Author: theodora vardouli

Categories
publications

Peer-reviewed article in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (Special Issue: Computing and Capitalism)

Citation: Vardouli T and David Theodore, “Walking instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing [Early Access] doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2020.2990111

Abstract: “Space allocation” was a central pursuit in postwar research on computing and architecture. Researchers sought an algorithm that could automatically design the most efficient floor plan for a set of activities. In this article, we connect an early algorithm for computing architectural floor plans to the postwar British hospital. We examine how researchers adapted algorithmic methods for floor layout design developed in industrial capitalist settings in the promotion of the British welfare state. Finally, we pay special attention to the agency that certain graphic inscriptions borrowed from mathematics had in validating these particular algorithmic methods as promising avenues for the algorithmic automation of all architectural work. This article situates the automation of hospital design in postwar U.K. at the intersection of building science and healthcare
management, with the aim to contribute critical perspectives on algorithmic reifications of work in early computer-aided architectural design systems.

Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9080089

Categories
publications

Peer-reviewed article in the Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics

Steadman Philip. 1983. Architectural Morphology: An Introduction to the Geometry of Building Plans. London: Pion Ltd, 68.

Citation: Vardouli T “Skeletons, Shapes, and the Shift from Surface to Structure in Architectural Geometry.” Nexus Network Journal 22, pp. 487–505.

Abstract: Architects that digitally manipulate geometry confront a rift between what is being displayed on the screen (metric shapes) and what is being computed (their non-metric skeletons). This article critically reads this relationship between surface appearance and abstract structure against a historical backdrop of changing attitudes toward the visual world in postwar architectural and mathematical cultures. First, it examines skeletal (graph theoretic) representations of floor plan geometry advanced in centres of architectural research at the University of Cambridge and the Open University. Then, it interprets this work’s technical and discursive outputs in the context of contemporaneous disciplinary and pedagogical debates around geometry in British mathematics. By positioning skeletons (graphs) in a genealogy of ambivalence toward concrete appearance, this article seeks to activate critical historical perspectives on descriptions of geometry currently reified in computer software.    

Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00004-020-00478-0

Categories
publications

Book: Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2020)

Citation: Vardouli T and Olga Touloumi (eds.). 2020. Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground. Routledge Research in Design, Technology and Society Series.

Vardouli and Touloumi Interview with the New Books Network: https://megaphone.link/LIT6952420790

Book description:

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century.

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.

Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

Available as a free e-book in most university libraries

Purchase link: https://www.routledge.com/Computer-Architectures-Constructing-the-Common-Ground-1st-Edition/Vardouli-Touloumi/p/book/9780815396529

Categories
publications

Debate on digital architecture for the INHA journal Perspective, with Martin Bressani, Mario Carpo, and Reinhold Martin, organized by Antoine Picon

Citation: Martin Bressani, Mario Carpo, Reinhold Martin, Antoine Picon et Theodora Vardouli, «L’architecture à l’heure du numérique, des algorithmes au projet», Perspective [En ligne], 2 | 2019, mis en ligne le 30 juin 2020, consulté le 04 mai 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/14830 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/perspective.14830

Greek Translation for Archetype.gr, by Rodanthi Vardouli:

Part A: https://www.archetype.gr/blog/arthro/i-architektoniki-stin-psifiaki-epochi-apo-tous-algorithmous-sto-kataskeuasmeno-ergo

Part B: https://www.archetype.gr/blog/arthro/i-architektoniki-stin-psifiaki-epochi-apo-tous-algorithmous-sto-kataskeuasmeno-ergo-2

Categories
publications

Review of Roberto Botazzi’s Digital Architecture Beyond Computers for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Citation: Vardouli T. “Review of Roberto Bottazzi’s Digital Architecture Before Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design”. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78(4)(December 2019).

Link: https://online.ucpress.edu/jsah/article/78/4/496/106979/Review-Digital-Architecture-beyond-Computers

Categories
talks

Talk at the conference “Pixels, Vectors, and Algorithms” Architekturmuseum, Munich

I gave an invited talk titled “Computing Choice: Participatory Design and the Enumerative Imagination” at the Pixels, Vectors, and Algorithms conference at the Architekturmuseum in Munich in October 2019. The conference is coupled with the exhibition The Architecture Machine, organized by Teresa Fankhanel, and will be followed by two book publications, one in English and one in German, in which I have contributed an essay.

Categories
news

“Toward a Digital Imagination” project awarded SSHRC Connection Grant

Visibility map showing area of a map visible from a specific point, developed by University of Toronto researcher Thyagarajan Natarajan in his doctoral work on Digital Terrain Modelling. (Canadian Architect, September 1971, p. 58)

Team: Lead Applicant: Theodora Vardouli, Co-applicants: Daniel Cardoso Llach (Carnegie Mellon University) and Nicolas Reeves (UQAM), Collaborator: Gabriella Aceves Sepulveda (Simon Fraser University).

Project description: How did 20th century developments in digital computation, software, displays, and hardware shape the aesthetic evolution of North-American design and architecture? How may we trace this evolution in contemporary cultures of creative practice? Before the advent of the personal computer, government and industry investment in computing research sought to propel the use of computers for manufacturing and design. Along with the new technologies, new conceptual and visual languages emerged. Through innovative, publicly engaged scholarship, “Toward a Digital Imagination” explores this period of remarkable inventiveness and traces its multidisciplinary aesthetic, material, and cultural repercussions.

The project includes an exhibition uniquely combining historical materials and contemporary artworks, scholarly presentations and workshops, and a high-quality printed catalogue. Engaging a variety of academic and non-academic audiences, it will enrich the public’s understanding of the vibrant interplay between technologies and cultures of creative practice.

A public exhibition will be hosted for two months in January 2021 at the Centre de design de l’UQAM — one of Montreal’s foremost galleries for art and design. It will showcase a unique combination of historical materials, interactive software reconstructions, and contemporary works by a selection of architects, designers, and artists experimenting with computation. The historical section of the exhibition showcases previously unseen or little known photographs, high quality reproductions, and films exploring the formative period of numerical control and computer graphics technologies between 1950 and 1980. A series of five interactive software reconstructions accompanies these historical materials, offering visitors the possibility of playfully interacting with pioneering systems for computer-aided design. Examining the influence of these technologies on present-day creative practices, the contemporary section of the exhibition showcases experimental works by Canadian and US artists, architects, and designers.

The exhibition adapts and expands “Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design”, which originated at the Miller Gallery of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University curated by co-applicant Prof. Cardoso Llach. As a result of a research collaboration with lead applicant Prof. Vardouli, the new exhibition brings into focus Canadian histories and practices of numerical control, computer graphics, and computer art in their enmeshment with architecture. Further, a symposium entitled “Digital.Visual.Material” will be held at McGill University in January 2021 bringing together scholars and practitioners of computational design from Canada, the US, and Europe.

Presentations by eminent scholars will be punctuated by hands-on workshops conducted by exhibition contributors. Finally, a high-quality reasoned catalogue, published with a widely-circulating architecture press, will document the exhibition and enrich it with brief essays and interviews.

From the playful and exploratory to the utilitarian and technical (and from historical archives to present-day practices) our project will illustrate how the expressive and functional possibilities of computational media challenged disciplinary boundaries — as well as dominant views on drawing, design, and creativity — ushering new aesthetic languages and intellectual debates. Highlighting shared practices, histories, and infrastructures that so far have remained distinct, it will offer a perspective from which we might critically reconstruct the visual, material, and intellectual histories of computation in design — and re imagine their future.

Link to the exhibition website: https://centrededesign.com/vers-un-imaginaire-numerique/

Categories
talks

Presentation at Cambridge Talks: Other Histories of the Digital

Olga Touloumi and I presented a methodological intervention on a multilingual, polyphonic, scalar, protean space for thinking about histories of architecture and the computer at Harvard GSD’s 2019 Cambridge Talks. Themed “Other Histories of the Digital” and organized by Matthew Allen, Christina Shivers, and Phillip Denny, the symposium featured presentations by Daniel Cardoso Llach, John May, Andrew Witt, Sean Keller, Michael Osman, with comments by Antoine Picon and Andrew Holder, and a follow up round table on digital pedagogy.

Categories
talks

“Seeing Structures Beneath” at the Lionel March Memorial Conference, Cambridge University, UK

I had the honour to be among the invited speakers in the Conference organized in memory of Prof. Lionel March in Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. The conference featured talks by Prof. March’s collaborators and students throughout his prolific trajectory from the Land Use Built Form Studies Center at Cambridge to UCLA. Full conference program and photographic coverage of the event here.

My presentation’s abstract: In a 2002 survey article reviewing relations between architecture and mathematics since 1960, Lionel March recounted the events that led to the Geometry of Environment — the first book publication of the Land Use Built Form Studies (LUBFS) Centre. The book, which March co-authored with Philip Steadman, was an invitation from the RIBA Library Committee to illustrate the potential of “new maths” in architecture. The invitation, March remembers, was triggered by Alison and Peter Smithson’s remarks about a “generational gap” between the mathematics that they knew as architects and the mathematics taught to young British students, including their son, which left them “at a loss.” This presentation traces influences and parallels between the educational movement of the new math –along with the mathematical cultures from which it emerged— and early work at LUBFS. It begins by providing some historical context on the new math and positioning it within broader currents in 20th century mathematics, with particular focus on debates about the status of geometry, shapes, and visual intuitions. Then, through examples drawn from the Geometry of Environment and other LUBFS working papers, it contemplates both technical and intellectual influences of these currents on the ways in which Lionel March and LUBFS researchers mathematically described architectural form. Ultimately, the presentation seeks to offer historical and critical insights on the ways in which this early body of work was permeated by, and contributed to, the cultivation of a new mode of seeing in architecture: one that moves away from sense-perceptible appearance and sees structures beneath. 

Categories
news

“Architecture as Computation” Research Project Awarded SSHRC Insight Development Grant

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has announced the results of the Insight Development Grants 2018 Competition. Happy to be among the award recipients with my research project “Architecture as Computation: Academic Research Networks and Mobilities of Technical Practices.” The SSHRC funding will allow me and my research team to build a searchable database of “design methods” (systematic theories of the design process) activity in late-1960s North American research universities, so as to visualize and examine the social, technical, and intellectual ecology that premised the computer’s introduction to architecture. Design methods cultivated a computational (step-wise, algorithmic) view of architectural design and in some cases included the first uses of computers in architecture. This research project promotes a cross-geographic and cross-disciplinary fashion with an eye for transactions and mobilities of concepts and techniques across various academic settings. The project directs attention to new modes of knowledge production and dissemination that spurred from academic architects’ work in postwar research universities, thus illuminating the development of a scientific imagination and a computational perspective for architecture. The project also pinpoints particular definitions of design as a common ground between architecture and engineering, in the context of efforts of disciplinary unification, and discusses epistemologies that catalyzed these efforts. An original aspect of this project is that it engages the Canadian context, highlighting its role in histories of design methods and computer-aided design. Stay tuned for updates.