SATURDAY: Techniques and Theories

MARIO CARPO

Digital Agencies: Relearning Authorship in an Age of Variable Media

At the beginning of the early modern age, Leon Battista Alberti invented the modern profession of the architect when he famously stated that architects should stop making things, and should design things instead. Alberti separated the act of design from the materiality of making, and defined the drawing, not the building, as the first and original materialization of the architects idea. In the process, Alberti also created the modern, authorial notion of the architect as the holder of some kind of intellectual ownership over his drawings and over the physical objects that may result from them. These Albertian principles have defined the architectural profession for most of the last five centuries, but in the course of the last fifteen or twenty years they have been reversed--both notionally and practically--by the digital turn. Digital tools for CAD and CAM have already largely expanded the notational constraints that were inherent in the Albertian method of building by design. More crucially, the digital emphasis has recently shifted from the vertical integration of design and fabrication to the horizontal integration of all the actors and networks, human and technical alike, that intervene in the design and construction process. As new tools for Building Information Modeling facilitate and encourage interaction and participation in the informational workflow that accompany all stages of design and building, new and untested forms of hybrid, shared, or participatory agency are being tested, and old principles of architectural authorship are being challenged. All digitally-based, parametric design is predicated upon some form of incomplete, or open-ended notationality. And all forms of digital information are inherently fluid, drifting and variable. Variability, whether digital or not, inevitably implies some loss of control or some devolution of agency, even if today digital variability itself can be managed, controlled, or even designed in a variety of ways. This paper will review some patterns of digitally-based participatory agency that have been emerging in contemporary theory and practice, and assess the implications of these new forms of hybrid, generic, or split agency for the future of architectural authorship. It is generally assumed that the traditional notion of intellectual authorship is incompatible with the new media objects of the digital age. Since architectural design, fabrication and construction are to a large extent an informational process, and this informational workflow is now increasingly supported by digital tools, the very same notion of architectural authorship seems today to be at stake--together with the social practices and pedagogical approaches that have accompanied the rise of the Albertian paradigm, from its early-modern beginnings until its modernist climax in the late twentieth century. But architects are trained to be makers of form, and few of them possess the vocation or ambition to become generic authors in the participatory making of generative, and possibly formless parametric models. How can we reconcile our pedagogical tradition with a new technical and cultural environment that seems to go counter to most humanist notions of authorial, and authorized form-making?