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Indepth Arts News:
"Folds, Blobs, and Boxes: Architecture in the Digital Era"
2001-02-03 until 2001-05-27
Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA,
USA
Over the past decade, software originally created for other
purposes--from designing animation to sneakers--has altered contemporary
architecture and opened up possibilities unthinkable in the pre-digital era.
Folds, Blobs, and Boxes: Architecture in the Digital Era, on view at
Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center from February 3 through
May 27, 2001, explores the impact of this software on architectural design.
Joseph Rosa, curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center,
organized the exhibition. In just over a decade, we've seen the practice
of architecture completely revamped by this new design software, he said.
I doubt if architects will ever completely abandon the craft of drawing by
hand, but because architects have digital capabilities, we now have a range
of architectural shapes that were impractical before the computer.
At a glance, digitally generated architecture looks different.
Digitally designed forms, unlike traditional rectilinear architecture, often
have smooth exteriors and shapes found in nature--design possibilities made
easier with computer software.
A few architects in the pre-digital era anticipated the shape of
today's sleek and supple buildings, but for the most part, designing and
building these structures became possible only when architects began
designing with computers. Today, computer software helps architects envision
and depict their ideas, control and simplify complex calculations, and test
alternatives. In fact, the digital realm can administer, unify, and
streamline the architectural process from conceptualization to construction.
To a great extent, computers have made many of today's large, truly
innovative architectural projects--buildable.
Folds, Blobs, and Boxes presents a variety of computer-generated
drawings and CD-ROMs, as well as three-dimensional models, and features
works by a number of today's leading architectural firms, including Preston
Scott Cohen, dECOi, Peter D. Eisenman, Frank O. Gehry, Kolatan/MacDonald,
Greg Lynn, Reiser + Umemoto, Stamberg Aferiat Architecture, Joel Sanders,
and Bernard Tschumi. (Peter D. Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi--are among the
five finalists chosen to submit plans for the expansion of the Carnegie
Science Center on Pittsburgh's North Shore, to be completed in 2005. Reiser
+ Umemoto and Stamberg Aferiat Architecture were finalists in the recently
completed Pittsburgh Children's Museum competition.)
Folds, Blobs, and Boxes begins with a look at twentieth-century
projects by R. Buckminster Fuller, Frederick J. Kiesler, and Claude Parent,
whose pre-digital-era work continues to influence and inspire today's
architects. These men created revolutionary designs, but their achievements
owe more to the innovative use of new materials and alternative building
techniques than to new design technologies. The new materials they used
included aluminum and poured concrete, which permitted the building of
sinuous and curved forms. In other cases, predigital designers relied on
alternative construction methods to realize their ideas. R. Buckminster
Fuller's Dymaxion Car (1933), for example, was created with marine
construction techniques and built in a shipbuilding factory in Bridgeport,
Connecticut.
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