Contemporary technological devices: The relationship between Architecture and Computing from the Mid-20th Century to the present day

This doctoral dissertation studies other ways of developing advanced architectural projects based on the relationship of the discipline with the many different technological changes that have been taking place in recent decades. Special attention is given to developments in the computing field and its direct link with architecture and numerous specific contemporary architectural devices. It relates fields that include architecture, computing, design and their different histories; the devices, interfaces and science and technology studies (STS), among others.

The research begins near the end of World War II, when most histories of computation begin, and continues through the following decades of the 20th century up to the start of the 21st century, when the fields of architecture and computation began to intertwine both conceptually and operationally. The study focuses specifically on the physical supports (built artifacts) that both disciplines design and build, and on how the two fields give each other feedback on through these projects, unfolding themselves through a set of concepts and strategies with shared characteristics. The main hypothesis of this dissertation and the prism through with to approach all these contemporary architectural and computational technological devices is of observing how these built artifacts quite literally shrink as their technological development progresses. The dissertation attempts to observe whether the computational architectures generated and built by both disciplines undergo a process of miniaturization, of degrowth, in a broad and complex sense, until nearly disappearing physically altogether.

As the architects and researchers Olga Touloumi and Theodora Vardouli point out, the exchanges between the two disciplines were two-directional from the outset of the age of digital computing. The emergent concepts and practices that arose for the first time in the field of computer science influenced the discourse of architecture projects at the same time as the strategies, project methodologies and spatial concepts from architecture contributed to theories and practices in computing.

One of the main goals of this research is to examine various questions about the complex, two-directional relationship between the two disciplines as both authors pointed out: architecture was conceived and projected as computation and computers were thought up and designed architecturally.

Likewise, one cannot think of computers and computing without taking into account design and architecture: the different technological computing devices acquire bodies and physical support through design-based decisions and their presence in the world is inscribed in specific spaces, architectures and architectural technological devices.

These histories that relate computing and architecture are so vast that they cannot all be captured under one overall glance. Many of these tales focus mainly on studying the creation of innovative forms, the new digital instruments used to make them or the ways in which these tools have changed architectural construction.

For that reason, this dissertation proposes a change in approach: instead of studying spaces, architectures and architectural technological devices projected and built using computers and digital tools and instruments, it instead suggests setting out sights on the strategies, influences, ideas and processes that mediated their conception, specifically on the ones related to the world of computing.

By analyzing different case studies of a wide range of different architectural and computing practices and studying the work of people such as Eliot Noyes, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Miguel Fisac, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jay Wright Forrester, Charles and Ray Eames, Wesley Allison Clark, Archigram, Christopher Alexander, Nicholas Negroponte, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Archizoom, Superstudio, Angela Hareiter, Andrejs Legzdinš, Alan Curtis Kay, Dieter Rams, Sir Jonathan Paul Ive, Toyo Ito, Kazujo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa and Junya Ishigami, clues will be found on the intertwining and assembling of these two areas of knowledge: architecture and computing.