Automating Architecture? Know-how and Computability in the Practices of the Computational Field in Architecture, 1965-2020

The lecture offers a foray into how computational practices constitute since almost four decades an occasion to question the epistemology of architecture, by examining the conditions of emergence of this field of research and by analysing the algorithmic tools that are mobilized across this period of time. While often being considered a small academic bubble, the computational field in architecture has been a place of development for some of the major new habits of practices in the industry. The lecture thus examines in what ways these habits are grounded in older and more confidential research, and questions the currently most recurrent topic of work in the computational field: architectural robotics.