Impact

This issue of AD explores the working discipline of architecture as it impacts the material culture within which it is always embedded. An architecture of impact uses advanced digital techniques in such a way that its material assembly supersedes its use of the digital.

Until now, this type of architecture has been formally and materially bound by restrictive conventional methodologies, which the digital project has moved from the scale of installations to three-dimensional building-sized fabrications. Unless architects turn to a new culture of making, architecture shaped by even innovative digital technology will become irrelevant. Architectural projects that are more subversive in how they are created and that lose their digital signature have greater potential to be at the forefront of the discipline’s new materialisations. This issue illustrates these ideas and their architectural impact.

Contributors: Kutan Ayata, Ben van Berkel, Hernan Diaz Alonso, David Goldblatt, Thomas Heatherwick, Ferda Kolatan, Ascan Mergenthaler, Antoine Picon, Casey Rehm, Patrik Schumacher, and Philip F Yuan.

Featured architects: Archi-Union, Contemporary Architecture Practice, HDA-X, Heatherwick Studio, Herzog & de Meuron, Ishida Rehm Studio, Pininfarina, SHoP Architects, SU-11, UNStudio, and Young & Ayata, and Zaha Hadid Architects.

Professor Ali Rahim directs the Advanced Architectural Design Program in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Director of Contemporary Architecture Practice in TriBeCa, New York City. Mr. Rahim has served as the Studio Zaha Hadid Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale University, and as a Visiting Architecture Professor at Harvard University and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC).

Professor Hina Jamelle directs the Housing Programme at the in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also Director of Contemporary Architecture Practice in TriBeCa, New York City. Ms. Jamelle has served as Visiting Schaeffer Chair at the University of Michigan.

About the Guest-Editors 05
Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle

Introduction

Architectural Impact After the Digital 06
Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle

Other Experts: Disciplinary and Aesthetic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence 14
M Casey Rehm

Novel Bricks: A Scenario of Human–Machine Collaboration 22
Philip F Yuan and Keke Li

Tech’s Teaching Moment: The Shape of Culture in the Post-Blob Era 30
Philip Nobel

Genuine Hybrids: Towards an Architecture with No Origin 40
Ferda Kolatan

Impactful Disruption: Gathered Thoughts of a Distracted Mind 50
Hernán Díaz Alonso

An Estranged Type: Old Techniques, Familiar Materials and Peculiar Outcomes 58
Kutan Ayata

The Impact of Automobile Design on Architecture 66
Paolo Pininfarina and Paolo Trevisan

The Mega-Void: Unleashing the Communicative Impact of Tall Buildings 72
Patrik Schumacher

Aesthetics, Narrative and the Materials of Architecture 82
David Goldblatt

Shanghai Bund: The Impact of Context 92
Thomas Heatherwick

Disjunctive Continuity and the Aesthetics of the Seam 100
Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle

Material Intricacy 110
Ascan Mergenthaler

Beyond Digital Avant-Gardes: The Materiality of Architecture and Its Impact 118
Antoine Picon

Architecture and the Impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution 126
Ben van Berkel

From Another Perspective

The Impact of the Digital on Bigg-ness 134
Neil Spiller

Contributors 142

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