The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn

Nathalie Bredella’s The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn revisits digital media’s incorporation into architecture in the 1990s. While it is nearly impossible to imagine architectural production without digital tools today, architectural discourse at the time coalesced around the premise that novel tools would somehow alter fundamental disciplinary conventions. The book argues that the different ways in which architects developed, appropriated, or co-opted the digital enabled them to forge new trajectories for their practices and imagine new futures for the discipline. To demonstrate this, Bredella creates “a mosaic-like account” by selecting representative examples including academic institutions, art and media institutions, interdisciplinary collaborations on ecology, studies of the body, forays in fabrication, and investigations of the impact of the digital on the city. She examines publications, archival materials, and oral history accounts to depict a more nuanced portrait of the rise and proliferation of digital media in architecture. Bredella’s episodic approach situates these developments in a larger “material and social context”—allowing an in-depth exploration of the complexity of each case, and the limitations the architects faced or later created as individual modes of operation such as formal, algorithmic, and parametric became more popular.