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Signal. Image. Architecture.

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Architecture is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called imaging. ​Yet the technical status and nature of that imaging must be reevaluated. What happens to the architectural mind when it s...
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  • 01 November 2019
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Architecture is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called imaging. ​Yet the technical status and nature of that imaging must be reevaluated. What happens to the architectural mind when it stops pretending that electronic images of drawings made by computers are drawings? When it finally admits that imaging is not drawing, but is instead something that has already obliterated drawing? These are questions that, in general, architecture has scarcely begun to pose​, ​imagining that somehow its ideas and practices can resist the culture of imaging in which ​the rest of life now either swims or drowns. To patiently describe the world to oneself is to prepare the ground for an as yet unavailable politics. New descriptions can, under the right circumstances, be made to serve as the raw substrate for political impulses that cannot yet be expressed or lived, because their preconditions have not been arranged and articulated.

Signal. Image. Architecture.​ aims to clarify the status of computational images in contemporary architectural thought and practice by showing what happens if the technical basis of architecture is examined very closely, if its technical terms and concepts are taken very seriously, at times even literally. It is not a theory of architectural images, but rather a brief philosophical description of architecture after imaging.

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Price: $18.00
Pages: 144
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Imprint: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Publication Date: 01 November 2019
Trim Size: 7.00 X 4.50 in
ISBN: 9781941332467
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

ARCHITECTURE / Criticism, ARCHITECTURE / Design, Drafting, Drawing & Presentation

Signal. Image. Architecture. is a significant intervention into discussions of both the “image” and the “digital” in architecture and urbanism. John May poses questions about the novel forms of actuarial and statistical life and about the new modalities of territory and governmentality emerging today through imaging infrastructures. As we turn to AI, big data, and predictive analytics, our actions and our gestures are increasingly tied to the training of machines, and we are left asking what representation, gesture, and inscription can still do. This book radically breaks from debates about when architecture became digital or what the digital is. It instead speculates on the aesthetic and political stakes of our imaging practices in design and offers a manifesto for future potentialities.
John May is founding partner in MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based architectural practice, and assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.