Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture: Exercises, Provocations, and Theories of Digital Representation

How and why do architects, artists and designers manipulate reality? This book answers that question by examining what it means to render, draw, represent, and mediate the elements that make up and affect our digital and physical worlds. From pixels and rooms to gaming spaces and dioramas, this book exposes approaches to rendering that are equal parts instructive and critical. In the pursuit of the strange and the uncanny, digital media and software aren't taken for granted, nor are they always used as intended. This journey is forward-looking about the emerging role of gaming engines, volumetric raytracing, and procedural shaders, but also looks back and samples from some '80s and '90s classics including MacPaint, DOOM, the Star Trek Holodeck and the film Predator.

Table of Contents:
9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction CHAPTER 1 19 Bits Mapped 21 The Pixel 23 Constructing Elements in Pursuit of Impossibility 25 1988, the Year of the Pixel 31 Pixel Creating Cultures 40 Preserving the Pixel, Releasing Style from Technology 45 The Contemporary Binary Bitmapped Surface 48 Draw by hand within the space of a digital image 78 Resolve to true or false with tons of information CHAPTER 2 83 Every Grid is Material BY JULIE KRESS 87 Every tool is Pre-Gridded 89 Every Grid is Aesthetic 94 Every Grid is Constructed 99 Every Grid is Imposed 102 Build and Break a Scaffold 105 Every grid wants to go on infinitely 107 Every grid has mass 112 Contain a Grid 115 Every grid does not need to be the same 118 Un-Standardized Fixtures CHAPTER 3 123 Using a Tree to Represent a Tree 127 Bonsai is an Action and an Element 128 Books About Bonsai are Like This Book 129 The Tree Behind the Tree 133 Designing Tools to Control or Release Natural Randomness 140 Random Salt Crystals 142 Who is the “User-Author”? 143 Using Software the Wrong Way 149 A Tree Yet Rendered is Three Hundred Text Files in a Folder 150 Sometimes a Tree Looks Nothing like a Tree 154 Everything is Bonsai when in Pursuit of Bonsai 156 Over Time, of Time 159 The Pot is a Diorama CHAPTER 4 165 A Room that Becomes a Diorama; A Diorama Afflicted with Room Envy 167 Almost but not Quite a Diorama: The Room, its Powers, and its Limits 172 Model your space with every regard for detail and no regard for accuracy 173 All Apertures Become Dioramas 184 The Room as a Diorama 188 Model from Memory 189 American Landscape as Diorama 196 Like (Performed) Magic 208 Can a Diorama be Separated from Its Content?

About the Author :
Carl Lostritto is an associate professor and graduate program director at RISD Architecture. His teaching, practice, and research explores the intersections between computation and representation.  Viola Ago is an Albanian architectural designer and researcher. She directs MIRACLES Architecture and recently held the Wortham fellowship at the Rice University School of Architecture. Julie Kress is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Architecture + Design. Her work straddles across realms of architecture, exhibition design, and research in digital media. Hans Tursack recently served as the MIT Pietro Belluschi research fellow. His writing and scholarly work have appeared in Perspecta, Pidgin, Thresholds, Log Dimensions, Archinect, and the Architects Newspaper.