Ellie Abrons

Authorship critically examines emergent themes in contemporary architecture by revisiting the seemingly defunct notion of design authorship. As we revel in the death of the master architect, how do we come to terms with the shifting role of creativity in architecture’s cultural production? In Authorship, a cross-disciplinary group of designers and scholars explores this topic through a myriad of lenses. Subjects include the impact of digital tools and computational scripts on the conception of buildings in the age of robotics, the current climate of appropriation and sampling as a counter-form of authorship, and the rise of reauthored materials in a postdigital age. These questions are cast against alternative ideas of authorship that, in turn, reposition the history of architecture. Featured essays investigate the separation between the personal and the authored while other contributions expose meaning, symbolism, and iconography as the subjects of authority—not authorship. Ultimately, this book dismantles, realigns, and reassembles disparate architectural conditions to form new ways of thinking. Discourse is a biannual publication series that presents timely themes on and around architecture. A selective compilation of essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, featured exhibitions, photo-essays, and collateral materials—such as architectural models, sketches, and built works—highlight architectural culture, practice, and theory.

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask: how do we characterise our post-digital design labour? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products. From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.