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| Author(s): Daniel Cardoso Llach Publisher: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, Year: 2015 ISBN: 0415744970, 9780415744973, 0415744997, 9780415744997, 1317755952, 9781317755951, 1317755960, 9781317755968 Description: Builders of the Vision traces the intellectual history and contemporary practices of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Numerical Control since the years following World War II until today. Drawing from primary archival and ethnographic sources, it identifies and documents the crucial ideas shaping digital design technologies since the first numerical control and CAD systems were developed under US Air Force research contracts at MIT between 1949 and 1970: the cybernetic theorization of design as a human -machine endeavor; the vision of computers as “perfect slaves” taking care of the drudgery of physical labor; the techno-social utopias of computers as vehicles of democracy and social change; the entrepreneurial urge towards design and construction integration; and the managerial ideologies enabling today's transnational geographies of practice. Examining the contrasting, and often conflicting, sensibilities that converge into CAD and BIM discourses – globalism, utopianism, entrepreneurialism, and architects' desires for aesthetic liberation – Builders of the Vision shows that software systems and numerically controlled machines are not merely “instruments,” or “tools,” but rather versatile metaphors reconfiguring conceptions of design, materiality, work, and what it means to be creative. Crucially, by revealing software systems as socio-technical infrastructures that mediate the production of our built environments, author Daniel Cardoso Llach builds a strong case for the fields of architecture, media, and science and technology studies to critically engage with both the politics and the poetics of technology in design. |
| Table of contents: 1. Introduction: Seeing Software as a Cultural Infrastructure — 2. Codification Before Software: Architectural Inscriptions and the Design-Construction Split — 3. Software Comes to Matter: Encoding Geometry, Materials and Machines — 4. Perfect Slaves and Cooperative Partners: Steven A. Coons and Computers' New Role in Design — 5. Computer-Aided Revolutions: CAD Experimentalism, Participation and Representation in the Architecture Machine — 6. Visions of Design: Software Stories About Design, Creativity and Control — 7. The Architect's Bargain: Building the 'Bilbao Effect' in the Abu Dhabi Desert — 8. Contesting the Infrastructure: Resistance Against and Re-Appropriation of a Digital Model — 9. Rethinking Redundancy: Parametrics of Trust-Building in Digital Practice |
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