Cyphers: On the Historiography of Digital Architecture

This dissertation reflects on the methods and concepts employed in constructing a history of digital architecture. By focusing on the methodological issues, it complements and expands the research developed for the monographic study Digital Architecture Beyond Computers (DABC) and the book chapter “Crypto Architecture”. In both pieces digital architecture is understood to cover a period of time that stretches well beyond the appearance of the modern digital computer (after World War Two). The notion of computing numbers and symbols to apprehend and intervene in our reality is in fact a much older idea than the invention of the modern digital computer. This dissertation reflects on the approach suggested by both writings by analysing the conceptual basis of computation in order to devise an appropriate historiographic approach to digital architecture. The aim of the investigation is to move beyond a technologically‐driven, utilitarian view of computation in favour of a more conceptual position that foregrounds computation’s fundamental logic and the role of the disciplines that informed and continue to inform it. This broader perspective aims at establishing a relation between the artifacts and the processes of digital architecture; that is, between what digital architecture is (which DABC explores through case studies in which computation and design affected one another), and how it is generated (the techniques and methods deployed to design architecture).

This dissertation introduces a specific conceptual figure to articulate the historiography of digital architecture: the cypher. Cyphers address the fundamental challenges emerging from constructing a history of digital architecture, they organise the vast collections of case studies forming the history of digital architecture, foreground the conceptual motivations behind computation, and acknowledge the role that different disciplines (philosophy, logic, semiotic) have played in shaping what we call digital architecture.