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Architecture’s New Media: Principles, Theories, and Methods of Computer-Aided Design

by Yehuda E. Kalay
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
521 pp., illus. b/w and col. Trade, $55.00
ISBN: 0-026-11284-1.

Reviewed by Peter Anders
MindSpace.net, Midland, MI

ptr@mindspace.net

The publication of Yehuda Kalay’s Architecture’s New Media is an important event in the history of design computation. Kalay, a professor of architecture at Berkeley, has been a proponent of computer-aided design (CAD) since its earliest years and has himself developed software now in use in various applications. His tenure in the field gives him a unique vantage point on CAD’s development. In this, his first book on the subject, Kalay conveys a sense of personal history, presenting a summary of ideas and observations that have occupied him throughout his career.

Architecture’s New Media is ambitious, accounting for several thematic strands that form the braid of architectural computation. These themes are presented in sections on communications, synthesis, and evaluation, plus a more general section on the future of digital technology in architecture. Within these sections are chapters illustrating specific methods or principles that have informed design computation. For instance, within the section on synthesis we find separate chapters on procedural, heuristic, and evolutionary methods, along with conventional, non-digital techniques. This nested framework gives the book its structure and focuses on important aspects of design technology. Unfortunately, the compartmentalization of topics, at times, results in disjointed, deliberate prose. Contiguous chapters often seem unrelated, commencing with historical throat-clearing that bogs down the narrative and undermines its arguments. Strapping CAD to the history of architecture puts the subject on a Procrustean bed, stretching and lopping it to suit a determinist history. From the book it would seem that CAD was simply the product of a gradual, progressive evolution. This is misleading: Computers do not extend the history of architecture so much as intervene and disrupt it. While the mimesis of architectural techniques has driven CAD development in the past, the book’s assertions of continuity obscures the radical nature of the technology. Computers’ underlying principles——mutable, algorithmic, and abstract——challenge values of permanence, materiality, and space that are fundamental to architectural practice. The unsettling, subversive potentiality of digital technology is lost with Kalay’s narrative strategy.

Fortunately, the book’s content belies historicizing, offering insights into digital technology along with stranger aspects of architectural media, such as evolutionary methods for "breeding" design solutions, virtual place-making, and automated design agents. Illustrations, diagrams——even mathematical formulae——abound making this book one of the most comprehensive on the subject to date. At roughly 500 pages, the book averages 10 pages for each year of design computation’s history. That’s thorough. New Media’s historical proximity to this period, however, leads to inevitable oversights and omissions. A review of the index yields no mention of John Holland——the inventor of genetic algorithms——Marcos Novak and Gerhardt Schmitt——visionaries of virtual architecture——or even William Mitchell who wrote the book’s forward. Given the book’s scope, a comprehensive bibliography——rather than chapter notes——would also have been welcome to Kalay’s readers. But these faults could be easily overcome in subsequent editions. Yehuda Kalay’s book is a valuable contribution to the literature of architectural computation and an important marker in the field’s still evolving history.

 

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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