
Graph Vision
Digital Architecture's Skeletons
Theodora Vardouli(Author)
MIT Press
Published on 12. November 2024
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-262-04901-6 (ISBN)
Description
How a protean mathematical object, the graph, ushered in new images, tools, and infrastructures for design and catalyzed a digital future for architecture.
In Graph Vision, Theodora Vardouli offers a fresh history of architecture’s early entanglements with modern mathematics and digital computing by focusing on a hidden protagonist: the graph. Fueled by iconoclastic sentiments and skepticism of geometric depiction, architects, she explains, turned to the skeletal underpinnings of their work, and with it the graph, as a site of representation, operation, and political possibility. Taking the reader on an enthralling journey through a polyvalent mathematical entity, Vardouli combines close readings of graphs’ architectural manifestations as images, tools, and infrastructures for design with original archival work on research centers that spearheaded mathematical and computational approaches to architecture.
Structured thematically, Graph Vision weaves together archival findings on influential research groups such as the Land Use Built Form Studies Center at the University of Cambridge, the Center for Environmental Structure at Berkeley, the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, as well as important figures who led, or worked in proximity to, these groups, including Lionel March, Christopher Alexander, and Yona Friedman. Together, this material chronicles the emergence of both a new way of seeing and a new prospect for the discipline that prefigured its digital future—of a “graph vision.” Vardouli argues that this vision was one of vacillation toward visual appearance. Digital approaches to architecture, she ultimately reveals, were founded on a profound ambivalence toward the visual realm endemic to mid-twentieth century architectural and mathematical modernisms.
In Graph Vision, Theodora Vardouli offers a fresh history of architecture’s early entanglements with modern mathematics and digital computing by focusing on a hidden protagonist: the graph. Fueled by iconoclastic sentiments and skepticism of geometric depiction, architects, she explains, turned to the skeletal underpinnings of their work, and with it the graph, as a site of representation, operation, and political possibility. Taking the reader on an enthralling journey through a polyvalent mathematical entity, Vardouli combines close readings of graphs’ architectural manifestations as images, tools, and infrastructures for design with original archival work on research centers that spearheaded mathematical and computational approaches to architecture.
Structured thematically, Graph Vision weaves together archival findings on influential research groups such as the Land Use Built Form Studies Center at the University of Cambridge, the Center for Environmental Structure at Berkeley, the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, as well as important figures who led, or worked in proximity to, these groups, including Lionel March, Christopher Alexander, and Yona Friedman. Together, this material chronicles the emergence of both a new way of seeing and a new prospect for the discipline that prefigured its digital future—of a “graph vision.” Vardouli argues that this vision was one of vacillation toward visual appearance. Digital approaches to architecture, she ultimately reveals, were founded on a profound ambivalence toward the visual realm endemic to mid-twentieth century architectural and mathematical modernisms.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge (Massachusetts)
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Illustrations
69 COLOR ILLUS.
Dimensions
Height: 260 mm
Width: 195 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
904 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-04901-6 (9780262049016)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
11/2024
MIT Press
€59.49
Available for download
Person
Theodora Vardouli is Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. She is coauthor and coeditor of Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design and coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground.
Content
1 Graphs
2 Images
Peril
Forms
Textbooks
Frameworks
Isomorphisms
3 Tools
Ends
Data
Layouts
Patterns
Generativities
4 Infrastructures
Control
Chance
Choice
Possibility
Combinatorics
5 Skeletons
Ghosts
Flesh
Boxes
Closets
Acknowledgements
Notes
Illustrations
Index
2 Images
Peril
Forms
Textbooks
Frameworks
Isomorphisms
3 Tools
Ends
Data
Layouts
Patterns
Generativities
4 Infrastructures
Control
Chance
Choice
Possibility
Combinatorics
5 Skeletons
Ghosts
Flesh
Boxes
Closets
Acknowledgements
Notes
Illustrations
Index