Angelos Floros

Published: Floros A., in A. Cohen and A. Floros (eds), Keyboard Events: Architecture and Information — An Introduction to Physical Computing, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly & Futura Publications, Athens, 2012, ISBN 978-960-9489-19-5, pp. 33-56

The chapter asks what happens to architectural design when its tools stop being mechanical and become computational. It begins, though, with two people who saw it coming.

Cedric Price, working with the theatre director Joan Littlewood and the cybernetician Gordon Pask, designed the Fun Palace — not a building but an organisational plan drawn as a programme, with inputs, procedures and an "output of modified people". Price described it himself as a short-life conglomerate of disparate, free-choice, free-time voluntary activities: a public launching-pad rather than a Mecca for East London.
Price took the argument one step further in the Generator, designed for White Oak in Florida between 1976 and 1979, with John and Julia Frazer writing the software. The building was a kit of relocatable cubes on a grid, and a computer held its plan. What made it unlike anything before it was a single routine: if the arrangement stayed unchanged for too long, the program grew bored, and began proposing rearrangements of its own. The Fun Palace gave the user the freedom to change the building. The Generator gave the building the initiative to change itself — which is why it is often called the first intelligent building.
Yona Friedman built the same argument into a keyboard. In the Flatwritter, the keys are room-shapes. A word typed with them is a string of rooms; a text is a floor plan; several pages make the floors of a building; and a text typed by many people produces the plan of a neighbourhood. A city is a collective text — typed by those who want to live in it. The result is not a complete city plan but a wishing list, and that is the point.

Tools, systems and methodologies of design
Architectural design has always been accompanied by the tools that let it finish. They fall into four categories: analogue design tools, digital design tools, hybrid media, and computational design technology.
The analogue tools are the pencil and its descendants — the technical pen, the rapidograph. To these were added the analogue computing instruments of Euclidean geometry: the scale, the triangle, the protractor, the compass. Between the instruments of writing and the instruments of calculation, the designer could record a proposal, develop it and give it form — provided they knew descriptive and projective geometry.
The weakness was structural. Everything had to be carried into two dimensions, and the weight fell on plan and section. Perspectives and collages were representational, used at the beginning to sketch an idea and at the end to present it, rarely in between. Many projects were carried through the design phase on isometric models with the character of diagrams — used to code, analyse, classify and exploit the parameters of the brief.
What follows in the chapter is the passage out of that condition: object-oriented design, where each element carries its own properties and behaviours; BIM, which extends control from the drawing to the whole of construction and its management; parametric and algorithmic design; and digital fabrication, where the file becomes the instruction for making.

The through-line is simple. In the mechanical age, the drawing described the building. In the age of information, the drawing is the building — an object that can be computed, and therefore an object that can answer back. Price had already built one that did.