Digital technologies are now a fact of life; they are part to almost everything we do. Any architect sketching the layout of a parking lot these days is likely using more electronic computation than Frank Gehry did in the s to design the Guggenheim Bilbao. As always, technical innovation allows us to keep doing what we always did, but faster or for cheaper; which is a good enough reason for technical change to be happening at all.
In the case of building and construction, costs and speed of delivery are of capital importance for economists, politicians, developers, as well as for society at large. Yet for a design historian this purely quantitative use of digital technologies is only marginally relevant. If we look at buildings as architects, what matters is not so much what digital technologies can do, but what we could not do without them.
This is the critical component of innovation, and only an enquiry into this creative leap may help us understand why and how digital tools have changed the way architecture is conceived and built, and the way it looks.
And sure enough, after a few decades of computer-driven technical innovation, digital design theory and digitally intelligent design already constitute a significant chapter in the history of contemporary architecture—albeit at the time of writing, a chapter still mostly unwritten with some notable exceptions that will be mentioned in the bibliographic footnote, appended. I have myself covered parts of this storyline in some of my publications, and more is in my last book, just published; when my friends at the Jencks Foundation and e-flux Architecture asked me to tell this story in a few thousand words, and have it shown as a diagram, in the great Charles Jencks tradition, I gladly took up the challenge.
The diagram shown here was drawn by Mark Garcia and Steven Hutt, based on my text and other sources. But if the role of digital tools in design grew formidably over time, their rise to pre-eminence was far from steady, as periods of technological exuberance were followed by period of technological retrenchment booms and busts , and digital tools and theories rose and fell with the ebb and flow of the economy and of design culture, following the twists and turns, and occasionally the fads, of technical innovation.
