Strategies for the Architectural Production in the Digital Era. Nine manifestoes written between 1992 and 2004

With the incorporation of digital tools into the architectural project, the discipline faces for the first time the possibility of achieving a certain degree of Digital Determinism in its designs, in opposition to the traditional option, which needed the previous definition of a Performative Criteria to give to the project meaning and content. In the context of this dialectic, the thesis critically analyses the contributions of computerised processes to some of the groundbreaking ideas that resulted from the crisis of the Modernity, that occurs around 1960. These fractures will act here as basis for the establishment of two dialectics, the first between the options of using the design of a Program or a Paradigm as starting points of the architectural project, while the second one is focused on the different possibilities of solving the geometry of the architectural object, that can be solved by seeking its coherence with the Structural Framework or from the definition of a complex surface. There is a key moment in the definition of this confrontation between the deterministic and the performative, which takes place between the development of the project of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and the trend that proposes the translation of criteria from biomorphology to architectural formal search processes, which the congress Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies of the Architectural Association contributes to introduce in the European architecture. During those years nine texts, that with the ambitious to be seen as manifestoes, are written to propose nine strategies to define the new architectural discourse, which shapes a more operational than theoretical thought and, therefore, it is capable of assimilating the changes that come with the era digital. Capable of proposing varied answers to solve the dialectics that are established from the two great ruptures of the architectural form with the function of the building and with its structural geometry, the manifestoes are then divided according to two large groups, defined by their degree of permissiveness or resistance to the total automation of the architectural project. Within the framework of the two previous dialectics and the response proposed by the nine selected manifestoes, their contribution is also essential to understand the search for a balance between the use of Performative Criteria for the contemporary architectural project, which is being developed in a context that allows a high degree of Digital Determinism. In view of the further developments of the dialectics that are proposed as the temporal context of this thesis, a revision of these nine manifestoes, written at a key time in the computerisation of the architectural project, is proposed. As, it is understood, that from the analysis of these texts possible evolutionary paths can be derived, paths that could be capable of finding this necessary balance between performative tendencies and those proposed by a total Digital Determinism as a solution to the resolution of the contemporary architectural project.