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E-book Drawing Futures
The Albertian paradigm of architecture as an allographic1practice implies that architectural design comprises forms of notation and representation. It would seem that mediums2 are all that architects engage with. Architecture is primarily a cultural, visual practice that operates through design, understood as composition and the arrangement of relations. While architects work with drawings and models, they primarily produce images. With the advent of the digital, according to media scholar Lev Manovich, other media (print, photography, radio, film, etc) have been collapsed and integrated into software as a meta-medium; in almost all areas of contemporary life, software takes command.3 According to Marshall McLuhan, when a new medium appears, it does its best to simulate the preceding one before it inevitably supercedes it. Hence, when cinema emerged in the late nineteenth century, its formal vocabulary was that of the theatre until it discovered its own medium specificity – montage and movable camera.4 Importantly, a change comes to the old medium as well. After cinema took over some of the classical representational and, in that sense, political responsibilities of theatre, the focus of theatrical production shifted more and more towards the participatory and the situational elements, retaining and honing the literary component while moving away from the visual. Eventually, these developments gave rise to modernist theatre and other complex forms. The specificity of theatre was rediscovered in focusing on the living presence of an actor’s body and voice. In another example, with the introduction of photography, painting was introduced to a new specificity in the form of abstraction. What happens when a medium contains all other mediums? Everything changes, yet the issue of software’s specificity is rarely addressed. In response, Clement Greenberg’s notion of medium specificity can be reintroduced with regard to the problem of architectural design understood as a software practice. The question becomes: what is it that software can do that no other medium can?
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