In addition, while in recent years there has been an uptick in critical scholarship on architecture, design, and computation, accounts of these technologies from within architecture and other design fields are typically advanced in support of their adoption and thus carry with them assumptions about their universality and convenience that can overwhelm critical, or simply analytical, dispositions.
As a result, our understanding of the role of digital technologies in architecture and design is framed by historical and theoretical armatures that closely reflect concerns, and interests, native to these locations -chiefly the United States, UK, and Europe- and thus carry with them assumptions that, when unchecked, can occlude important questions and domains of analysis. 6 However, the bulk of these efforts has focused on practices and institutions of the global North. Researchers have sought to understand, for example, computational design methods’ manifold effects on the design professions, 2 their historical origins, 3 pedagogical implications, 4 as well as their potentials for both creative design 5 and managerial efficiency. This vertiginous territory has been the subject of a growing body of architectural and design scholarship. Clearly enough, computational ideas and methods are key factors shaping the intellectual and material labors of architects and other design professionals, 1 as well as their aspirations. At the same time, in a tradition that can be traced to the early days of computing, architectural researchers in academia and industry investigate the potential of interactive computing, algorithms, and robotics to automate or reconfigure aspects of design and construction. Today, the emerging paradigm of “building information modeling” seeks to bring together the graphical and the calculative in digital environments that integrate highly-detailed geometric building descriptions with information about material quantities, budgets, and structural attributes. It was then that architectural firms started to embrace them more widely, chiefly to facilitate drafting tasks.
It took a couple of decades for computers to become personal, and relatively affordable, and for CAD systems to become commercially available (the first version of AutoCAD, for example, was released in 1982). For example, since the early 1960s emblematic firms such as Skidmore Owings and Merril (SOM) in the United States, ARUP in the United Kingdom, and Clorindo Testa’s in Argentina used computers -albeit mostly for budgets, quantity estimation, and structural calculations. Up until the early 1980s, when many architectural offices around the world adopted them, computers had been predominately the luxury of a few architectural firms and academic institutions.
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