Algorithmic Pathways and the Continuing Narratives of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

T A D 6 : 1 “Histories” uncovers the diverse narratives in architecture technology, history, and culture, looking for unexpected inflection points while facilitating innovative modes of historical and contemporary research. Several of the papers included in this issue instrumentalize a close look at the intersection between technology and history ultimately paving the road to contemporary discourse. The authors highlight the aforementioned inflection points, experimenting with innovative research methods, combining archival explorations with speculative digital reconstruction, expanding our knowledge of historic initiatives, designs, and machines. Elizabeth Andrzejewski, Marcus Shaffer, and Ester Obonyo discuss Konrad Wachsmann’s visionary Location Orientation Manipulator (LOM), a device that led the way for automated on-site building assembly in 1969, representing an early version of a robot that marks the beginning of automated processes in construction. In their paper “Assembling the Assembler: Reanimating the ‘Lost’ Motion Machine of Wachsmann, Bollinger, and Mendoza” the authors examine the LOM after completing a digital reconstruction, rearticulating its capacities, and analyzing its parts. The research positions the LOM in a line of inquiry focused on the building process. Andrew Witt and Eunu Kim leverage data science techniques and machine vision tools in their research work “Neural Image Classifiers for Historical Building Elements and Typologies” to scan, analyze, and categorize large imagery datasets of historical architecture based on stylistic and morphological characteristics. Such methods and techniques can transcribe the conventional qualitative interpretation in historical architecture contexts into a new quantitative analysis, facilitating automatic cataloging and classification of historical architecture. Samuel Johnson and Mitesh Dixit’s contribution “Counterfactual Modeling in Historical Reconstruction: El Lissitzky’s Horizontal Skyscraper WB2” explores the work of another visionary work of the twentieth century—El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel WB2, engaging in a process of speculative reconstruction of an unbuilt structure thus uncovering conditions not obvious in the existing design documentation. While taking interpretative liberties, the authors’ continuation of Lissitzky’s iterative design process is based on selected evidence, uniting the design process, applied research, and speculative reconstruction. “From Efficiency to Exhaustion: Computer-Aided Architecture at the Madrid Calculation Center (1968–1973)” analyzes the work of an unexplored case study, an institution tasked with the algorithmizing of creativity. Diana Cristobal Olave argues that the reorganization of the design process driven by algorithmic techniques at the Calculation Center at the University of Madrid did not result in efficient procedures, but an exhaustive (and exhausting) abundance and lengthy methodologies. The criticism and recontextualization of the four papers addressing historic instances of the twentieth century represent a series of productive insights into historic projects and processes while at the same time laying out tools for understanding the potential and downfalls of our present condition. In addition, the two other papers in this issue adopt algorithmic pathways to enable deep understandings and innovative applications in the design process. “Decoding the Architectural Genome: Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms in Design” by Mohammad Makki, Diego Navarro-Mateu, and Milad Showkatbakhsh demonstrates the Algorithmic Pathways and the Continuing Narratives of the Twentieth Century