Origins of the digital

What do we need to know in order to say how and when architecture became digital? Our focus is on projects produced in the 1980s and 1990s that used digital tools to explore new directions for architectural research and practice. Rather than making future projections, we look critically and archaeologically at the way digital technology has shaped architecture in a concrete way.

Article 11 of 18

Arata Isozaki and the Invisible Technicians

Text by Matthew Allen

In the spring of 1986, Kenzo Tange won the competition for the New Tokyo City Hall. But many observers agreed that the most exciting project had been submitted by Tange’s protégé, Arata Isozaki.1 For his entry, Isozaki produced fourteen silkscreen prints that have become icons of the era. But another, lesser-known set of prints from the competition marks a genuine shift: a moment when the avant-garde of architectural notation moved from ink-on-velum to a new medium, the computer printout. By the late 1980s, this was a shift that could no longer be avoided. A generation of young architects was starting to practice in a computer-saturated world, and they were inclined to think about architecture through a new computational imaginary. In his competition entry, Isozaki—who came from an older generation—began to grapple with this sensibility. New notions of space, form, colour, and inhabitation worked their way into his firm’s conceptual palette. Looking closely, we can see a new ontology for architecture emerging, an older understanding of form and representation giving way to the idea that architecture can exist within the computer.

Arata Isozaki & Associates. Section, New Tokyo City Hall, 1986. CCA. DR1988:0274

Arata Isozaki & Associates. View of the atrium, New Tokyo City Hall, 1986. CCA. DR1988:0273

Architects working with computers today can claim this ontology as part of their own tradition. As Isozaki’s images show, this tradition is not confined to Western Europe and North America, nor is it limited to the signature styles of star architects. Rather, it is part of a genealogy that belongs to a global culture of creative labourers whose imagination of architecture cannot be separated from the way they use and think about computers. We might call them “invisible technicians,”2 “CAD monkeys,” or simply interns; whatever their name, their role in creating contemporary architectural culture should not be underestimated.

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