Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design -- Daniel Cardoso Llach Full Citation and Summary Cardoso Llach, Daniel. Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design. N.p., 2015. Print. This book explores changes in architectural practice associated with the emergence of software. Daniel Cardoso Llach (DCL) argues that software is an infrastructure of design which has transformed the professional identity and discourses of designing with machines. DCL combines an extensive historical investigation with a short ethnographic section sited in Abu Dhabi to examine transformation of design technologies. DCL was trained as an architect, did his PhD at MIT, and is now an Associate Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. Chapter Notes Preface (pp. xi-xviii) - The project: history of contemporary practice of computation in design (pp. xi) - Outline of the project by opposing his view to contemporary received ideas about digital technologies: not smoothness, seamlessness, cleanliness, ideas over matter (pp. xi-xii) - Proposes to unveil the underlying dependencies of technologies in architecture: new forms of social organization, notions of creativity and work, infrastructures of maintenance & etc. (pp. xii) - Connection between inbuilt capacities of machines and possible outcomes (pp. xii) - Focus on origins and implications of techno. discourse (pp. xii) - Historical examination and contemporary ethnography (pp. xii) - Working through metaphors and critiquing their limitations: software as scaffolding (xiii-xiv), as language (pp. xiv), as slave and partner (pp. xv) - Focus on CAD software over other forms of technology, how it reveals a larger techno-cultural change in human-machine epistemology (pp. xv-xvi) - Change in what design is considered, what creativity is (pp. xvi) - Focus through "key characters" (protagonist-based history) - Fieldwork in the UAE with Gehry Technologies revealing software as infrastructure and not tool (pp. xvi) - His main projective impulse: software and machines should be "speculative, disobedient, and porous" a "space of possibility" (pp. xvii) 1 -- Introduction: Seeing Software as a Cultural Infrastructure (pp. 1-12) Intro section (pp. 1-2) - Starts off by introducing the so-called "Albertian Split" between design and construction, making of architects' authority and identity (pp. 1) - Intellectual history of CAD through ideas about digital technology with a US focus during "Cold War Era" (pp. 1) - What made it possible to take specific positions and think specific ways (pp. 1) - Statements of architects, designers, programmers, technologists - Archival and ethnographic sources tracing different versions of Albertian split (pp. 1) - Cybernetics, automation, design-construction integration, managerialism - "how software systems come to matter", how they modulate material production (pp. 1) - Software as instrument, metaphor, infrastructure which reconfigures, design, work, authorship, and the meaning of human (pp. 2) - "Counterhistory" a la Paul Edwards, attempting to get out of discipline-internal historical accounts (pp. 2) Beyond Autonomy and Neutrality - Confronting two conceptual approaches to tech. and design, both of which shield technologies and their operators from critical scrutiny (pp. 2-3) - Autonomy: technologies as standing in for humans/having agency of their own (pp. 2) - Obscures the social groups that sit behind and work within their operation (pp. 2) - Note on Figure 1.1's caption: the questions DCL focuses on are "effectiveness" and "convenience" (not responsibility) (pp. 3) - Related to the bogeyman, Technological Determinism (pp. 2) - Neutrality: technologies as passive containers for human intention (pp. 3) - Viewing design as a seamless translation from mind to matter via a technical (full br-ridge r-)rectifier (pp. 3) - Deprives operators as much as the tech. of their agency (of different types and amounts of course) (pp. 3) - Obscures the same as above (the various groups involved) and the effects of tech. on the processes they are involved in (design here) (pp. 3) The Infrastructure View - Recovery of politics and poetics of tech in design through an infrastructural frame (pp. 4) - Treating software systems to be "infrastructures that condition the design and production" of built enviros (pp. 4) - Invocation of larger tech systems, social/material orgs; asymmetrical approach (difference in abilities to act btwn human/machine) - Calls for a research program on software in design in general, but he takes history of ideas/cultures as his tack (pp. 4) Lenses - software studies, architectural computation/tech., social sciences, STS, Barad's relational ontology (pp. 5-6) A Note on Method - Section on method: the anthropologist as exile, influence of Sherry Turkle (depaysement) (pp. 7) Sites - Note on sites: MIT as site of discursive/intellectual hegemony, Gehry Technologies in Abu Dhabi as site of global work (pp. 7) - Ethnographic participant observation; taking a position on distance (no distance a la Malinowski), reflectivity as the major mode of ensuring analytical distance (pp. 8) - Moments of importance rather than summaries or coding analysis; section on ethics (pp. 8) - Research through doing: the development of data collection software (pp. 8) - "Mesoscopic research" (Peter Galison); specific non-generalizable site as means of engaging larger, more general processes (pp. 9) - Chapter Outline (pp. 9-11) 2 -- Codification Before Software: Architectural Inscriptions and the Design-Construction Split (pp. 12-29) Intro section - Myth of architectural as an individual authorial practice (pp. 12) - Derives the myth from the 15[th] century splitting of design and construction (pp. 12) - Gaining of distance from builders through inscription (drawing, written instructions); distance producing authority (pp. 12) - Moving away from builders and towards clients (pp. 12) - Changing level of authority over building production by architectural professional identity moving closer to artists and away from construction (pp. 13) - Architects seeking remedy to Albertian Split through tech. (pp. 13) - Software collapsing distance, but not immediately evident whether this is the case (pp. 14) - Software situated in a lineage of architectural inscriptions (pp. 14) - Architectural professional identity is a product of the split produced by the original inscription and software is just a new instantiation of it by expanding the use and manipulation of abstraction (pp. 14) - Addressing the "ideological edifice" of architecture; the myths that remain despite alternative historiographies (pp. 15) Crafts of Abstraction - Architecture as exemplary of "deeply entrenched tradition in Western thought" of mind over matter (pp. 15) - New set of manual skills (drafting, etc.) and material substrates (paper etc.) supports "craft of abstraction" (pp. 16) - Mobility and reliability of drawings give authority (pp. 16) - Architectural inscriptions localizing struggles for authority (eg: 17[th] cen stonemasons see Robin Evans) (pp. 16-17) - Change in professional identity through inscriptions allows mobility across certain borders (architect becomes close to aristocrats) (pp. 17-18) - Inherent inability of drawings to fully account for whole building process which is much messier (pp. 18) - Medieval model of building production which distributes design knowledge through various people, tools, and materialized standards as opposed to drawings (pp. 19) - Increased organizational distance in the mid-1600s; Wren's bureaucratized arch. firm as example of adding more and more levels of distance with construction (pp. 20) - Related to systemization and standardization of architectural drawing which draws new, expanded, and complexified social relation into play An Old Professional in a New World: Architecture in the US - In US context, differentiation of architects from "practical architects" through French-style academic training, mentorship, and licensure (pp. 20-21) - Increased precision necessary with change in materials (steel and glass) (pp. 22) - Scientific management, architectural labour having a change in quality (workplace like workers rather than professionals); drafting v. designing (pp. 22) - Architect becomes one subcontractor among many; loss of status (pp. 22) Digital Inscriptions and Architectural Authority - SOM bringing computers into workplace first (?) in 50s and 60s to deal with routine calculations (cost, structural, energy) (pp. 23) - Decrease in computer cost in the 80s; specialized software commercially available (pp. 23) - Late adoption of computer drafting by architecture (not the same kinds of profit extraction due to no mass production) (pp. 23) - Software as a means to improve productivity and strengthen professional authority through "mobility, scalability, and immutability" of computer produced inscriptions (pp. 23) - So-called "seamless link" between arch. and construction, distributed workflows, multi-user access of data - Section on Gehry as an example for a bit (pp. 25-26) PART ONE: DESIGN MACHINES 3 -- Software Comes to Matter: Encoding Geometry, Materials and Machines (pp. 31-49) Intro section - From prev. chapter: design inscriptions index changing power relations [Foucault] (pp. 31) - Psychologizing architecture: anxiety over authority, needing control - Proposal that a new theory of materials and geometry as computable emerges from US Cold War "culture of technology production" driven by military-industrial-academic entanglement (pp. 31) - Automation solutions posing new questions; modes of inscription shaped by new storage media (pp. 32) - Software as new intermediary between clean, abstract computational geometry and messy world of production; new social role of the programmer (pp. 32) From Inscription to Protocol - Exploration of "material and social history of numerically controlled machines and of software inscriptions" as step toward material history of computation in design (pp. 32) - Punched tape (storage media) driving the possibilities of machinic operation (pp. 32) - Earliest CNC in power loom 18[th] cen - First computationally controlled CNC mill in 1952 @ MIT driven by paper tape - Explains analog milling process as iteratively refined technique reaching high levels of precision (pp. 34) - Automation of mill through servomechanisms (pp. 35) - Concise dataset to directly encode cut shapes and small processor (see note for a couple more details) (pp. 35) - Code shaped by material constraints; general computers turned into special purpose machines (pp. 36) - Assertion, from this historical first, that CAD comes from CNC/CAM (pp. 37) - Convergence of Military, Industrial, and Academy in Design - Computers as key instruments in US national project of global supremacy (chanticleer hegemony) (pp. 38) - Increase in "competitiveness" (productive, also research hegemony) - Moving servo-CNC from a problem specific tech to universal tech through US Airforce research contracts (pp. 38) - Not just research development contract but also supporting dissemination to US manufacturers (pp. 39) - Documents a multi-audience MIT conference on early CNC in 1940s-50s (pp. 39-40) The Rise of the Gentleman Technologist - "Gentleman Technologist" is DCL's coinage to describe the 20[th] century professional man with special command over technological systems, giving him special authority and access to power (pp. 40) - "craftsman" of abstraction (pp. 41) From Shop to Code - Rethinking material manipulation as computation aligned with movement to reduce human involvement in fab, but relocation of labour to programming (pp. 41) - Manual process of punching tape, debugging, etc. - Movement to automate production of machine instructions through subroutines, then higher level, use specific programming languages (pp. 42) - Of fundamental concern to programmers in the 40s & 50s was how instructions were represented (to people) (pp. 43) - Example of Ross' "plex" database which could, in theory, represent any problem (pp. 43-44) - Compares to "black box" - Language building as answer to problems of representation (that a rep. system can be designed) (pp. 44) - Algorithmic modes of thinking and doing manual work leading to new kinds of labour, new professional roles, and new questions (pp. 46) The Place of Design - Tech. as index of theories through modelling human-machine interaction (pp. 46) - Main goal of replacing humans with machines in the design process to make continuous design prod. (pp. 46) 4 -- Perfect Slaves and Cooperative Partners: Steven A. Coons and the Computers' New Role in Design (pp. 49-73) Intro section - This section focuses on the work of Steven A. Coons from 1959-1963ish, specifically his work on the MIT CAD project (pp. 49-50) - Curriculum influence (case based) (pp. 55) - Rethinking human-machine interaction (also I/O, though this is mentioned only tangentially) and creativity through two competing visions: computers as universal tools for full automation (Ross) and computers as "slaves" or "partners" (Coons) (pp. 53-54) - Focusing on how external theories of human-machine interaction/computation in design shaped architecture, an area not covered much at the time (pp. 54) - Revealing discourses of design and tech. (pp. 56) - Coons and CAD project as example of how storytelling ability and charisma are important in strengthening technological visions (beyond financial resources and tech competence) (pp. 56) - Three threads: theoretical debate over creativity in computers; new human-machine division of labour; new conception of design representations as engineered (pp. 56) Designers Meet "Software People" - Section on meeting and conflict between "design" people and "software" people and their two cultural/theoretical approaches (see above) (pp. 57-60) - Attempts to codify how the design process works through observation of designers in action, to make their actions computable (pp. 58-60) - Identification of automatable parts of design (while leaving the "creativity" and fuzzy components to people): drafting, specc'ing, shape description (pp. 60) - Automation vs. Augmentation: Relocating Creativity - Creativity as what differentiates humans from computers in CAD proj. discourse (pp. 60) - Disciplinary conflict over design and automation; affirming of professional and disciplinary identity of the architect through resistance to full automation (pp. 61) - Difficulty to describe creative processes and the preservation of design-specificity; pragmatic solutions (augmentation) set up cybernetic feedback loop between humans and machines (pp. 63) Masters and Slaves: Relocating Work - Coon's rhetoric of automation allowing creative emancipation through change in understanding design as performance of hybrid solving engine (pp. 64) - Conceptual implication: design as taking place in abstract world - Procedural implication: general theory of design as iterative: rep. analysis materialization - Rhetorical implication: machines become humanized - Technocratic discourse of human emancipation through technological management (pp. 65) - Layer of racial politics in the use of "slave" discourse (pp. 65) - "Maps laced with data": Reconfiguring Representations and Artefacts - Computer representations as "structured descriptions" and hand drawings as "unstructured" (pp. 65-66) - Hand drawings are directly indexical, not encoded, based on imprecise movements (pp. 66) - Computer drawings as having an underlying encoded structure that is its code, they can be engineered (pp. 66) - The assertion that the decoupling of computer-generated image and its structure (code) is a "fact of computation" (pp. 66) - Ability to add extra layers of data to computer visualizations; ability to change visualizations after the fact of drawing through "rubber-banding" - Through the computer's ability to store relational databases (pp. 67) - Design representations as forms of building; drawings have their own materiality and are "built" (pp. 67) - Hacking the Renaissance Vision: Inventing Digital Perspectivalism - Section on encoding perspectival views through matrixes: treating the screen as a deep 3D space (pp. 68-69) On Influence - Vectors of influence from the CAD project: political (research funds), promotion ability (publications, conferences, copying, double-posting to industry), alumni distribution (pp. 69-72) 5 -- Computer-Aided Revolutions: CAD Experimentalism, Participation, and Representation in the Architecture Machine (pp. 73-85) Intro section - This section covers Negroponte's ArcMac which grew out of the CAD project and demonstrates variations on the previous theme of design as iterative performance of human-machine problem solving (pp. 73-75) - Demonstrates various sensibilities in design computing practices (pp. 75) - Computation's utopian impetus to democratic design process (pp. 76-77) - Political emancipation through tech. (pp. 77) - Focuses on period from 1963-mid 1970s when ArcMac became the MIT Media Lab (pp. 76) - Works specifically through Negroponte's The Architecture Machine - Human-Machine Encounters: "Ted, many conflicts are occurring" - Machine as expert system challenging professional authority of arch. and planners (pp. 77) - Covers the stuff Felicity Scott covers: URBAN5, DISCOURSE, the Hessdorfer Experiment in Boston (pp. 78-79) - ArcMac thinking the computer as "neutral" stand in (pp. 78) - Developing along two axes: tech. as democratizing, and challenge to authorship of designer (pp. 79) Rethinking Authorship, Humanizing Machines - Section on shift to computers as "humanized partners" with agency and authorship and how this "technocratic idealism" erases the other participants in design process (pp. 79-80) - Machines as servants rather than machines as automatons (pp. 79) - Flexibility vs. adaptability (pp. 80) Prescribing Participation - Technological exceptionalism of cold war soft power and the way technological "bottom up" approaches are distinctly "top down" in their development (pp. 81) - Tech. development as derived from heavily managed, state actors; the colonial move of "participation" through tech. (pp. 81) - A critique of relational aesthetics (pp. 81) - Falsity of polarity between aesthetic of representation and aesthetic of performance (pp. 82) Some Futures Never Get Old - Summing up: ArcMac critique of the "gentleman architect" through speculative scenarios (pp. 82) - The fact that the desires in ArcMac's publications remains unsatisfied, CAD development moving in a different direction (pp. 84) 6 -- Visions of Design: Software Stories About Design. Creativity and Control (pp. 85-105) Intro section - CAD development moved toward pragmatic needs to produce drawings; design of software centred on drawing production (pp. 85) - Dramatic expansion of CAD industry in 80s & 90s with massive capital investment, cheap electricity, faster computer processors, cheaper computers (micro-computing) (pp. 86) - Economic imperative in the development of building simulation and BIM, the infrastructural impulse to colonize and reorganize design and building in the image of managerial control (pp. 86) - Software as a territory where the meaning of design is negotiated (pp. 87) Structured Descriptions: Design as Information Management - Charles M. Eastman and the potential of relational databases and OOP programming for CAD in the 70s (pp. 87-89) - Building structured as a collection of data that can be manipulated and analyzed performatively (pp. 88) - Not drawing with line, but assembling objects which encode information - Position of getting rid of trades to "heal the Albertian Split", relation with who the trades are in the US (undocumented immigrants) (pp. 89) - Avoidance of emancipatory tropes (pp. 89) - Between Aesthetic Liberation and Globalciist Ambitions: Design as Control - Incorporation of both managerial impetus and artistic formal impetus into professional identity of contemporary architects [managerial aesthetics] (pp. 89) - Andrew Witt from GSD as example: stylistic liberation, "style of the present", software mediation of artist and businessperson, exertion of control at global scale (pp. 90) - Control is moved to those who own and develop the software and platforms (pp. 91) - BIM as globalist project (= produce a shared understanding of the world as a whole and build legitimacy for that knowledge), reveals geo-political asymmetries in global division of labour (West-East model) (pp. 92) - Software as infrastructure of global business which is supposed to reduce all things to data packets what are eminently transmissible without friction (pp. 92) A Toolmaker's Paradigm: Design as Culture - Gives an overview of the ideal BIM model: the digital model is at the centre and all building participants (except the client) are organized horizontally around the model (pp. 92) - Considerable effort this reorganization would take, exceeding tech. towards legal, cultural, org. frameworks; new labour of keeping models up to date - Comparison with RhinoCAD (Bob McNeel's mistrust of BIM) as a user-driven software which has no grand technological narrative (pp. 94) Software as Contract and Boundary: Design as Expression - Gehry and software that documents models rather than producing form (pp. 94-95) - Iterative process akin to computational models, but done in real life - Messiness of modelling and messiness of digitization & processing (pp. 95) - Call for more first hand accounts of offices to help understand changes in "materiality, design, and work around material practices, software environments, and global economic forces." (pp. 96) - Overview of Gehry Technologies and its relation with the architectural practice; CATIA and software as the boundary between design(ers) and technology(ists) (pp. 97-99) Colonizing Moves: Design as Technological Practice - Discussion with GT employee shows two diverging conceptions of design: software systems and their operators as neutral infrastructures for moving design info. And software as the site of design itself (where the building really is) (pp. 99-100) Remediating Plasticity: Design as Form-Making - Relation of software to the prototypical form-making with clay (modelling) (pp. 100) - Contemporary limitations of the interface: mathematically structured enviros and drafting table emulation - Plasticity through NURBS; heavily static and complex math gets malleability at the interface (pp. 101) - A side note on how RhinoCAD is a collage of various code components, proprietary and open-source (pp. 101) Algorithmic Tectonics: Design as Constraint Definition and Exploration - Parametric systems as the simulation of constraints (constraint as force in the Newtonian sense; not constraint in the OuLiPo sense) (pp. 101) - Second order modelling: modelling of so-called "design space" or solution space; designing topologies of control rather than the thing (pp. 101) End of Part One - Summary of points made above (pp. 102-103) - Making the point that design as a reflective, diverse practice of thoughtful engagement with the situation [Schoen] is lost in technological and arch. discourses (pp. 103) PART TWO: SOFTWARE FROM THE FIELD 7 -- The Architect's Bargain: Building the "Bilbao Effect" in the Abu Dhabi Desert (pp. 107-121) Intro section - Overview of Abu Dhabi through analogy with the mall (pp. 107) - "Flexible citizens" (Aihwa Ong) and exploited migrants (pp. 107-108) - Three vectors: software infrastructures, urban arrangements, and political bargains; all merge into a disciplining project of governance (pp. 108) - Software as part of a larger politics of representation; signature designs (pp. 108) - Hiding/"deleting" how images are brought into being (pp. 109) Abu Dhabi: A Fatherly State - Section covering the way resource extraction (oil) legitimates aristocratic rule (the benevolent king model) (pp. 109-110) - Change in economic regime and change in labour force (from locals to migrants) (pp. 110) - Techniques of worker exploitation: misinformation, hidden salary deductions, bad housing and work conditions, constraining of movement (local and international); lack of architect response or outrage (pp. 110) The Mallscape - DCL's coinage describing the urban configuration of Abu Dhabi: network of "expat" spaces become an urban infrastructure keeping "flexible citizens" away from the exploited (pp. 110-111) - Urban form enacting and expressing power relations through who is served, who is made invisible, etc. (pp. 112) The Architect's Bargain - Representational politics of UAE framing all architectural production; BIM models as more visible in the UAE due to friction with local building practices (as opposed to Western Europe and US where it has become normal to the point of invisibility) (pp. 112) - Mesoscopic research approach where the "architectural perspective" is achieved through the view of DCL's research subjects; all (including him) enjoy benefits of "flexible citizenship" (pp. 113) - Trade offs for architects in UAE (no-sum situation) - Ability to design beautiful things... due to worker exploitation (pp. 114) - Diversity of people involved... but also communication issues (language) (pp. 114-115) - Large-scale, cultural projects... but process hyper-state-controlled (pp. 115-117) Self-Expression and (Non) Politics - What politics architects espouse vs their actions "in the field" (pp. 118-120) - Gehry is an example: self-espoused vaguely left (though based on the value of self-expression), but economically pragmatic IRL (works in situations where he knows there's shit going down; pragmatism as a concession to conservatism an/or capitalism) (pp. 118) - Relation between architecture and power; professional interests of architects to be close to the powerful (though DCL doesn't go in depth at his own admonition) (pp. 119) - Architects are one group among many who are involved in UAE politics of rep. and not even the most crucial players in it (pp. 119) - Need to engage how architecture acts within larger processes and its material specificity at the same time (pp. 119-120) 8 -- Contesting the Infrastructure: Resistance Against and Re-Appropriation of a Design Model (pp. 121-135) Intro section - Introduces his day at the building site/office, the fact that everyone working on the project is considered a "visitor" (pp. 121) - The following ethnographic vignettes demonstrating that software interfaces are where the notions of design and modernity are contested (pp. 122) Disastrous Meeting - BIM coordination meeting where a French engineer demonstrates how much he hates BIM (pp. 122-123) - Issues of accuracy, updating, the role and idea of what BIM is (simulation vs. image) (pp. 122) - Techno-desires of totalization contested in the field; newly emergent bureaucracies of verification and approval (pp. 123) The Digital Proletariat - BIM modelling team, interview with their manager on how they work (pp. 123-124) - The huge numbers of people who do manual work of updating BIM models; always being behind schedule, qualities of workspace (pp, 124) - Manual workers integrated with computational systems as the support for building production (pp. 124) The "Babel Tower" - The diversity of people involved in the project; diversity of digital languages (file formats, software operations, etc.) (pp. 125-126) - Non-computational programming as a means of communicating across languages; the importance of informal communications (pp. 125-126) Tasks of Digital Coordination - New role of the "BIM Coordinator" who does exactly that (even though the software is supposed to coordinate itself) (pp. 126) - Fragmentation of drawings and models made with various software (pp. 126) - Convergence of four roles: navigator (of data), office assistant, cinematographer (in meetings) and three-dimensional modeller (to deal with interface); enforcer of information transfer protocols on the people level (pp. 127) - Subverting and Appropriating the System - Subverting BIM supremacy through parallel processes of 3D (BIM) and 2D (contractor) (pp. 127-130) - Sending weekly models to "keep up appearances" but the BIM model turning into recording tool for documentation in hindsight (pp. 130) The Liturgics of BIM - On the ground BIM practices are messier than proposed by software consultants and take place in less formalized situations (pp. 130) - Formation of rituals (pp. 131) What Does Design Look Like? - Design not as individual machine-human practice but "many to many" practice involving various geographically disjointed, yet unified groups; "humans-machines-environments" (pp. 131) - Shows his quantitative data collection which "semi-automatically" scraped project data for "conflicts" (pp. 131-133) - Interactive data visualization tool which allows observation of what might not have been visible at first glance and means of intervening in situation (pp. 131) - Need to reshape discourses of design technology towards embracing of contingency (pp. 134) 9 -- Rethinking Redundancy: Parametrics of Trust Building in Digital Practice (pp. 135-149) Intro section - Assertion that Albertian Split is today a digital one that can only be healed by redefining both design and construction (pp. 135) - Digital model as an added level of redundancy rather than unifying "lingua franca," added so-called managerial inefficiencies rather than reducing them (pp. 135) - DCL calls for a reassessment of discourses of technology in design, rejecting centrality, universality, and control in favour of making spaces for reflection (pp. 136) The Practicality of the Split: Cultural Boundaries to Digital Flows - Healing the split requiring vast realignment of culture, law, and profession (thought of a "forces") against the current models of practice (developer as manager) (pp. 136) - Legally prescribed limitations on how architectural information is transferred to builders and in what forms ("frozen" in un-editable formats, needing to be reverse-engineered) (pp. 137) - Redundancy as on the one hand introducing noisiness into communication process and on the other allowing space for trust building (pp. 138-139) - For the former, non-coordinated drawings and mis-interpretation; for the latter, redrawing (reverse-engineering) as a crucial part of construction analysis (pp. 139) - Comparison of "authoritative models" to "authoritative drawings": high levels of model precision means more room for error (pp. 140) - Redundancy in model audits and checking by other trades, this as trust-building (pp. 141) The Place of Design - Section documenting specific work done by DCL @ Gehry Technologies on turning 2D tender drawings into a 3D parametric model in CATIA (pp. 141-142) - Explanation of what he did with his team (pp. 142-143) - Thinking CATIA as a "parametric space of software" (pp. 142) - Working at a higher level of abstraction: designing the constraints to produce geometries; describing project in terms of relationships (pp. 143-145) - The "power copy" command and how it is storage light but logic heavy (pp. 144) - The increasing size of files containing multiple layers of data; the way one model may be distributed in storage (on a file-manager level) (pp. 145) - Documents tension between architects and technologists despite adjacency; architects value engineering tech. design and the feeling of being infringed upon (pp. 146-147) - Parametric model makes the design malleable within a certain topology, it has strict boundaries (pp. 147) - The need for spaces for trust building, the need to preserve existing forms of trust building against radical centrality of BIM; technologies as operating in a "porous and generative periphery." (pp. 148) Coda (pp. 149-153) - Recapitulates project's aims to illustrate mutual reconfig. of tech and design discourses (pp. 149) - Building an "infrastructural awareness" of design that is sensitive and critical to its own frameworks deployed for its production (pp. 151) - Architects as needing to take a stance on their technologies (pp. 151) - Making a trabs-disciplinary space of investigation (pp. 152) - Proposes a bit of an educational project in which technology can be engaged as "embodied, situated, and messy" (pp. 152)