Digital Romantics

Abstract

In the office, computers are central to a range of tasks. The architects’ days are mostly spent at screens: checking and responding to e-mail, finding “precedent” images that provide the inspiration for design, researching building materials and new technologies, and most centrally of all using one of a range of computer-aided design packages. Watching them at work, I observe screens flicking perpetually between these programs and tasks. Observing their movements, I find it clear that these architects are thoroughly digital humans, their capacities of thought and action indissoluble from digital technologies that saturate this working environment....