Just finished Distributed Form: Network Practice a conference exploring “issues of connectivity in contemporary design” sponsored by Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Design. Architects come from a different tradition and set of practices than I, so I tried not to impose my own expectations on the presentations.
Still, I couldn't help but feel there was not much presentation of "distributed form," frankly - most of the architects obviously think in terms of singular buildings, or perhaps a cluster of buildings on the same site. For them, "the network" was evoked as a kind of guiding metaphor for the creation of new building forms - what Marcos Novak incomprehensibly referred to as the "transvolution of the alien," - rather than a real, physical skein of connections linking buildings together. The digital - instantiated as a metaphor, and in specific tools - becomes the servant of the architect's creative process. And after the process is complete and the building is fully designed, the digital then (for them) seems to disappear, leaving the building as the only evidence of its passage.
A neat concept - except in its ceding of all agency to the architect, and its utter denial of the increasing presence of the invisible landscape of information flows in the build structures around us. There's an archived webcast on the site, though: so judge for yourself.
Notes follow – as always, my own comments are in brackets. Anything in quotes is pretty much verbatim; anything else is paraphrased at best.
