The title 'Digitalia' is an amalgam of 'digital' and 'marginalia', is an inclusive view of an evolving practice: digital design in architecture. It developed from research done during an EPSRC MPhil fellowship at the University of Cambridge. The book brings together for the first time digital innovation not only in architectural form-finding, but in environmental design, and analyses in detail the ideas now driving an emerging convergence towards a focus on building performance between the two agendas. The architectural avant-garde has laid claim to the incursion of computers into architecture, sidelining other uses and developments in the same field, especially the role of the digital in environmental design. There is in fact a split between an ‘autonomous’ version of the avant-garde, pursuing formal novelty in practice, and an ‘engaged’ version that loops back from the virtual to the actual – actual global urbanisation, actual global warming, actual meta-architectural problems. The book uses unexpected as well as expected sources to identify the split and postulate its increasing irrelevance – from Ali Rahim to Manfredo Tafuri. The research was developed through a literature review of architectural form-finding, the history of digital environmental design, and critical studies of the architectural avant-garde. Research also used interviews with selected architects and environmental design professionals with a central role in the development of the use of the computer within this context, and research-by-design to draw evidence-based conclusions from firsthand experimentation with digital parametric design. Cited in
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