Design Technics

Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology’s role in architectural design Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume’s contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories—some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode—of seven techniques regularly used by the designer in the architectural studio today: rendering, modeling, scanning, equipping, specifying, positioning, and repeating. Starting with observations about the epistemological changes that have unfolded in the discipline in recent decades but seeking to offer a more expansive meaning for technics, the volume casts new light on concepts such as form, experience, and image that have played central roles in historical architectural discourses. Among the questions addressed: How was the concept of form immanent in practices of scanning since the late nineteenth century? What was the historical relationship between rendering and experience in Enlightenment discourses? How did practices of specifying reconfigure the distinction between intellectual and manual labor? What kind of rationality is inherent in the designer’s constant clicking of the mouse in front of her screen? In addressing these and other questions, this engaging and timely collection thereby proposes technics as a site for historical and philosophical reflection not only for those engaged in architectural design but also for any scholar working in the humanities today. Contributors: Lucia Allais, Edward Eigen, Orit Halpern, John Harwood, Matthew C. Hunter, and Michael Osman.

Sampled Data Systems - ADCs for DSP Applications - DACs for DSP Applications - Fast Fourier Transforms - Digital Filters - DSP Hardware - Interfacing to DSPs - DSP Applications - Hardware Design Techniques.

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – 'naming' through timber, 'process-based' through concrete, and 'performance specification' through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or 'Preliminary Operations' as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

At present, although most of the optical design processes are automated with the aid of computer software, the fundamental question of how we can generate the initial optical configuration such that it can be dealt with by the computer remains. The answer can only be found in applying techniques based on the aberration theory. Previous works have explored this subject matter. None, however, has covered the full extent of first deriving the aberration theory and then illustrating with the help of various kinds of actual examples how it can be applied effectively to practical design problems. This book is significant in its attempt to put theory into practice for the first time to provide new insight and knowledge to its readers.