Páginas do livro “Digital Culture in Architecture”, de Antoine Picon
Foto divulgação

Gabriela Celani and David Sperling: Since you just gave me your last book, La materialité de l’architecture (Parenthèses, 2018), why don’t you talk a bit about it?

Antoine Picon: The book is a mix of history and theory. It starts with the idea that what architecture does is actually to order matter and form structure. And from that I engage into a reflection about what kind of relation we have with matter, trying to show that in some ways what architecture tries to do is to animate matter. To make it so that materials create this frame within which human action have a meaning. Then I arrive to the somewhat more complex idea that what architects work about is materiality, but I define materiality in a very specific way. Materiality is not matter for me; is the kind of relation we have with matter. Architecture works on the kind of relation we have with matter and with the physical world more generally. The final chapter is about the digital, as a new regime of materiality. The digital is redefining materiality. It’s something I call a regime of materiality, which I have developed from book to book. Already in the book on Digital Culture in Architecture, which I published 8 years ago, there was this idea that the core of a digital revolution in architecture is actually a shift in the definition of materiality. I want to show that there is not a dematerialization with the computer; it’s a different materiality.

GC/DS: Probably at the end of the 20th century there was a dematerialization.

AP: I think even from the start, because it was about reeducating the eye, the senses… it started with a dramatic estrangement from construction. I think the digital has redefined who you are, and the way we relate to things, to materials, etc. The final chapter is completely about that.

GC/DS: Thank you so much, Professor Picon, for all your insights.

Páginas do livro “Digital Culture in Architecture”, de Antoine Picon
Foto divulgação