I research, write on, and critically experiment with mathematical and algorithmic techniques for design, in their various manifestations from pencil and paper methods to their implementations in digital software and tools. My current research revolves around three cross-fertilizing axes, which foreground these techniques as things that have histories, participate in culture, and display instrumentalities:
1. Reconfigurations of design and computing in postwar research institutions;
2. Visual histories of mathematical and algorithmic inscriptions in design and architecture;
3. Idiosyncratic instruments and discursive artifacts for design and making.
1.RECONFIGURATIONS OF DESIGN AND COMPUTING IN POSTWAR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS: I study multidisciplinary academic research projects with an eye on the material, cultural, intellectual, and institutional contexts in which design was, early on, reimagined as a form of computation.
ARCHITECTURE AS COMPUTATION: ACADEMIC RESEARCH NETWORKS AND MOBILITIES OF TECHNICAL PRACTICES
funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant
This project is concerned with the visualization and historical analysis of the emergence of a multidisciplinary network of researchers concerned with so-called “rational” approaches to design. It focuses on the Design Methods Group (DMG) Newsletter, a periodical that chronicled cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional transactions, tentative computer experiments, technical languages, controversies, and trends, offering a unique view into an agile intellectual ecology of connections and exchanges.
TOWARD A DIGITAL IMAGINATION
funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant, with co-applicant Daniel Cardoso Llach and collaborators Nicolas Reeves and Gabriela Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
This project includes a symposium, a public exhibition, a web platform, and a book that collectively illuminate the twentieth-century emergence of new methods for design representation, simulation, and manufacturing linked to digital computers’ capacities for information processing and display, and reflecting on its contemporary repercussions across architecture, art, and design.
2. VISUAL HISTORIES OF MATHEMATICAL AND ALGORITHMIC INSCRIPTIONS IN DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE: I investigate ambivalences about shape, appearance, and the perceptual world negotiated upon specific mathematical objects and their visual manifestations.
FORMALISMS: MATHEMATICS, ABSTRACTION, AND DIMENSIONS OF ‘FORM’ IN POSTWAR DESIGN THEORY
funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) Etablissement de nouveaux professeurs – chercheurs
This project is a thematically-guided examination of the construction of design formalisms across multiple sites, with the aim to retrieve the hybridity and polyvalence of “form,” to challenge its frequent equation with geometric shape, and to examine its ambivalent relationship with context. Its core is an archival and genealogical examination of three concepts pertaining to, and invoking, “form” (or morphe): morphology (study of form), isomorphism (equality of form), and transformation (change of form).
GRAPH VISION: DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE’S SKELETONS
under contract with the MIT Press
My in-progress book tentatively titled Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons constructs an architectural history of graphs as a prehistory of digital architecture. Graphs were drawn, sketched, printed, and etched in the pages of controversial, yet impactful, publications that promised a computational future for architecture: one that relied on precise, transparent methods for processing information, producing form, and anticipating its performances. The book is an iconology of this prolific visual production.
3. IDIOSYNCRATIC INSTRUMENTS FOR DESIGN AND MAKING: This project opens up mathematical and algorithmic techniques embedded in architectural software to scholarly investigation and creative retooling.
Infrastructure provided by a Canada Foundation for Innovation – John E. Evans Leaders (CFI-JELF) Grant
UNFIT ARCHITECTURE
funded by the Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering Program (SURE)
This project dissects the “design space” – a term used to denote possible configurations of form that are derived from a set of rules and constraints. Instead of outputting optimum or sub-optimum choices, we develop methods for design space visualization and navigation of different historically significant design algorithms and contemporary plugins so as to showcase “unfit” candidates and validate them as potentially desirable by a designer.
[ More coming soon … ]