A Letter to the Digital Era


VR,AR,MR, AI, they are all now popular trends on all media. What digital brings to
architecture area, for me , are digital ways to produce and present architecture. If we ask
ourselves, what has changed in architecture field between the last 50 years, the biggest
change I would say is the way that people now are more and more used in using computer as a production method.
 
However, most of the changes happened only as the change of the tool. The idea of
architecture and the the idea behind a digital era of architecture has not changed at all. 50
years ago, architects use pen and ruler to draw the architecture graphs line by line and now
there are still many architects draw the architecture graphs line by line not using pen but
AutoCAD or Rhinos. The technology development in many other field doesn’t change the way how we think about architecture but only provide us with the new tools to repeat the way which we are used to think and work in architecture field.

Thus, for me, a real digital era for architecture is an era that architecture field begins to
embrace the changes in other fields and begin to change itself to accustom to the world’s
change. Like CNC and 3D printer, they enable us to shape a more complex and dynamic
forms, opening up opportunities for a much cheaper and quicker method for constructions like prefabrication, architects should be aware of these changes and response to these by their designs not only regarding these technologies as a modeling tool. Another example is about the rendering. With the rapid development of GPU, the rendering power of the computer can now easily produces photo quality rendering images and even VR environment, but most of the works done by architects don’ t response to these changes. We are still comfortable with the traditional graph presentations, ignoring the changes which will improve the way we communicate with the public and other specialists.
 
Architecture is an ancient industry, but it can be always young. Like parametric design or
using other fields theories to produce architecture design, they all benefits architecture to
archive a more diverse and flexible condition to explore the spatial problems. For me, the
digital era of architecture lies in the power of fabrication, of the algorithms and of the
computation ability. Architects should be free from the house keeping errands by the help of
the computer and they should also be free to explore the spatial design with the help of
computer.