What is digital architecture? Is it legitimate to apply the term to any design made with the assistance of a computer, or should it be reserved to productions that put to real use the capacity of the machine to be more than a drawing tool? For the past ten to fifteen years, in order to distinguish the term from the rapidly increasing use of computer-aided design, digital architecture has been often characterized by an experimental dimension more pronounced than in mainstream production. As a result, there has been a tendency to confuse digital and experimental. Because of this tendency, noticeable in exhibitions like ArchiLab or the Venice Biennale, many innovative practices that undoubtedly belonged to the latter category have been deemed digital." But if the term is certainly appropriate for the productions of designers like Ali Rahim, Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch, who rely heavily ‘on the computer, does it truly capture what is arresting with the projects of Preston Scott Cohen or Jesse Reiser? Is it appropriate to interpret recent features of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s architecture, like the accent put on surface and ornament, in rela- tion to the rise of digital culture? The vagueness of the term has been further increased by the series of offices that have pioneered the use of computer-aided design, where the senior partners have little actual familiarity with the machine. In these offices, programs are usually run by younger designers who have benefited from an early exposure to computer culture. To what extent is their produc- tion, which closely follows the intuitions and ideas of their employers, really digital? The question has been raised by the architecture of Frank Gehry. In Gehry’s office, the use of Catia (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) CAD software remains external to the core of a highly personal design process that relies on traditional means like sketches, cardboard and wood models.” However, the ambiguity is not as problematic as it might appear at first glance. As we have stressed it, digital architecture, in the narrow sense of a production using the computer in an experi- mental perspective, is inseparable from broader trends at work in the contemporary architectural world. Because they express some of these trends with a special clarity, Cohen, Reiser, but also Herzog & de Meuron have their full place in the discussion of what digital architecture is about. As for the argument based on the generation gap between architects trained before and after the spread of digital tools, its relevance is undermined by the enduring character of the relation between architecture and computer culture. For almost half a century, this connection has influenced theorists and Practitioners beyond the mere use of software. Despite the diversity of research directions revealed by this half-a-century-long history, the architectural uses of the computer of Innovative Geometries Antoine Picon‘THE SEDUCTION OF INNOVATIVE GEOMETRIES in an experimental perspective have generally privileged form: the investiga- tion of shapes in complete contrast with the limited vocabulary of modern architecture. The result has been a proliferation of alternative geometries that are calling for new criteria of evaluation. However, this focus on form should not lead to the reduction of the quest to a mere stylistic obsession. As we will see throughout this chapter, digital architecture's formalist orien- tation is inseparable from a series of broader concerns, like the ambition to be in tune with the general march of the world’s economy. Above all, formalism is to be understood here as synonymous with an inquiry regarding ‘the mechanisms of formation, or to put it like Sanford Kwinter, “the proc- esses by which discernible patterns come to dissociate themselves from a less finely-ordered field.” The desire to understand form in terms of formation is one of the reasons for the attention that digital architects pay to recent scientific developments, for instance in dynamic systems theory or genetics that put an emphasis on the property of emergence conceived as a capacity of auto-organization at work throughout nature. In the long history of the connections between | culture and archi- tecture, the postmodern turning point with its formalist dimension stands clearly as a key to present developments. Taking up Robert Venturi's appeal to complexity and contradiction exposed in his 1966 eponymous essay, post- modernism proper was followed by a deconstructionist phase in which archi- tectural form was meant to express the conflicting logics of its surroundings by resorting to heterogeneity and fragmentation. Completed in 1989, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, was in that respect one of the most paradigmatic projects of the time with its colliding grids. Although the smooth forms of contemporary digital architecture are in complete contrast with deconstructionist violence, they have inherited from them the project to address with lucidity heterogeneous and often conflicting conditions. Typical forms of digital architecture are, above all, indebted to the reac- tion against deconstruction that arose in the early 1990s. One of the most telling episodes of this reaction was the enthusiasm for folding - understood sometimes literally, most of the time as a metaphor - that characterized a whole range of architectural productions around that period, especially in the United States. The use of the term was triggered by the translation of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay, Le Pli (The fold), into English.’ A study of Leibniz’s metaphysics, The Fold insisted on one of its aspects: the Possibility to envisage complexity in other terms than discontinuity and frontal collision. For architects like Peter Eisenman, the book opened new Perspectives on the question of complexity. These perspectives were theo- rized in an influential collection of essays edited by Greg Lynn. Published in Facing page Figure 3.1: "'Lightfall', Herta and Paul Amir Wing, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Preston Scott Cohen, Architect. Image credit: Courtesy of the office of Preston Scott Cohen. 49