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Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design

A book visually examining the twentieth-century emergence of new methods for representation, simulation, and manufacturing linked to computers, and reflecting on their contemporary repercussions across creative fields.

A copy of Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design

During the three decades following the Second World War, and before the advent of the personal computer, government investment in university research in North America and the UK funded multidisciplinary projects to investigate the use of computers for manufacturing and design. Documenting the eponymous curatorial project, Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design explores this period of remarkable inventiveness and traces its repercussions on architecture and other creative fields through the work of computational architects, designers, and artists working today.

Alongside a compelling visual archive showcasing hundreds of unpublished or lesser-known computational images, drawings, films, and software, the book features essays by architecture, media, and science and technology scholars offering close readings of specific images, as well as conversations and interviews with historical protagonists and contemporary practitioners. Together, these materials illuminate in unprecedented detail the confluence of technical innovations in software, geometry, and hardware with a fledging technological imaginary of design and creativity, tracing the emergence — and reimagining the potentials — of a vibrant field of interdisciplinary research and practice.

Contributors

Introductory essays by Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli; guest essays by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Matthew Allen, Andrés Burbano, Moa Carlsson, Mario Carpo, Emek Erdolu, Jacob Gaboury, Sean Keller, Anna-Maria Meister, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Akshita Sivakumar, David Theodore, and Olga Touloumi; conversations/interviews with Kristy Balliet, Nathalie Bredella, Joseph Choma, Dana Cupkova, Golan Levin, Carl Lostritto, Jonah Marrs, Leslie Mezei, Frieder Nake, Paul Pangaro, George Stiny, Molly W. Steenson, Rachel Strickland, and Elizabeth Vander Zaag; artworks by Kristy Balliet and Kelly Bair, Philip Beesley, Joanna Berzowska, Joseph Choma, Dana Cupkova and Daragh Byrne, Felecia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu, Jean Dubois, Madeline Gannon, Benedikt Groß, Andrew Heumann, Daniel Iregui, Jürg Lehni, Golan Levin, Zach Lieberman, Carl Lostritto, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jonah Marrs, Leslie Mezei, Vernelle Noel, Ben Snell, John Stehura, Lillian Schwartz, George Stiny, Jer Thorp and Diane Thorp, Elizabeth Vander Zaag, Alan Warburton, and Shaheer Zazai. 

Authors and Editors

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of numerous publications, exhibitions, and technologies exploring the interplay of design and computation including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, published by Routledge in 2015.

Theodora Vardouli, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University. She is co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, published by Routledge in 2020, and author of a forthcoming book with the MIT Press entitled Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons.