"When code matters" by Ingeborg M Rocker is an article in Architectural Design that deals with the role of computation in the discourse and praxis of architecture. It gives a well summarized overview of historical computational models and concepts and then interestingly discuss their role in architecture.

While previously architects were obsessed with the reduction of complexity through algorithms, today they are invested in exploring complexities based on the generative power of algorithms and computation.(...) Most architects now use computers and interactive software programs as exploratory tools. All their work is informed by, and thus dependent on the software they are using, which inscribes its logic, perhaps even unnoticed, onto their everyday routines (...) The computer is no longer used as a tool for representation, but as a medium to conduct computations. Architecture emerges as a trace of algorithmic operations. Surprisingly enough, algorithms – deterministic in their form and abstract in their operations – challenge both design conventions and, perhaps even more surprisingly, some of our basic intuitions.

Why do I blog this? curiosity towards architectural practices, and - of course - how technology reshape how people do what they do.