{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":161,"pdf_page":177,"physical_index":177,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"8272178217217300a3cca2b85cfce39d3861a6460e31cc9c01a88cb783fc3e00"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"More visible than esoteric forces of production and consumption, but no less important as governance interfaces, are those architectural surfaces and envelopes that articulate physical and figural politics of urban space. At the same time that spatial planning management consultants employ predictive financial models to ensure, they suppose, a preferred quality of urban-economic performance, architectural design studios increasingly rely on generative algorithms as form-finding agents to calculate indi vidual building morphologies in pursuit of other, sometimes conflicting, performative goals. This division of labor between formal economics and designed form sometimes bedevils progressive architectural design, a disciplinary project relegated to a thinner and thinner slice of the structural pie. Among the most emblematic and visually striking formal machinations of today ’ s architectural vanguard are perhaps those gathered under the rubric of parametricism. These practices and techniques, much more diverse that they may seem at first glance, use algorithms as design agents for the partially automated genesis of complex forms and also supposedly to guarantee an intelligent index of the intrinsic and extrinsic forces that couch a project ’ s programs. In theory, important design solutions — programmatic circulation, interarticulation of subsystems, site posture, material distortion, proportion and nested symmetry, energy administration — may find direct formal expression by the mediation of the building ’ s envelope as machine. <sup>20</sup> As one contemporary derivation of D ’ Arcy Thompsons ’ s “ form is a diagram of forces, ” parametricism ’ s often extremely self-conscious self-theorization claims to use architectural form to communicate the social, economic, ecological, cogni tive forces that, after having been codified somehow into Grasshopper scripts, are now well disposed to disclosing themselves through the exacting distortions of involute morphology. At the project level, it concentrates expertise on the delineation of bones, surfaces, and skins at the unit level of individual architectural envelopes, hoping to capture the lightening of global forces into the bottle of programmable metallic flora. This strategy is partially a response to the diminished and decorative economic position for even famous architects in the post-Bilbao effect era, but it is also supported by much broader and more substantial disciplinary interests (especially those that one would not consider to be “ parametricist ” as such) in surface performance, living and nonliving emergent systems, and alternative topologies as the loci for future design as consolidated by a global signal style. They also speak to the unsure agency of algorithms in the design and organization of space beyond the professional domain of architecture and architects. Pessimistically, we may lament that the impoverished perch from which architecture has authority to say which assemblages go where is now reduced to variously thrilling or bombastic skins, shells, and special effects. Optimistically, we might say that in these same post-Euclidean habitats, the stage is set for new, complex, and challenging points of tactile encounter between human and architectural bodies that don ’ t just index client programs but forcefully reinvent them. More than perfect obedience to macroeconomic energistic field conditions, the more creative promise of continuous involuted forms involves perverse moments of folded contact and nested cohabitation between unlike bodies, flesh and form.\n\nCity Layer\n\n161","previous_page":160,"next_page":162}