Lunch Bytes Architecture

Confirmed panel: Richard Clif­ford, stu­dio di­rec­tor MAK­Lab , Glas­gow; Stef­fen Krämer, artist and film­maker, Berlin; Mona Ma­hall co- founder of stu­dio m-a-u-s-e-r, Stuttgart; and East­ern Surf, artist col­lec­tive, Ed­in­burgh. Mod­er­ated by Remco de Blaaij, CCA cu­ra­tor, and Melanie Bühler, Lunch Bytes cu­ra­tor, Am­s­ter­dam.

Digital technologies have altered the way buildings can be conceived, conceptualized and modelled. By no longer relying on the formal geometrical concepts and units that were hitherto used as part of the design process, computer-aided-architectural design techniques now have the potential to create radically different, complex forms. This can be seen in the organically shaped buildings of architects like Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry. This new power, however, also leads to new pitfalls. When architect and critic Bernard Tschumi comments on the digitization of the discipline, he criticizes it for mainly celebrating spectacular forms, favouring the iconic at the expense of other values and considerations.

Next to these computer-aided architectural design techniques, digital technologies have also spawned new ways of producing structures and materials (computer-aided manufacturing), resulting in built environments that look and feel differently. In this way, such technologies have transformed our experience of the spaces we inhabit and move through. Our world is increasingly permeated by calculative, software-enabled infrastructures running silently in the background, while we in turn become ever more attached to our devices, which register, process, and exchange location-aware information. This data space continually and recursively informs how we navigate and perceive architectural spaces, by making them ‘smarter’, more complex, yet also less unpredictable.

This panel critically reflects on the various ways in which digitization has heralded transformations in architecture and of our built environment, both on a formal and material level. It discusses the impact of digital technologies, whose incessant computation and connectivity afford an augmented and expanded human perception of buildings and (public) spaces.

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For more information, please visit the Lunch Bytes website here and the Goethe-Institut Glasgow site here.