the Founder of e-Architects.net, Director of the AI Lab, and Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Design. He co-edited Architecture In:Formation, Routledge, 2013.