Ornament Today: Digital, Material, Stuctural
Wednesday, August 15th, 2012Associate Professor Ingeborg M. Rocker publishes essay entitled “Calculated: formal excesses of digital ornaments,” as a chapter in Ornament Today: Digital, Material, Structural edited by J. H. Gleiter, Professor of architectural theory at the Technical University Berlin.
Rocker’s chapter is part of her ongoing research in the role of computation for the theorization and production of architecture. Rocker’s research of “digital ornament” began in 2009 with her paper “Computation in Command? Fading Flamboyant Architectural Aesthetics,” presented at the Harvard Design School’s Critical Digital Conference.
Her current contribution, “Calculated Excess,” contextualizes the development of ornament within shifts of production logics, from hand-crafted, to industrially produced, to digitally fabricated. Rocker marks the ambiguous terrain between the investigation of production techniques and the ornamental, while drawing parallels between the digital ornament of today and those of the past. Does the computation ability to facilely produce variation through the manipulation of code suggest considering ornament and architecture as a like set of endless differentiations? Or does it rather recommend looking at architecture and ornaments at the level of code itself?
For further details see:
Book:
J. H. Gleiter, editor. Ornament Today: Digital, Material, Structural. Bozen: Free University of Bozen Press, 2012.