Exhibition

Designing the Computational Image/ Imagining Computational Design

Duration

September 23, 2017 - November 12, 2017

Curator

Daniel Cardoso Llach

Artists

Kristy Balliet / Kelly Bair (BairBalliet), Andrew Heumann (WeWork, NY), Dana Cupkova, Golan Levin, Benjamin Snell, Kyuha Shim (CMU), Zach Lieberman (SFPC, NY), Jürg Lehni (Zurich), Carl Lostritto (RISD), Joseph Choma (Clemson/Cambridge), Jonah Ross-Marrs (MIT). Archives of Carnegie Mellon University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Cambridge, UK; and the Computer History Museum, among others.

Designing the Computational Image/Imagining Computational Design showcases a selection of previously unseen or lesser-known drawings, films, and high-quality reproductions, as well as interactive software reconstructions, illuminating the twentieth-century emergence of new methods for design representation, simulation, and manufacturing linked to digital computers' capacities for information processing and display. Examining the formative period of numerical control and computer graphics technologies between 1949 and 1976, the exhibition traces their evolution from elemental geometric constructions into highly structured semantic models—and from government-funded research in universities into industry standards—shedding light on the social, technical, and aesthetic origins of present architectural production techniques. From blips on radar screens to perspectival representations and free-form surfaces, the exhibition uniquely reveals the confluence of technical innovations in software, data structures, and hardware with a new cultural imaginary of design, endowing computer-generated images with both geometric plasticity and a new type of agency as operative architectural artifacts.

The historical materials featured in the exhibition are drawn from the archives of institutions key to the development of these technologies, including Carnegie Mellon University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Cambridge, UK; and the Computer History Museum, among others.

Joseph Choma, Contained Warping, 2013

Daniel Cardoso Llach is assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate architecture courses. His work explores problems ranging from social and cultural aspects of automation in design, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods for using data to visualize design as a socio-technical phenomenon. His recent research includes Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge, 2015), a book on the cultural history of computer-aided design and numerically controlled machinery, which examines how postwar technological projects shaped conceptions of design informing current architectural practices. He holds a PhD and an MS (with honors) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BArch from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. He has been a research fellow at MECS, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Reconstruction of an original drawing produced by the Whirlwind Computer, Servomechanisms Laboratory, MIT, 1958