Coffee Break

IT REVOLUTION

During the 1970s, the few architects who worked with a computer were seen as a group of strange, determined Utopians. During the 1980s, they were looked upon as specialists who spoke a language incomprehensible to most. But during the 1990s ? parallel to the widespread expansion of computer use in design studios ? the understanding also grew that those Utopian or specialist architects were following lines of research that would become fertile ground for new developments for everyone.

Along with the great founding fathers of CAAD use in architecture (Chuck Eastman, Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Mitchell and the group of younger fathers, Chris Yessios, Gerhard Schmitt and John Gero), a new generation of architects "Born with the Computer" made itself known. Mine was the last generation to straddle the old and the new, to open ourselves up to computers when we were in our thirties in that great hotbed of Computer Science researchers that was Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. In those early years of the 1980s, while the first robots roamed the campus alleyways, we asked ourselves how computers would change architecture. Today, we begin to have clear ideas and are more importantly facing an even younger generation who sees the computer as not just an extra device but quite simply the main tool for both designing and building; yes, even building, because the first constructions have now been made of buildings and spaces conceived using this new digital sensibility. These buildings are not only "designed and built with the computer" but also aim at being significant signs for identifying the contemporary lines of orientation, the new information phase in architecture.

This book is called, not by chance, Behind the Scenes. Avant-garde techniques of Contemporary Design. Written by two enthusiastic young Italian researchers, Francesco De Luca and Marco Nardini, it aims at revealing almost step by step the methods for approaching architectural design using Information Technologies to open new fields of investigation. Born out of this spirit are sections on Polysurfaces, Keyframing, Morphing, Metaballs, Particle Systems and still others on interconnected, open and dynamic systems that bring together contemporary science and computers.



For regular users of these techniques, the first part of this book may be only a useful synthesis, but for the great masses of young, and not so young, architects, I am certain the broad ranging and detailed explanation of these techniques of investigation will constitute a very useful aid. The book was in fact created to resolve a question from below. Studying the books in this series, many readers have been fascinated by the work of new architects, have seen the results and at the same time analyzed the theoretical background that motivated the research. But an intermediate element was missing: the "how". And so this book attempts to explain "how" by choosing areas in which the paradigms of Information Technology help create architectural projects more in keeping with today's complexities. To grasp the meaning of the second part of "Behind the Scene", we must however go back to the overall design of this book series.



INFORMATION AND INTERACTIVITY. Though originally planned in 1996 to be only in Italian, with this issue the series has now reached its eighteenth volume in English and is presently also translated into Chinese. All of us are naturally very satisfied about this: not only the authors, but also the Italian publisher Testo & Immagine who originated the series, Birkhäuser Publishers for the English version, the Chinese publisher Prominence Publishing and finally this writer who, as you know, is the creator and curator of the series.

The definition "Information Technology Revolution" was chosen to underline an implicit parallelism. During the 1920s, architects such as Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe "completely" reformulated architecture under the influence of the new mechanical, industrial world. Their architecture was revolutionary because it modified all the operating parameters of the era, absorbing the serial, rational, uniform and standardizable processes of industrial production. Architecture performed these processes both by internalizing them as work methods as well as assuming them as "objective" parameters to evaluate whether or not new qualities had been achieved.

We are now in another era. The key words of architects have changed. They no longer think in terms of "standardization" but "personalization"; no longer via processes of "division into cycles" or "assembly lines" but of "unity among differences". The city is no longer conceived in monofunctional zones (work here, live here, play here) but as an interactive whole of uses and functions, no longer considering the idea of the "repeatable model" (the Black Ford or Unité d'Habitation) but rather the concepts of Adaptability and Individualization.

The Network, the information systems for designing and planning buildings, construction materials and even methods themselves are changing the essence of architecture. Spaces tend toward being more and more multifunctional and are created using complex geometry. Construction is done through a sort of "computerized craftsmanship" with special pieces made using routers and lathes guided by digital models. But it is information above all that is becoming an essential component of the new architecture and new urban environment. In particular, forward-looking architects are attempting to create a generation of buildings and spaces that are "conscious" of the changes in the operational and social framework caused by information technology and capable of expressing this revolution. There is an attempt to understand how an interface can be created between computer and user (and no longer between user and computer as it was for decades). Attempts are being made to understand how to make the computer interact with us humans and the environment by using various types of sensors: mechanical and quantitative ones that measure air, light or temperature; more complex ones able to interpret facial expressions or a tone of voice; and others even more sophisticated that manage to formulate hypotheses about what we might emotionally "feel". For a small, but essential, group of architects, this frontier is also a fundamental attempt to make architecture change interactively with changing situations and desires. The second part of this book is aimed precisely at understanding this world, including the "technical" viewpoint.

This is done both through a detailed analysis of the realm of sensors and interactive systems as well as by outlining the overall logic of a new environment; an environment that is half natural and half artificial, created and developed by new forms of media.

Antonino Saggio