Borsa valori dell'architettura
The new values in today architecture

originally published as
Antonino Saggio, "Interactivity" in  Promise and reality, Proceedings of the 2000 Ecaade Conference, Bauhaus Weimer 2000 (pp.239-243).
 

This essay  presents a mixture of materials. While the written text is in English and it follows the paper AS gave to Ecaade in Weimer 2000, the quick time movies are in Italian and have been recorded on February 27 2001 during a speech at School of Architecture of Pescara Italy .
1.TheRevolution
(the book series and beyond)

 Ascolta il filmato della prima parte: La rivoluzione (e oltre)


800 K realplayer
Scorri le immagini sotto mentre ascolti il testo

La Rivoluzione Informatica

Background
A few info before starting. My work in the last years in CAAD moved mainly in the field of publication. In the 1996 I planned a new book series. After a very stimulating ping-ponging with Bruno Zevi the name of the series became "La Rivoluzione Informatica". Its scope was reflecting on the effects the virtual dimension was having on architects and architecture in general. Each volume examines a single topic, highlighting the essential aspects and exploring their relevance for the architecture of today. The series, published by Testo&Immagine (Turin), was very successful in Italy and in 1999 it was acquired for English translation by the publisher Birkhäuser (Basel, Berlin, Boston) and named "IT Revolution in Architecture".
It is the first book series world wide to address the issue of Information Technology in the field of architecture. Titles of the books published so far are: 1. HyperArchitecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age.
2. Information Architecture: Basics of CAAD and its future.
3. Digital Eisenman: An Office of the Electronic Era. 4. Virtual Terragni: CAAD in Historical and critical research. 5. Digital Stories: The Poetics of Communication. 6. Natural Born CAADesigners: Young American Architects.
(For all info, authors and summaries in English and German please refer to www.birkhauser.ch or www.amazon.co.uk)
Three books are in press (NewFlatness, New Wombs, Digital Design) and 15 authors are under contract right now to produce six new books every year.
My work as a editor is very intense. I have to pick a theme that I consider relevant in today cultural debate, find the best possible author to develop it, help structuring the book and naturally revise the text and the images.
In some book, I write a Preface that is of course "an appetiser" for the reader but also a way to orient and direct the effort of the whole series. I intend IT Revolution in Architecture not a sum of individual point of views but a more general collective enterprise toward the comprehension of the impact that Information society has for architecture.
Scope of this paper, which summarises and reorganises some of my Prefaces, is centred on the issue of Interactivity. We could go very deep on this word, but let’s stop for a moment in order to be clear. The specific problems that I want to address are: firstly, "why" interactivity is one of the crucial frontiers for an architecture that is able to respond to the challenge of Information Society and secondly "how" this can be achieved. The fact that this is paper is given in a University that keeps the name of "Bauhaus" has for me a great symbolic relevance.

Il Vortice


Il simposio di Zurigo; Il pensare insieme


Il problema dei valori

E' Finita l'era della macchina






Two concepts: modernity as answer to crisis, metaphorization
First concept to consider is that the rechanneling of ideas and researches from different disciplines towards a common direction is characteristic of each age of change. The fact that art, literature, architecture, design and philosophical, scientific and economic thought are today closer and more interconnected than they have been for decades may be another proof that we are living a moment of "Revolution". IT Revolution, in particular, has an impact that is comparable only to "The Industrial Revolution". Here comes the theme of Modernity. Modernity, from my point of view, (in Baudrillard and Zevi terms), is the striving toward the transformation of world crises into aesthetic and ethical values at a tempo that architecture could cultivate and manifest. The Industrial revolution was a "crisis" that lasted, for architecture, at least for 12 decades.
Industrial Revolution started at the beginning of XIX, but architecture was able to find a coherent answer to the new "industrial" world only around 1925: at the forefront , as everybody knows, it was Germany with its experiences from Werkbund to Bauhaus. Question in front of us is: how can architecture of today face a shift from an industrial to an information paradigm? The only thing that we know is that a ponderous and collective effort is necessary, and also, from my point of view, that "Interactivity" is one absolutely key ingredient for this transformation

GO TO NEXT SECTION

Antonino Saggio Home
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS
Antonino Saggio, "Interactivity" in  Promise and reality,
Proceedings of the 2000 Ecaade Conference, Bauhaus Weimer 2000 (pp.239-243).