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Designing United Europe: Data-Driven Architectural Programming of the 1960s-1970
YIG Prep Pro Project, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
2024-2026
2024-2026
Contemporary architectural practice is impossible to imagine without computers. As we continue to inhabit architecture’s “digital turn,” a wide range of software programs assist in all stages of the building process, from ideation to final touches, inevitably leaving their footprint. Architecture historians and design practitioners have long been concerned with the impact of new technologies on the design process. Cutting-edge MIT experiments with computer programming in the 1950s or avant-garde form-finding of the 1990s with the aid of new software have been thoroughly researched. However, far less attention has been paid to the more mundane type of early architectural programming developed in the 1960s and 1970s, which, as this project argues, is still at the core of most contemporary BIM processes today. Unlike the more visual experiments of the later decades, this programming relied on building specifications and classification systems developed by commercial producers and resulted from years of intra-European standardisation efforts. Although less spectacular, this architectural programming of the 1960s not only aimed to create large-scale intra-European computer infrastructure but represented an architectural equivalent of a political project of a united Europe.
Through three Work Packages, the project investigates the business and physical infrastructures of the early intra-European architectural programming networks and explores their implications on the process of design and architectural education. Based on archival and secondary literature research, supplemented with interviews, the project will critically engage with new technologies' social and cultural impact. Interested in the largely invisible bureaucratic actors and proto-algorithmic processes, the project fits well within the research of proto-digital processes at the Professorship of Dr Anna-Maria Meister and the overall agenda of the EKUT Institute.