Review: Digital Architecture beyond Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design, by Roberto Bottazzi

Abstract

Roberto Bottazzi Digital Architecture beyond Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, 256 pp., 21 b/w illus. $88 (cloth), ISBN 9781474258135 In his afterword to Roberto Bottazzi's new contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the histories and genealogies of digital practices in architecture, Frederic Migayrou identifies a historiographic conundrum. “How to elaborate the limits of a critical history of digital architecture,” Migayrou asks, “where the limits have not yet been established or well defined?” (207).1 In other words, how does one simultaneously construct and critique a field? One possible response to Migayrou's challenge is offered by the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Archaeology of the Digital research project (begun in 2013). In what the CCA calls “a Tristram Shandy of the digital,” the absence of limits and definitions encourages proliferation and digression, which are to be embraced as positive qualities rather than domesticated through taxonomic delimitation.2 In Digital Architecture beyond Computers , Bottazzi offers a different response. While scholarship on digital architecture has so far focused largely on uses of commercial or custom computer programs in contexts of architectural production, Bottazzi invites us to see computers not as closed technological instruments but as the most current manifestation of modes of thought and cultural practices that go back centuries.3 Using an abundant collection of historic examples, Bottazzi traces theoretical tropes and practices that have informed contemporary computer applications for architecture and prefigured their uses. This refreshing approach brings to mind the Instruments research project of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, which seeks to identify the technical preconditions of contemporary thought and praxis, as well as media theorist Bernhard Siegert's notion of cultural techniques, which “highlight the operations or sequences of operations that historically and logically precede the media concepts generated by them.”4 Bottazzi's …