To address the hegemony of digital calculus and its architectural meaning by the question of politics, there is a thought raised in Antoine Picon’s “Digital Culture in Architecture”, one of challenging the impact, achievement and consequences produced and generated by “digital architecture”. Conversely, such a discussion is one of asking what ideas and visions evolve through “digital architecture”, what does it provoke and leave behind? And indeed, architecture in the digital age falls far short of asking these questions. As opposed to consider what effects and results are being produced, novel techniques of visualization were following an inspiration from materialist philosophy and various sciences that allowed for a new aesthetical repertoire to liquidate Modernism’s uniformity and the ambiguity of the Post-Modernist doctrine. Addressing the digital age in architecture by the question of politics, however, involves a thorough discussion of complexity, responsibility and the production of space, evolving from and within a specific practice of digital architecture. In this, the critical dialogue The Politics of Digital Architecture: Complexity, Responsibility and the Production of Space aims to intensify the discourse on the contexts, influences, and legacies of architecture in the digital age in order to foster a broader understanding and less ideological thought that stimulates digital potentials to be covered by both responsibility and the consequences they initiate.
by Jan Willmann