The quintessential quality of the digital approach is its copiability – that it can be copied without effecting on the original. As pure information is at the core, the core can be effortlessly copied into numerous copies of itself, and multiple instances of the same core can coexist. That way, even if numerous tweaks are applied to the cores, they essentially remain the bound copies (i.e. instances) of the original core which can be edited and developed regardless of the added layers. In terms of architectural application this has proved very useful in comparative formal studies, as these correlating changes would be considered telepathic in a material world. Not so in a digital one.
This eventually leads to the disembodiment of information, or more to the point, brings focus on the fundamental disembodiment within an embodied world. Consequently, identity and authorship need to be re-thought.
For example, the Parthenon is an actual, materialized building (or what remains of it today). The individual authors of its constituent parts are known, and the building as a whole could hardly be classified as an anonymous project brought together by haphazard chiselling by disconnected individuals within that took place at a specific time. And yet, it is in fact a specific stage in a long process of formal evolution and although the authors undoubtedly contributed to its form and subsequent glory, their efforts are deeply bound into the historical process from which they derived.
The form of the temple has developed from a history of technical innovations, material advances, experimentation as well as trial and error. What has resulted, partly in the Parthenon but mostly in the archetypical Greek temple, is a specific approach to solving some basic demands such protection from the elements, imposing a delineation of in and out, as well as a presentable appearance.
The result is what has become known as classical styles, amongst others Doric. Even though the individual piece of work that is Parthenon has specific authors, the Doric style is, not unlike a language, author-less. Its main aspects can be freely adapted and rearranged and as long the basic rules, ones that have developed over time and through numerous individuals, are followed it functions as a coherent whole.
And whereas the Doric style is freely copiable, adaptable and movable, the Parthenon is not. The materiality of its existence prevents it. Contrarily, the digital is essentially removed from the irrevocable material-ness. If it were made of stone blocks, the individual blocks could be freely interchanged, copied and reformed, regardless of their originality, as each block would be equal to any other of the same type. This is fundamentally different to carving a series of stone blocks to the same template and achieving the result of identical columns. Even if they were multiple copies of an ideal column in Plato’s sense, they merely share a (very) similar shape imposed on them by a carver, and are not inherently connected to the initial column any other than formal way. They are not, in digital terms, instances of the original column. And obviously if they were to be used at some other site, their removal would imply their absence at their previous location.
The questions of individuality, authorship and authenticity have come up more recently with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion. Although the original was constructed in 1929 for the world exhibition, it was then taken down in 1930. Its building blocks were partly stored, and partly used elsewhere. Although this would then imply that there are buildings that are in part the Barcelona pavilion, even though they are essentially another project all together, it is more prudent to focus on the fate of the pavilion itself. Having been re-erected in 1986 after considerable effort to ensure the actual use of the same building blocks used in the same way, this somehow introduces crutches to support its identity.
Mies would undoubtedly recognize the pavilion in its today shape and the authorship of the pavilion would never be disputed. It is in fact (partly) the same authentic pavilion, and yet it is not the same pavilion. Materiality does not agree with copy-pasting.
Luckily, digital does not agree with authenticity. As pure bits are the building blocks, then the concepts of copy-paste, multiple instances and simultaneous coexistence are the basic mode d’être. In a way there is no shadowy divide between the proto-bit and any other bit as in Plato’s cavernous world, but each bit is essentially its own bit, only attaining meaning when conjoined into bytes, and is in every way as authentic as any other bit with which it is replaceable. And due to the specific arbitrary set-up of the world these two types of bits inhibit, each is the full emancipation of one of two possible ways of being – I or O. Architecture is of course only one affected area.
While writing this, numerous words have been moved around, replaced, written over and edited in many ways. Although in the subsequent printed version the individual sentences, words and especially letters will have a material individuality of its own, they will represent a specific stage in the development of this text and the letters themselves. However at this point, there is no essential difference between this word and this word. Both words (being actual words for a word) have in fact copies of one another, having been pasted from one to the other. If either is replaced by another new (typed) entity that will also be ‘word’, the newly created word will be in no way different from the word it has replaced. In either case, the words are an end in themselves, but can easily be replaced by another instance of themselves without suffering any qualitative difference of their essence. Their meaning derived from their shape through their virtually endowed meaning will equally stay unchanged.
In this way, a digital equivalent to Parthenon’s columns can be in fact the same as any other that came before it, or after. It can either be copied endlessly, or replicated through instances and thus breaching the underlying principles of the material world of uniqueness. Even though the instances (that are composed of bits) are the representations of another entity (also made of bits), they are not, as it were, bits on their own, but in effect the same bits as their role models.
This multitude of bits perhaps becomes more relevant when applied to the Barcelona pavilion. The first and second materialization of the pavilion are in fact two separate entities. But through their virtual connection they are in fact two manifestations of the same conceptual pavilion, mildly tainted through their materialization. The author of the building is the same, as is its purpose and location. And although the pavilion has remained the same, the building that represents it has changed. In effect, it became a material equivalent of cutting and pasting, whereas the building has retained every bit of its essence, without actually remaining the same building.
The question of authorship is even more obscure when there is no physical artefact to have as an example. Although there have almost always been multiple authors of any given architectural project, each contributing to the end object in some way, the relationships have complicated themselves further.
In a classical context the tools used for production of drawings have had a negligible effect on the end product – the pencil is too simple a tool for its producers to be significantly involved in the organization, aesthetics or use of an architectural endeavour. Not so with digital tools, where any software environment comes bundled with its own limitations – either the original programmer, computing power, organizational concepts, accuracy of input devices, etc. As Terzidis argues, the resulting building firstly depends on designer of the software and the available computing power and only then the architectural designs.
As the development of software progresses at an ever-increasing pace, this dependency on the software designer becomes more obvious as architectural designs begin to closely correspond to any advances in the software field. And due to its rapid development, any previous breakthrough result in being outdated with the any succeeding version as the available possibilities increase. This in effect voids the experimental and innovative architectural work done previously.
However the issue is not that of architectural endeavours becoming rapidly out-dated in itself, but the inseparable dependency on software and the strive to achieve the best results within the most recent version. Not unlike a dog chasing its tail instead of cats, the purpose of the exercise seems to have been lost (or at least the efforts misguided).
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad of 1963 is the first benchmark for such shifts. Being one of the first computer-aided drawing tools its role is already revolutionary, however its trump card is the groundbreaking graphic interface along with object-oriented design. The concepts developed and systems put in place have very much become a standard in a majority of later software.
Sketchpad was an improvement over the somewhat related contemporary LOGO, which emulated classical hand drawing by recording a single marker guided by textual commands. Its key contribution is that it enabled previously unfeasible drawing exercises such as fractals and similar. Along with others, the two tools caused a paradigm shift in digital drawing. With a single improvement, the boundaries of possibility have been tremendously expanded.
Although Sketchpad was not widely available (or was the required equipment), it served as a powerful proof-of-concept. Later packages joined the characteristics of Sketchpad, LOGO and others into ever-more powerful tools, and added their own improvements, such as drawing within three dimensions and various deformations, amongst others.
One such universal package is Maya. Being a merger of multiple specialized tools itself, it is very versatile and its functionality is additionally expandable through an in-built programming language. Not entirely unlike LOGO’s attempt to create a graphic representation of textual programming, it enables creating objects and procedures beyond the scope of the human user and in a way enabling the tool’s tool (i.e. the computer itself) to ‘stretch its muscles’ and through that enable a glimpse into the primordial digital.
An even more recent addition is Grasshopper, which focuses solely on the automatization (or, better yet, parametrification) of the design process. In one way almost a de-evolution of the development of user-friendly interfaces, and a further step in entrusting the design decisions to the software in another.
The concept is very practical to the industries it was actually developed for. Moreover, it has proved very alluring to architecture, as it in effect produced the new brick; thus recreating the essence of architecture and enabling the expedition into the digital.
This is the point where the issue of authorship assumes the shape of hen-or-egg dilemma. Would the architect ever have begun to explore the shapes or principles embedded in the Digital and thus exploring the potential of the Virtual without the tools made available? And, more to the point, are the results in fact the work of the architect, or the tool’s tool blissfully oblivious to any addend meaning to an endless onslaught of 1s and 0s that need to be processed, or the tool developed for other uses entirely and almost accidentally becoming marginally useful to an additional industry, or was it the hordes of programmers putting a strings of abstract commands together in an obscure artificial language?
Of course the introduction of technical innovations is nothing new to architecture. Numerous foreign objects have been painlessly absorbed into architecture’s tissue over time, often causing considerable change of style, technique and capability. However the change has never been quite as profound or far-reaching as this. Perhaps partly due to its immateriality and the overall paradigm shift it came with.
