Scholarship centered on innovation is not necessarily innovative. In complete contrast with other fields of architectural research, the study of the digital in architecture has been until recently marked by a certain indifference towards the necessity to challenge the traditional privilege given to Western thought and achievements. Indeed, most historical accounts begin with the seminal role played by British and American early developments in computing before envisaging episodes like the creation of the Land Use and Built Form Studies at Cambridge University in 1967, or the launch of the Paperless Studio at Columbia University in the 1990’s. This Western-centric and decidedly Northern orientation often extends to contemporary studies of digital architecture and robotic fabrication, as if technology obeyed concentric patterns of diffusion from selected centers to various undifferentiated peripheries.
The essays gathered in this volume by Daniel Cardoso Llach and Andrés Burbano question critically this received narrative in various ways. First, they enrich considerably the geography of the digital by showing for instance how institutions like the Architecture School of the University of Costa Rica was very early on permeated by a computational perspective that led to creative experiments in design pedagogy. Second, this collection of essays also reminds us that the circuits of innovation are far more complex than the centrifugal logic evoked above, that they involve processes of translation and reinterpretation that are often akin to a complete reinvention. As one of the studies reveals, Latin-American researches on digital fabrication follow specific agendas that differ from their Northern counterparts.
Above all, enlarging the scope is not only a matter of paying tribute to underrecognized contributions to the digital in architecture from a postcolonial perspective. It also offers key insights on how to envisage some of the most pressing issues today, such as the complex relations between traditional labor, on the one hand, digital modeling and fabrication, on the other. Looking closely at how the contemporary realization of Indian temples involves both the hands of sculptors and CNC machinery, or paying attention to the digital potential of the craft practice of wire-bending in Trinidad and Tobago, may inspire more creative scenarios for the future of digital fabrication than the neo-Ruskinian vision of the designer as maker or the nostalgia of the craftsman that are currently being discussed based on essays like Lars Spuybroek’s The Sympathy of Things and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.
The Other Computations evoked in this volume should remind us of two essential features of the digital. First, that as much as a series of technologies, it appears as a culture whose actors are far more numerous than what has been generally supposed. Things did not happen only at the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, or MIT. The global South has been part of the story, and this has been the case a long time prior to the rise of Indian software engineers or Latin-American digital designers. Second, as a culture, the digital should not be approached as an external factor impacting architecture from the outside. The notion of co-production mobilized by science and technology studies (STS) scholar Sheila Jasanoff is probably better suited when trying to understand its relation to a domain like design. Thus, the essays gathered here force us to challenge not only received narratives but also reassuringly straightforward, but by the same token simplistic, explanations.