When is the digital in architecture? What are the conditions that led architects to integrate digital tools into their practices? Over the course of the Archaeology of the Digital research program, the CCA has collected the archival records of twenty-five projects realized between the late 1980s and the early 2000s in order to understand this moment as a point of origin for the digital. But if we take care to identify the digital as a condition that is made possible by the conceptual foundations of digital media and not necessarily by digital media itself, the boundaries of the digital moment—when it began and under what circumstances—become less clear.

There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them in a chronology of responses to the question of when the digital is in architecture. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone to Archaeology of the Digital and the beginning of an investigation of other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

Asking a question like When is the digital in architecture? can produce eight million stories in response, and eight million digressions and redirections that narrow in focus and change geographies, producing a Tristram Shandy of the digital as the CCA continues to build its digital archive and makes it increasingly accessible to researchers. If this novel of digressions is distributed across future research projects and extended with studies of new archival material, so much the better for the reader, in our opinion. 

Edited by Andrew Goodhouse
Texts by Stan Allen, Phil Bernstein, Nathalie Bredella, Mario Carpo, Wolfgang Ernst, Marco Frascari, Peter Galison, Orit Halpern, Greg Lynn, Antoine Picon, Molly Wright Steenson, Bernard Tschumi, Mark Wigley, and Andrew Witt
Foreword by Mirko Zardini
Graphic design by Studio Katja Gretzinger

Published in 2017, in French as Quand le numérique marque-t-il l’architecture?
Co-published with Sternberg Press and with the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Softcover, 464 pages