1st Edition

Digitalia Architecture and the Digital, the Environmental and the Avant-Garde

By Susannah Hagan Copyright 2008
    160 Pages
    by Routledge

    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    Susannah Hagan boldly discusses the fraught relationship between key dominating areas of architectural discourse - digital design, environmental design, and avant-garde design.



    Digitalia firstly demonstrates that drawing such firm lines between architectural spheres is damaging and foolish, particularly as both environmental and avant-garde practices are experimenting with the digital, and secondly remonstrates with an avant-garde that has repudiated the social/ethical agenda of the modernist avant-garde because it failed the first time round. It is environmental architecture that has picked up the social/ethical ball and is running with it, using the digital to very different, and more far-reaching, ends.



    As the debates rage, this book is a key read for all who are involved or intrigued.

    Introduction  1. Deep Background  Binary Opposites.  Binary Dependencies.  New Dependencies.  Melds  2. The Avant-Garde: Autonomous or Engaged?  The Avant-Garde's Dilemma.  Manfredo Tafuri.  Theodor Adorno.  An Avant-Garde Now  3. The Autonomous Avant-Garde and the Digital: From Formalism to Nature.  Procedural Innovation: Practice.  Procedural Innovation: The Academy.  The Parametric Past: Structuralism.  Christopher Alexander and Generative Rules.  The Dissenters.  In Pursuit of Novelty.  Nature Restored  4. The Engaged Avant-Garde and the Digital: From Nature to Environmental Design.  Closing the Loop.  Modelling Built Behaviours.  Productive Form-Finding.  Constructible Parametrics  5. The Avant-Garde: Meeting in the City.  The Groningen Experiment.  EnGen.  Conclusion

    Biography

    Susannah Hagan is Reader in Architecture at the  University of East London, head of the MA Architecture: Sustainability + Design and founder of Research into Environment and Design (RED) at the University of East London. Her previous publications include Taking Shape (2001), and City Fights, co-authored with Mark Hewitt (2001).