Review: Digital Architecture beyond Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design, by Roberto Bottazzi

In his afterword to Roberto Bottazzi's new contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the histories and genealogies of digital practices in architecture, Frédéric Migayrou identifies a historiographic conundrum. “How to elaborate the limits of a critical history of digital architecture,” Migayrou asks, “where the limits have not yet been established or well defined?” (207).¹ In other words, how does one simultaneously construct and critique a field? One possible response to Migayrou's challenge is offered by the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Archaeology of the Digital research project (begun in 2013). In what the CCA calls “a Tristram Shandy of the digital,” the absence of limits and definitions encourages proliferation and digression, which are to be embraced as positive qualities rather than domesticated through taxonomic delimitation.² In Digital Architecture beyond Computers, Bottazzi offers a different response. While scholarship on digital architecture has so far focused largely on...