Emerging Technologies and Drawings: The Futures of Images in Architectural Design

Mark Garcia , Senior Lecturer in History and Theory in the Department of Architecture, University of Greenwich, explores the technologically mediated future of drawings in architecture ‘without hands’. He highlights how multiple technological innovations are putting us on the brink of an exploding spectrum of possibilities for the image, and looks at three distinct areas of potential: new media and materials; emerging and future technologies; and theory embodied in fiction and art.     

Collaborative Design: Combining Computer-Aided Geometry Design and Building Information Modelling

The spatial expression and ordering of social processes is one of the primary aims of architecture. Such is the view of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), where Shajay Bhooshan heads the computation and design group (CoDe). Here he explains how the practice has followed in the footsteps of the automotive, aircraft and shipbuilding industries in adopting a hybrid approach to design development. As demonstrated by a mathematics-themed gallery conceived by ZHA for London's Science Museum, it assimilates historical knowledge while facilitating fabrication and allowing for future flexibility.     

Tectonism in Architecture,Design and Fashion: Innovations in Digital Fabrication as Stylistic Drivers

After ‘foldism’ and ‘blobism’ comes ‘tectonism’ – a new branch of the epochal style of parametricism that allows greater expressive and formal variety. It is made possible by an evolving range of digital tools for structural form-finding and physics analysis, linked directly to fabrication. As Patrik Schumacher , principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, underlines, these do not remove the need for architects to collaborate with engineers and fabricators, but they do enable them to acquire more reliable intuitions about the logics of these other disciplines. This can only enhance their capacity to produce works that successfully combine communication and social functionality with technical integrity.     

Back to the Future: The Everyday Built Environment in a Phase of Transition

Time is a crucial dimension in architecture, yet architectural education ignores it. While historical environments were able to evolve over centuries, the purist spirit that has prevailed since the advent of Modernism is at odds with the social dynamics of normal human life. John Habraken – a renowned architectural educator and writer both in the Netherlands and the US – examines the issues and argues for a more effective distribution of design control, showcasing recent projects in the Netherlands and Denmark that have achieved this.     

Mashup and Assemblage in Digital Workflows: The Role of Integrated Software Platforms in the Production of Architecture

Digital technology is eliminating the separation between design and making that had existed since the Renaissance. But in order to seamlessly produce experience rather than just artefacts, architects have been turning to software developed for other fields. Adam Modesitt – assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and founding principal of New York-based Modesitt Design – discusses the new directions that this hybridisation of workflows is allowing architecture to take.