Architecture and the Structured Image: Software Simulations as Infrastructures for Building Production

This chapter shows how technical and conceptual innovations brought about by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) research during the 1960s and 1970s foreshadow current practices of building design and construction, and are foundational to a modern epistemology of the image in the age of simulation. No longer construed as pictorial representations of a design but rather as mathematically enlivened and operative artifacts performing it, computationally produced images elicited new aesthetic and managerial aspirations—crucially, to re-structure design labor and to destabilize the boundaries between design and construction. Interrogating the material and discursive tenets of this transformation through both historical evidence and ethnographic insight, the chapter proposes the analytical category of “structured image” to engage with its significance to architectural and visual cultures. It further proposes that the scale at which this reconfiguration is realized requires both historically informed perspectives and performative, localized accounts of socio-technical practice.