Up until the early 1980s, when many architectural offices around the world adopted them, computers had been predominately the luxury of a few architectural firms and academic institutions. For example, since the early 1960s emblematic firms such as Skidmore Owings and Merril (SOM) in the United States, ARUP in the United Kingdom, and Clorindo Testa’s in Argentina used computers —albeit mostly for budgets, quantity estimation, and structural calculations. It took a couple of decades for computers to become personal, and relatively affordable, and for CAD systems to become commercially available (the first version of AutoCAD, for example, was released in 1982). It was then that architectural firms started to embrace them more widely, chiefly to facilitate drafting tasks. Today, the emerging paradigm of “building information modeling” seeks to bring together the graphical and the calculative in digital environments that integrate highly-detailed geometric building descriptions with information about material quantities, budgets, and structural attributes. At the same time, in a tradition that can be traced to the early days of computing, architectural researchers in academia and industry investigate the potential of interactive computing, algorithms, and robotics to automate or reconfigure aspects of design and construction. Clearly enough, computational ideas and methods are key factors shaping the intellectual and material labors of architects and other design professionals,1 as well as their aspirations.
This vertiginous territory has been the subject of a growing body of architectural and design scholarship. Researchers have sought to understand, for example, computational design methods’ manifold effects on the design professions,2 their historical origins,3 pedagogical implications,4 as well as their potentials for both creative design5 and managerial efficiency.6 However, the bulk of these efforts has focused on practices and institutions of the global North. As a result, our understanding of the role of digital technologies in architecture and design is framed by historical and theoretical armatures that closely reflect concerns, and interests, native to these locations —chiefly the United States, UK, and Europe— and thus carry with them assumptions that, when unchecked, can occlude important questions and domains of analysis. In addition, while in recent years there has been an uptick in critical scholarship on architecture, design, and computation, accounts of these technologies from within architecture and other design fields are typically advanced in support of their adoption and thus carry with them assumptions about their universality and convenience that can overwhelm critical, or simply analytical, dispositions. From these techno-centric perspectives the adoption of the newest technologies is often presented as a one-way process: as a linear path between “province” and “metropolis” and —drawing from British geographer Doreen Massey’s observation that in the uneven geographies of development physical distance acquires a temporal dimension7— between ‘past’ and ‘future.’ Clearly, placing the global South in this conceptual past closes off the possibility to imagine other, alternative futures.8 With this special issue of Dearq we instead ask: How might we articulate other accounts of digital design and construction that do not place regions outside of the global North on the receiving end of technology and innovation? How might we dismantle the conceptual past that condemns entire regions and peoples to perpetually catch up with a seemingly pre-determined future?
Over the last decade, a group of Latin American scholars has been tracking the adoption of software and digital fabrication technologies by architects and architectural educators in this region, and the emergence of increasingly strong networks of international and inter-institutional collaboration. Peruvian design scholar and educator Pablo and collaborators, for example, have documented the influence of digital design and fabrication technologies in Latin America by mapping the movements of students from this region returning to their countries after completing degrees in US, EU, and UK universities, and following their impact on local universities and practices.9 These maps have made visible, for example, the emergence of local “fab labs,” or digital fabrication laboratories inspired by the “Fab Lab” initiative started at MIT.10 Echoing the ideas accompanying this initiative, these scholars have sought to emphasize the potential of these digitally-equipped spaces for stimulating the region’s social, economic, and political transformation. The expected benefits include to foster an entrepreneurial culture aligned with the prescriptions of the so-called “fourth industrial revolution,”11 collaborative opportunities between local artisans and digitally-savvy architects and designers, new formal styles that reinterpret local traditions for a technological zeitgeist,12 along with technology-driven approaches to children’s pedagogy.13 Related efforts have sought to understand the effects of digital technologies in Latin America’s architectural culture through bibliometric analyses. Brazilian architects and design and computation scholars Gabriela Celani and Pedro Veloso, for example, have studied regional research trends in Cumin-CAD, a database that aggregates research papers from several international digital design conferences and journals. Computationally analyzing metadata from thousands of papers, they sketch the evolution of the field following the Design Methods movement’s aspirations to make design a more “scientific” practice in the 1960s into more recent efforts to introduce parametric design software and digital fabrication machines in architectural settings.14 In a different study, Brazilian architectural educators and digital design researchers Tássia Borges de Vasconcelos and David Sperling have drawn metadata from the same database to identify pedagogical trends in the region, and suggested that the recent dominance of specific keywords such as “parametric” indicate a conceptual shift in the use of software — from the digitization of drafting towards the automation of analytical and even configurational aspects of architectural design.15 In addition, the related database and series of exhibitions Homo Faber has valuably curated and disseminated the work of a new generation of Latin American designers and researchers using computational media, with a focus on digital fabrication technologies.16
Parallel efforts in other Southern contexts have looked at computational design technologies through a similar lens, albeit using different methods. For example, Bangladeshi architect and educator A. Q. M. Abdullah and co-authors have used surveys to examine student attitudes towards the “digitization” of architectural education and practice in this South Asian country.17 With the goal of identifying pedagogical strategies to incorporate these technologies more effectively in the architectural curriculum, Jordanian architect and educator Rana Al-Matarneh and collaborators have used qualitative data to assess the state of adoption of computer-aided design software in Jordanian architectural education.18 Comparing survey data from 1997 and 2012, architect and scholar Ra’Ed K. QaQuish has pursued a similar question, suggesting that more university-level CAD training is required to accelerate adoption.19 From a different perspective, Egyptian architect and educator Muhammad Hegazi and collaborators have sought to utilize computational methods to foster a regional identity for Arab architecture by, for example, helping codify mathematical and geometric traits of Islamic patterns.20 Other studies in, for example, Pakistan,21 Nigeria,22 and the African continent,23 are similarly premised on the convenience of computational methods, and on the need to identify and target “barriers” to their adoption.
The body of work briefly reviewed above offers valuable insights about how architectural and design educators and practitioners outside of the global North have embraced digital technologies, and has helped to instigate this special issue. And yet, because of their focus on supporting the dissemination of digital technologies, these studies leave aside the very questions that we seek to confront with Other Computations. A few critical distinctions are thus in order: First, seeing computational design technologies as inherently positive and socially-transformative obfuscates important opportunities for analysis, such as those concerning these technologies’ relevance to particular contexts of design practice, or their problematic histories, unexpected failures, or their undesired effects on, for example, organizational cultures and labor practices. Second, seeing local expressions of computational design through the lens of dissemination tends to frame local practices, sites, and peoples in terms of their fitness to serve as subjects, or substrates, of digitization, potentially rendering invisible kinds of innovation and creativity that do not fit within imported techno-pedagogical molds. Finally, while mappings and bibliometric analyses can help visualize broad trends, they leave untouched the nuances, details, and inflection points where technological projects are realized. The picture emerging from these approaches is often one of “transfer” between a developed North and an underdeveloped South chasing after an always elusive, digitally-enabled modernity.
Recent work in science and technology studies (STS), design, and architectural studies offers some clues to avoid these pitfalls. Scholars in these fields have worked to re-signify “technology” and “science” to incorporate registers outside Western armatures, acknowledge the historical and ongoing intertwining of some of these technological projects with militarism, and emphasize the complex, situated, and dialogical nature of technological design and adoption. For example Zimbabwean STS scholar Clapperton Mahvunga reminds us of the fundamental asymmetry underlying concepts such as “science,” “technology,” and “innovation” by virtue of their intellectual and political origins at the entwined histories of colonialism and imperial domination. He usefully asks what these terms might mean not “for” but “from” Africa.24 Using this framework, Ron Eglash and Ellen K. Foster’s description of the African Maker Movement, for example, attempts a generative re-specification of maker spaces that articulates them to African imaginaries of innovation, mathematical knowledge, communal life, and political agency.25 Challenging the presumed universality of technological solutions, United States communications and STS scholar Anita Say Chan has explored digital cultures in Peru shaped by government efforts to network the nation and foster the emergence of a digital creative class.26 Also from the United States, historian and STS scholar Morgan Ames has documented the deployment of the (also MIT-based) “One Laptop Per Child” project in Paraguay, critically unpacking some of its ideological, pedagogical, and political underpinnings.27 From a different perspective, Colombian-Argentinian anthropologist Tania Pérez-Bustos has challenged the dichotomy between craft and technology that casts digital technologies as both universal and place-less while casting artisanal practices as ad-hoc and culturally situated. Drawing on STS sensibilities towards situated technology design practices,28 her critical review of projects combining textiles and digital devices emphasizes the culturally and materially situated nature of their design, casting it as a form of artisanship.29 With similar questions in mind, design and computation scholar Daniel Cardoso Llach, this issue’s co-editor, has examined CAD systems as historical artifacts with roots in US militarism, and as vehicles of culturally specific assumptions about design and construction labor. Through an ethnographic study of a building consultancy firm in the Middle East, his research documents tensions and conflicts arising from attempts to digitally coordinate a project’s design and construction, unsettling tropes about the centrality and universality of these technologies in architecture.30 In addition, the global architectural history and theory collaborative (GAHTC) has done much in recent years to challenge the epistemological authority of Anglo-European accounts of the discipline by generating teaching materials aimed at enriching architectural history survey courses with a global perspective. These include, for example, lecture materials covering Islamic, South Asian, West African, and pre-Hispanic architectural and urban traditions.31
Further, a strand of recent scholarship in media history offers additional tools to reimagine the conceptual geographies of computation in architecture and design. These recognize that while technology and science are commonly seen as essential to the formation of the contemporary global North, the same logic is not usually applied to historical accounts of Southern geographies. Addressing this imbalance, recent histories from Latin America and Oceania, for example, have focused on developments from these regions, complicating conventional genealogies of technological development that focus on a handful of well-studied pioneers and institutions. These have helped to re-shape diverse fields including digital music, computational economics, computer graphics, and management cybernetics. Australian musician and historian Paul Doornbusch, for example, has documented how in 1949 in Melbourne a team led by Trevor Pearcey assembled the CSIRAC, a vacuum tube computer which was used systematically to explore sound and music;32 New Zealander economist Alan Bollard has observed how his fellow countryman William Phillips created in London the MONIAC computer, a machine to model macroeconomic dynamics with a fluidic circuit;33 Colombian media scholar and artist Andres Burbano, this issue’s co-editor, has shown how in that same year, 1949, Brazilian avant-garde artist Geraldo de Barros created in São Paulo a series of experimental photos using punched cards instead of negative films.34 United States STS scholar Eden Medina has documented how a large-scale cybernetic system, a kind of proto-Internet, was deployed in Chile in the late 1960s during Salvador Allende’s government to help manage the country’s economy —a project led by British cybernetician Stafford Beer and Chilean scientist Fernando Flores, among others.35 Australian artist, engineer, and scholar Stephen Jones has exposed early developments in computer graphics and music in Australia, explicitly adopting an artist’s point of view.36 These histories are not coincidences, or oddities, but rather evidence of the complex historical entanglement of technologies with multiple academic and creative fields— an entanglement that is always shaped by geocultural and historical specificities.
In sum, these efforts from across STS and the history of media, architecture, and technology offer clues to think about architectural and design innovations from Southern contexts as epistemologically autonomous. On the one hand, they help cast technological developments from the global North in their cultural, political, and material specificity, thus questioning their presumed universality. On the other, they cultivate a sensibility towards practices that do not fit within received technological prescriptions, helping make visible synergies between local forms of thinking, designing, and inventing, and what Mavhunga calls “inbound” ideas and methods.
In alignment with these perspectives, this special issue of Dearq on Other Computations proposes a change of scope and analytical emphasis in the study of architecture’s digital turn.37 With a focus on Latin America and other Southern contexts, the issue imagines these geographical locations not as new territories to unveil, explore, or mine for empirical raw materials —nor as markets ripe for the adoption of imported technological solutions— but rather as domains where the project of architectural and design computation is crucially advanced, and where a critical vantage point might be gained to examine it. At the same time, the issue seeks to enable dialogical thinking about the dynamics of technological design and adoption. The project of modernity cannot be simply seen through the lens of colonial plunder and domination. As Indian post-colonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarti reminds us, modern ideals have often been wielded in Southern contexts to resist, or subvert, colonialist frames.38 In thinking about the always incomplete modernities of the global South39 it is thus important to leave room for generative appropriations and dialogues. After Mahvunga,40 instead of asking what computation and software might mean ‘for’ architecture and design in the global South, our issue asks what these technologies might mean ‘from’ there.
It is in this spirit that the materials assembled in this issue interrogate design-computational settings in Southern contexts. The issue comprises eight peer-reviewed research articles, one invited essay, two visually rich sections featuring the work of practitioners, and an afterword. The peer-reviewed scholarly articles responded to the issue’s call examining “other computations” in their historical disclosures and contemporary dispositions through a variety of methodological lenses —from the historical to the ethnographic and the project-based. In order to avoid approaching digital technologies with a narrow focus on transfer and dissemination, each author approaches these systems as open questions, and not as answers in and of themselves. The four articles that open the issue share an inquisitive attitude that draws from the historian’s and the ethnographer’s toolkits to illuminate historical and sociotechnical aspects of computational design. Based on a close ethnographic study of CNC factory workers in Ahmedabad, India, Megha Chand Inglis shows how conventional distinctions between manual and digital, and between tradition and future, are insufficient to understand the messy modernity of present-day architectural construction. Her article offers detailed portraits of three actors involved in the design and construction of an Indian temple, vividly accounting for their lived experiences, as well as for their entanglement in a global chain of material and digital labors connecting English Midlands to the largest city in Gujarat. Examining pedagogical materials from the School of Architecture at Universidad de Costa Rica in the 1970s, Natalia Solano-Meza’s reveals how computational ideas and methods came to embody aspirations to bring technical rationality to a tropical context. Describing the intellectual trajectory of these experiments in a strand of British cybernetics, as well as some of their ongoing legacies, her article reflects on how computational ideas have acted as vehicles of colonial and developmentalist paths of architectural education and practice, but also as instigators of unexpected pedagogical experiences and practical projects. Through a close visual and historical reading of an iconic modernist building in Algiers, Amina Rezoug and Mine Ozkar observe how dwellers’ gradual transformations of the building challenge both the building’s original design and its established historiography. Of interest here is the authors’ ingenious use of a classic computational design formalism, Shape Grammars,41 to document not only the building’s shape but also its evolution. Drawing from a rich ethnographic and design study of the craft of wire-bending in the Trinidad and Tobago carnival, Vernelle Noel leads us to imagine new ways to bring craft and computation together. She documents her development of an experimental digital design tool based on her cross-disciplinary study of Trinidad’s wire-benders —whose technique is slowly disappearing as a result of generational change and other factors. With this, Noel proposes a series of principles to guide the development of digital tools that enter in conversation with and help recuperate artisans’ knowledge.
The four articles that follow rigorously document and reflect upon projects that help illuminate contemporary computational design practices in Southern contexts. Extending their ambitious project to trace the adoption of digital technologies in Latin America’s architecture, David Sperling, Pablo Herrera and Rodrigo Scheeren critically review a series of recent projects in the region which engage with digital fabrication technologies. Responding to this issue’s call, they enrich their analyses with STS and post-colonial thinking to explore diverse configurations of the digital in Latin American architecture and design —from “fab labs” to the emergence of digital craft communities— emphasizing hacking and other bottom-up strategies. Through a discussion of a series of projects exploring the intersection of urban space and digital platforms, Pablo de Soto reflects on the history and aspirations of the activist group Hackitectura from Spain, which he himself integrated. In these projects, medieval castles are intertwined with abandoned nuclear research facilities, and terrestrial and maritime borders are explored through open-source software and open hardware, exposing the collective’s ambition to use computational systems to re-think conventional spatial categories. Specifically, the article proposes the wiki, the square, and the control room as new hybrid spaces comprising both digital and physical components. Taking Our Lady of the Valley church as a case study, a legacy from the Spanish architect Felix Candela, Diego Navarro-Mateu, Oriol Carrasco and Ana Cocho-Bermejo outline a computational methodology for the geometric analysis of historical buildings. Their methodology expertly blends parametric design and inverse engineering methods, and uses a genetic algorithm to investigate and re-describe the distinctive hyperbolic paraboloid shapes of Candela’s architecture. Of special interest here is the use of algorithmic methods for historical-analytical purposes —rather than for formal-exploration or structural analysis. In a tradition of using computation as a vehicle for participatory approaches to architectural and urban practices, Camilo Andrés Cifuentes Quin and Carlos Alberto Nader Manrique document their project to harness the flexibility of digital design and combinatorial systems for intervening in precarious housing in semi-formal urban settlements in Bogotá, Colombia. Their project offers one perspective on how generative design tools might be put in the service of local issues and communities. An invited historical essay by Australian artist, engineer, and scholar Stephen Jones outlines the distinctive trajectory that computer graphics took in Australia from 1949 onwards and complements the research section of the issue. Focusing on two of Australia’s earliest mainframe computers, CSIRAC and SILLIAC, Jones paints a lively picture of the materiality of the computational image —of its transit from system diagnostics to scientific visualization— and their role setting the stage for multiple applications of computer graphics in other practical and artistic domains including, for example, weather forecasting, music, and games. Illustrating the article are compelling historical photographs and screenshots which bring this history —which has often focused on contributions by the United States and United Kingdom institutions— into focus. In the spirit of an afterword for the research section, French historian of architecture and technology Antoine Picon reflects on the materials presented and on the importance of articulating new stories about architecture and the digital.
The Projects section, curated by Colombian architect David Rodríguez Vargas, brings together computational expressions from across the architectural, the artistic, and the pedagogical. These illustrate how Southern practitioners have appropriated, transformed, hacked, or developed their own approaches to computational design. Featuring projects from Australia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, and Nepal, the selection emphasizes participatory and culturally-situated applications of formal systems and digital fabrication methods in architecture. Closing the issue is the Creation section, featuring the work of Colombian artist Julián Jaramillo. Three of his recent projects using location-aware technologies to augment urban space with sound are introduced: The Smartphone Ensemble (2015), The AirQ Jacket (2016), and Lumina Nocte (2016). These explore new ways for people to interact with both mobile devices and urban space, suggesting new approaches to intervening in and studying urban environments. Using QR codes, Dearq readers will be able to experience fragments of these projects.
The materials assembled in Other Computations do not offer an exhaustive map or catalogue —this is neither possible nor necessary— but rather fragments of a complex picture that continues to unfold. They propose a re-focusing of architectural and design scholarship towards narratives that challenge, rather than reinforce, the universality and centrality of technological systems. In sum, the issue invites us to lend careful attention to the historical, material, and aesthetic specificity of computational systems in architecture and thus change our focus from a universalist computation into plural, situated, and local computations.