For many architects, computation defines our contemporaneity and is the determining factor in the latest significant historical rupture in architecture. Yet the design of most buildings today continues to operate under the terms of an earlier rupture resulting from the 19th-century invention of steel frame and ferroconcrete construction: the dismantlement of the tradition of tectonic unity in architecture. It was then that a profound temporal disparity was established between, on the one hand, the relative permanence of the core-defined by the structure, floor slabs, egress stairs, and mechanical and elevator shafts-and on the other hand, the transience of everything visible in the space of architecture-the surfaces. Against the backdrop of the majority of architects who try to reconcile this disparity, two extreme tendencies stand out: those architects who focus almost exclusively on the production of surfaces with all their performative and sensorial effects and those who, believing architecture's mission to be the facilitation or even production of new social relationships, manipulate the spatial properties of the core.
展开▼
