Consider this office. It could be the view into a creative practice, with models and drawings strewn across desks, hung on walls, or stuffed into shelves. Or, backing up: consider the digital reproduction of a photograph originally taken in the office of the architect Frank Gehry.
Gehry’s office is “digital” in more than one sense, not only because you are almost certainly viewing it as a digital image. But it was also in this office, in the 1990s, that Gehry proposed new digital modes of form-making and production, with staff developing their own software to optimize and translate their projects’ complex geometries. Gehry thus paved the way for the representation of his office in this exhibit and architecture’s digital turn. And yet calling it “digital” is not that simple. Depicted at the office’s center are, after all, people—surrounded by the very analog “stuff” of architectural practice, not least the...
University of California Press