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.
如何一個多變的數學物件——圖形，為設計帶來新的形象、工具和基礎設施，並催化建築的數位未來。
在《Graph Vision》中，Theodora Vardouli 提供了一個關於建築早期與現代數學和數位計算交織的新歷史，重點聚焦於一個隱藏的主角：圖形。她解釋道，受到破壞偶像的情感和對幾何描繪的懷疑驅動，建築師們轉向他們工作的骨架基礎，並將圖形視為表現、操作和政治可能性的場所。Vardouli 帶領讀者踏上一段引人入勝的旅程，探索這一多義的數學實體，結合了對圖形在建築中作為形象、工具和設計基礎設施的具體分析，以及對推動數學和計算方法在建築中應用的研究中心的原創檔案工作。
《Graph Vision》以主題為結構，編織了關於影響力研究團體的檔案發現，例如劍橋大學的土地使用建築形式研究中心、伯克利的環境結構中心、麻省理工學院的建築機器小組等，以及在這些團體中領導或與之密切合作的重要人物，包括 Lionel March、Christopher Alexander 和 Yona Friedman。這些材料共同記錄了一種新的視覺方式的出現，以及為這一學科預示數位未來的新前景——一種“圖形視野”。Vardouli 主張，這種視野是一種對視覺外觀的搖擺。她最終揭示，數位建築方法是建立在對於視覺領域的深刻矛盾之上，這種矛盾是二十世紀中期建築和數學現代主義的特徵。
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.
