Join us in Berlin for the launch of When Is the Digital in Architecture?, a new book published by the CCA and Sternberg Press. The discussion will feature Nathalie Bredella and Wolfgang Ernst—two of the book’s authors—as well as Albert Ferré (CCA Associate Director, Publications) and Andrew Goodhouse (Editor, CCA Publications).

When is the digital in architecture? What are the conditions that led architects to integrate digital tools into their practices? Over the course of the Archaeology of the Digital research program, the CCA has collected the archival records of twenty-five projects realized between the late 1980s and the early 2000s in order to understand this moment as a point of origin for the digital. But if we take care to identify the digital as a condition that is made possible by the conceptual foundations of digital media and not necessarily by digital media itself, the boundaries of the digital moment—when it began and under what circumstances—become less clear. There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them in a chronology of responses to the question of when the digital is in architecture. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone to Archaeology of the Digital and the beginning of an investigation of other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

This evening, Nathalie Bredella (Visiting Professor of Architectural History, Universität der Künste Berlin) will trace the origins of the digital in architecture to the interaction between media art and architecture in the early 1990s, and Wolfgang Ernst (Professor of Media Theories, Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) will discuss how a media archaeological understanding of the archive can situate the digital’s point of origin far before the integration of digital tools into architecture practice.

This publication received the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.