Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (MIT Press)
How a protean mathematical object, the graph, ushered in new images, tools, and infrastructures for design and catalyzed a digital future for architecture.
In this brilliant book, Theodora Vardouli explores the multiple ways in which graphs have been haunting architecture from late modernism to the rise of the digital. Weaving together the visual, the instrumental, and the infrastructural dimensions, she offers new insights into the rise of the computational in design.
~ Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design; author of The Materiality of Architecture
Much ink has been spilled on formalism and functionalism in architectural modernity. Graph Vision brilliantly recasts these debates in an entirely new mold by making the structuralist impulse of graph-making a primary protagonist of twentieth-century architectural discourses. Stripping architecture temporarily of its flesh, these graphs made relations (rather than forms or functions) into objects of analysis and manipulation for postwar architects. Vardouli’s deeply researched, beautifully written, and stunningly original book will change how historians and practitioners alike will understand the history of that thing we now call ‘digital architecture.’
~ Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Associate Professor, Columbia University
Vardouli’s groundbreaking analysis reshapes key debates across media studies, science studies, and visual culture, establishing the centrality of architectural theory to future debates in these fields.
~ Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Senior Lecturer, Information Studies, University of Gothenburg
Vardouli has done an excellent job. She is fully in command of all the mathematics and computation and has ploughed her way through many dusty, indigestible documents to produce her lucid and attractive account.
~ Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science