How did you decide on the four practitioners in the show?

Honoring Architecture's Digital Pioneers

A Hoberman arch at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. Chuck Hoberman is one of the architects highlighted in the ongoing "Archaeology of the Digital". Image © Wikimedia Commons

Many would consider Greg Lynn the leader of computer-aided design in architecture - but Lynn himself begs to differ. He and the Canadian Centre for Architecture recently collaborated on "Archaeology of the Digital," the first in a series of exhibitions that will showcase the work of the earliest adopters of digital techniques in architecture. The exhibit, which opened on May 7, focuses on work by Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh. In this interview, originally published in Metropolis Magazine as "Computer Control," Avinash Rajagopal speaks with Greg Lynn about some of the projects and the inspiration behind the exhibit itself.

A view of the exhibition, with a model of Peter Eisenman’s Biozentrum, Biology Center for the J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in the foreground. Image Courtesy of CCA, Montreal

Why do we need an archaeology of the digital?

Close to a decade ago, the CCA acquired the Embryological House, the first project of mine which was natively digital. They took more than 500 models and drawings, and I said, very innocently, “Would you like any of the digital material?” They said yes. But it was done on old silicone graphics machines and you can’t open the files without them. And the software, Alias and Wavefront, had merged into Maya. It could open the files, but a lot of things would be dead in the migration. So the CCA ended up doing a two-year study with the Langlois Foundation in Montreal and Library of Congress, asking the question, “What is an institution’s responsibility towards digital material?” I thought it was possible to identify 25 specific architectural projects to collect, all done before the turn of the century. And that’s where we started—to try to get as much stuff as we can, even if we don’t know what to do with it yet, because it’s going to disappear.

How did you decide on the four practitioners in the show?

These four architects were very early engagers with digital tools. Even though the tools were around earlier than the 1980s, we tried to find instances where they enabled a design that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and were an extension of the architect’s vision. These four projects were also very individual takes on how the digital could work. So instead of taking people my age, which is where a lot of people think digital technology really started, we decided to find people who were in their fifties and sixties when they started using the technology. It’s important that they were mature enough to already have an agenda, a vision of what to do with it.

A perspective view of the Biozentrum project. Image Courtesy of CCA, Montreal

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 685