Builders of the Vision

Software and the Imagination of Design

Daniel Cardoso Llach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317755951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Builders of the Vision traces the intellectual history and contemporary practices of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Numerical Control since the years following World War II until today. Drawing from primary archival and ethnographic sources, it identifies and documents the crucial ideas shaping digital design technologies since the first numerical control and CAD systems were developed under US Air Force research contracts at MIT between 1949 and 1970: the cybernetic theorization of design as a human-machine endeavor; the vision of computers as "perfect slaves" taking care of the drudgery of physical labor; the techno-social utopias of computers as vehicles of democracy and social change; the entrepreneurial urge towards design and construction integration; and the managerial ideologies enabling today's transnational geographies of practice.

Examining the contrasting, and often conflicting, sensibilities that converge into CAD and BIM discourses - globalism, utopianism, entrepreneurialism, and architects' desires for aesthetic liberation - Builders of the Vision shows that software systems and numerically controlled machines are not merely "instruments, " or "tools, " but rather versatile metaphors reconfiguring conceptions of design, materiality, work, and what it means to be creative. Crucially, by revealing software systems as socio-technical infrastructures that mediate the production of our built environments, author Daniel Cardoso Llach builds a strong case for the fields of architecture, media, and science and technology studies to critically engage with both the politics and the poetics of technology in design.

Builders of the Vision will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners across disciplines interested in the increasingly complex socio-technical systems that go into imagining and building of our artifacts, buildings, and cities.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Seeing Software as a Cultural Infrastructure

The Albertian ideal of building as the execution of designs by an infinitely precise skilled craftsman has been used to define the meaning of architecture since the sixteenth century, and it has not yet lost its hold upon our collective imagination of design. The reason is clear enough. Aligned with a long-standing Western tradition of privileging mind over matter, the Albertian split detached the mental sphere of design from the physical sphere of materials, installing the authority of the architect over artisans and builders. Different versions of this ideal underpin the rapidly changing landscape of technologies and technological discourses that since the second half of the twentieth century have shaped the contemporary imagination of design, which is the subject of this book.

My purpose is to circumscribe an intellectual history of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems by identifying, documenting, and examining the ideas of design that digital technologies have been modeled upon and have in turn elicited. To address this mutual reconfiguration, I explore outside the fields of design and architecture, into the cultures of technological production evolving under military contracts in the United States during the Cold War era, when important developments in electronics and actuators, as well as digital computers made it possible for architects, technology advocates, and automation enthusiasts to think of computers as “perfect slaves” taking care of the drudgery of working with materials, or as “creative partners” enabling participation and democracy in design. By further examining how these technologies and discourses are deployed in increasingly large and complex architectural projects, I show how software systems have come to matter, in a literal sense, by modulating the material production of our built environments—becoming a cultural and technical infrastructure in ways too important to ignore.

Drawing primarily from archival and ethnographic sources, I shall trace different versions of the Albertian ideal to key computational design cultures evolving since the years following World War II until today: the cybernetic discourses of design wielded by the engineers who developed the world’s first numerical control and CAD systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the automated design utopias imagined by architects who saw computers as vehicles of democracy and social change; the urge towards design and construction integration advanced by software entrepreneurs; and finally, the managerial ideologies that condition the work of contemporary Building Information Modeling (BIM) professionals, enabling transnational geographies of practice. The book reveals how, like a Rorschach inkblot, software is not merely an instrument of design but also a versatile metaphor—and a crucial infrastructure—reconfiguring conceptions of design, work, authorship, and what it means to be human.

In contrast with previous efforts to explore “the digital” in architecture, I purposefully avoid perspectives that celebrate, for example, the aesthetic novelty enabled by three-dimensional modeling software and numerically controlled devices, or the promises of managerial control advanced by software entrepreneurs. Rather, this book is a “counterhistory” in the sense proposed by historian Paul Edwards: an attempt to escape the discipline’s internal accounts that overwhelmingly frame digital technologies as inexorable forces driving cultural and historical change.¹ Instead, I explore digital technologies for design as artifacts indigenous to the political and cultural spaces of the US Cold War era, and to a contemporary globalist mindset. Thus, I place special emphasis on those who have devised, promoted, and explored CAD software, erecting it as the crucial infrastructure for the production of the built environment. It is the members of this diverse group of technologists, architects, academics, engineers, theorists, proselytizers, and evangelists whom I invoke with the phrase Builders of the Vision.

Beyond Autonomy and Neutrality

The book seeks to confront two overlapping and conflicting frames, autonomy and neutrality, that co-exist in and dominate technological discourses about design.

Through the autonomy frame, technologies are depicted either as surrogate humans, or as entities with an agency of their own. In these—mainly optimistic—portraits, technologies are endowed with attributes such as perception, judgment, and the ability to learn. As I discuss throughout the book’s Part One, engineers, architects, and designers seduced by the possibilities of digital computers variously imagine and seek to portray technologies as surrogate humans—chiefly as “perfect slaves” or “design partners”—or as meta-historical entities bringing society and the built environment closer to a social, environmental (or commercial) utopia. A problematic effect of viewing technologies as autonomous from humans is that the social groups involved in their design, production, and operation are hidden from view—thus shielding technologies, their makers, and the consequences of their deployment from critical scrutiny.

The frame of technological autonomy is linked with what scholars in sociology, anthropology, and history of science have critically termed “technological determinism”: the view that technology is an autonomous force with its own in-built logic, outside the reach of social actors and institutions. A broader effect of this view is the notion that society is always advancing towards an impending and inevitable technological future.² This obfuscation is evident in popular debates about technology, for instance, in recent debates about the use of deadly force by drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Often in these debates, the (presumed) autonomy, efficiency, and infallibility of the machines are advanced as arguments in support of more research leading to their production—in some cases overlooking important questions concerning the human decisions involved in their implementation and deployment as “autonomous” military systems (Figure 1.1).³

Figure 1.1 In public debates, the presumed autonomy and precision of technological systems sometimes obfuscates questions concerning their effectiveness, or the convenience of their implementation. The image shows an MQ-9 Reaper flying over Southern Afghanistan.

In contrast with the frame of technological autonomy, the frame of technological neutrality portrays technologies in design as passive vessels of human intentionality. With this view, common in popular discourses about design technologies, software and machines are “just tools.” Linked to a long-standing tradition in Western culture of elevating mind over matter, the frame of technological neutrality views acts of design as purely mental operations resulting in physical representations and artifacts through processes of externalization and translation. Since these translations are presumed to be seamless, adopting this frame has the negative consequence that those materials, as well as the people and tools involved in their manipulation, are construed as passive recipients of designs—and therefore deprived of their agency. This is a familiar story for the design fields: architects owe their professional DNA to the distinction between the mental sphere of design (the domain of the architect) and the material sphere of materials and tools (the domain of a “skilled craftsman”), a theory first formulated by Renaissance architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti.

This portrayal of design technologies as neutral tools for design is inadequate not only because it hides from view the social groups and material arrangements involved in the deployment of technological systems, but also because it obscures the many ways in which technologies themselves may condition design, and the lives of those who practice it. Thus, the effects of technological systems are also obscured. In popular debates about technology, the frame of technological neutrality structures well-known arguments concerning justice and responsibility, such as the argument against gun control, claiming that “guns do not kill people, people kill people.” Though rarely fatal, discourses of technological neutrality in design deprive both technologies and their human counterparts of their agency as participants, deleting both the origins and the effects of technology from view, again shielding them from critical scrutiny and from public debates concerning both the poetics and the politics of our shared built environment.

The polarity between technological autonomy and neutrality thus hides a great deal. The issue in question is that, by construing software systems either as autonomous agents or as neutral tools for design, we shut down their politics—the ways in which they are contingent upon and reconfigure networks of social, material, and technical actors—as crucial domains of analysis and critique. Moreover, we shut down their poetics—their very open-endedness—as territories of creative exploration.

A change of frame is thus in order.

The Infrastructure View

As opposed to autonomous entities or obedient tools, this book takes the view that software systems are increasingly infrastructures that condition the design and production of our built environments. Software systems today resemble railroads, telegraph lines, and highway systems more than they resemble traditional drafting or modeling tools.⁴ Whereas drafting tools evoke a tactile and bodily relationship with both materials and instruments—body extensions—infrastructures evoke larger technological systems that depend for their production and operation upon hierarchical social organizations and material arrangements. Likewise, whereas seeing software as an autonomous agent invokes a deceptive human–machine symmetry that imbues machines with undue agencies, seeing software systems as infrastructures situates them as cultural artifacts within economic, institutional, and political frames, and as embodiments of their makers’ worldviews, ambitions, and desires. Thus, the infrastructure view endows digital technologies for design with social, material, and spatial dimensions—conditions often overlooked by a tendency to imagine software systems as naturalized, immaterial, and placeless entities. If we care about the design of our cities, products, and buildings, we need an expanded—technically and theoretically engaged—approach to design criticism that embraces software for design and architecture, its history, its makers, the cultures that produce them, and the images of practice they inscribe, as crucial to understand the way we design and build the world. And crucial, also, to an informed discussion about computational literacies in both design education and the general public. Thus, through this expanded frame, this book approaches the construction and deployment of CAD systems as techno-cultural infrastructures for design production. The “dissymmetries” between humans and machines are thus acknowledged, and software enters our analytical stage from an enriched material, social, spatial, and political perspective. By looking at the ideas and cultures that shape CAD systems, and examining an example of their deployment into actual design and building practices, this book seeks to build this perspective. It does so supported on a trans-disciplinary foundation combining studies of science technology and society, software and media studies, and the architectural humanities.

Lenses

My inquiry into design and computation stands on the shoulders of many authors across different fields. For example, a growing body of work by scholars in media studies, and the more recent field of software studies, has sought to explore and theorize software’s specificity. Software and media theorist Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command, for instance, reveals image-processing programs as cultural objects linked to a history of modern visual and media culture, observing how the interoperability between different systems enables new forms of creative expression.⁵ Matthew Fuller’s Behind the Blip offers a practical theorization of non-normative approaches to software—critical, speculative, social—evocative of a desirable landscape of technological possibility.⁶ In Protocol, Alexander Galloway talks about the constraints and affordances embedded in software and networks by virtue of their own materiality, arguing that these condition the flow of data in society and are increasingly indiscernible from the data themselves. While my use of “infrastructure” bears resemblance to Galloway’s concept of “protocol,” it further invokes the spatial and geographic dimensions of technological systems in ways that are crucial to my subject and questions.⁷

Authors for whom design is a specific concern have also approached software, and some of them have crucially informed my inquiry. William J. Mitchell’s The Logic of Architecture, for example, offers an ambitious take on the parallels between architectural and computational thought, and suggests alternatives to the dominant images of technology in design;⁸ Robert Bruegmann’s concise history of architects’ adoption of CAD is a useful roadmap that opened up key questions at the right time;⁹ Kathryn Henderson’s On Line and On Paper offers a persuasive account of how new design technologies never simply replace established ones, but link unpredictably to existing traditions of representation and work;¹⁰ Malcolm McCullough’s Abstracting Craft thoughtfully explores digital design practices as both embodied and expressive;¹¹ more recently, Yanni Loukissas’s Co-Designers, a study of architects’ use of simulations, reveals simulations as sites of boundary negotiation between different disciplines, shaping the professional identities of those who produce them.¹² While not directly addressing questions about software, the work of architectural scholars such Dana Cuff, George B. Johnston, Mary Woods, Robert Gutman, Magali Larson, and Diane Ghirardo provides invaluable accounts and histories of architectural professionalism that have been crucial in framing my treatment of the field throughout this book.¹³

Further, the fields of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies, as well as feminist scholars, have provided useful instruments to complicate conventional explanations of technology as either a neutral tool, or as an autonomous agent outside the control of social actors or institutions. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, for instance, offer methods to account for both human and nonhuman agencies as constitutive of our social worlds.¹⁴ Observing how technologies always rely upon and reify conceptions of practice and of users, Lucy Suchman’s work reminds us that human actions are irreducibly situated and thus contingent upon social, institutional, and material arrangements—therefore exceeding analytical models, accounts, or prescriptive plans.¹⁵ Paul Edwards’s account of Cold War discourse in the United States in The Closed World, and his later reflections on infrastructure and modernity provide crucial historical and analytical insight.¹⁶ Gary Downey’s The Machine in Me offers an unparalleled account of Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technologies during the 1980s and 1990s, and identifies its impulse to conflate design and construction as an expression of the then dominant economic doctrine of competitiveness in the US. His concern with the dominant image of technology is one I share throughout these pages;¹⁷ Karen Barad’s call for the constitution and adoption of “performative” idioms to account for material, technological, human, and nonhuman agencies—an attitude she terms “agential realism”—offers strategies to avoid the risks of narrowly defining agency as exclusively human.¹⁸

The work in these areas is vast and thus this enumeration is by no means an exhaustive one. However, it reflects some of the intellectual debts I have acquired in the course of preparing this book, as well as some of the alignments I seek. The Bibliography section should amend most of the key omissions. My hope is to create an audience that spans these communities of scholarship and practice, bringing them closer to the design disciplines and fostering a crucial transdisciplinary debate over the role of software and technology in the production of our shared built environments.

A Note on Method

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle describes the anthropological notion of depaysement as the process through which “one leaves one’s own culture to face something unfamiliar, and upon returning home it has...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Image Credits
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Seeing Software as a Cultural Infrastructure
• 2 Codification before Software: Architectural Inscriptions and the Design–Construction Split
• Part One Design Machines
• Part Two Software from the Field
• 9 Rethinking Redundancy: Parametrics of Trust Building in Digital Practice
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index