Remote Control: The Natural Language of Architecture

The architectural design process is a means of translating information into form, and has long relied on indirect (“remote”) control mechanisms for communicating and translating the architect’s authorial intent into a built work. These methods have generally evolved from a more direct, physical basis, as both technology and the discipline have evolved. To communicate design ideas, architects have relied on methodologies that range from an extreme desire for control, to models that attempt to relinquish many controls entirely. Early communication models, in part due to lack of material, form, and program diversity, allowed for a less systematic and complex descriptive method; inscriptions in the earth, physical detail models along with a set of instructions, or simple scale models of the intention were all that was required.2 As cultures and their technologies advanced, communication methods such as scaled orthographic drawings, specifications and other forms of written instructions, and now fully realized Building Information Models, have become normative practice in a profession that looks for total control of the built work before it is physically realized. Apart from the communicative control models mentioned above, there are authorial models which have also progressed in complexity and abstraction alongside societal advancements. In the discipline’s infancy, authorship involved subtle evolutions of proportion and order within a well-established typological system. In modernism, the authorial models evolved as architects experimented with increased typological invention in response to a radically changing technological and social environment. Advancing to the contemporary “digital” moment, architects continue to develop systems to control complexities within the work, mapping strategies that deal with collecting and spatializing data, while others see contemporary design tools as a means to relinquish some design control to outside forces whose unexpected potential is compelling. This paper gives examples of remote communicative and authorial controls, and posits a new theory of the potential meaningful effects of leveraging these control mechanisms in new ways using three projects by SILO AR+D.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.30

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0