The rules for seductive renders determine how easily a project is disseminated, and are starting to feed back into the way architecture is designed. Where photography once demanded clearly defined surfaces, right angles, and atmospheric lighting, the render of the past few decades encourages curvilinear geometries, visual allusions, and a kind of exaggerated artificiality.
An impasse in architectural history
However, digital transformation not only has an impact on architecture, it seems to me that this digital transformation places architectural history at an impasse. Since Alberti, the drawing has always been understood as the artefact, the bridge between the architect’s mind and the built structure. To understand a building, a historian turned to the drawings.
Now, in everyday practice, hand drawing has been displaced by digital models – but a digital model is not a drawing; rather, it is a data set that can be made visible in a number of ways. If architectural history was previously preoccupied with drawings and thus with the ideas of architects, how is it to serve the profession now?
Indeed, what sources can historians of the digital age even turn to, given the woefully inadequate state of current digital conservation practices? File types become unreadable, links rot and media formats fail. CAAD architecture of the late 1980s is in many respects less well documented than church architecture of the fifteenth century. This undermines the existing toolset of architectural scholarship. Against this backdrop, how should architectural history education look? Technological progress throws up plenty of questions for architecture and architectural history. It is high time to come to grips with the enormous impact of digitalisation.
