Book Launch + Discussion: The Discrete

If being comes in chunks, as Graham Harman has it, what are architectural chunks made of? Two generations of architects have deployed this concept in radically different ways. Tom Wiscombe argues for architectural “supercomponents:” specific, unique entities that are produced in the process of creating fully choreographed, obsessively detailed, alternative realities. Gilles Retsin claims that new, digitally optimized regimes of fabrication can more fully align with production processes to create radical economies. Casey Rehm’s neuro-net algorithms produce stylized and futuristic aggregates that straddle the boundary between the readily buildable and the otherwise unimaginable. Jose Sanchez promotes game-based collaborative design based on standardized building chunks as a way to remake the relationship between communities and the production of housing. Embedded in each of these positions is a different philosophical position about what constitutes the core of the discipline, and how architecture should relate to the status quo. Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion, moderated by Marrikka Trotter, at the LA launch of AD Discrete: Reappraising the Digital in Architecture.