Ludger Hovestadt Livres

Treatise on digital architecture Hovestadt’s treatise strictly follows the model of the famous treatises by Vitruvius ( De architectura ) and Alberti ( De re aedificatoria ), based on the supposition that we find ourselves in a comparable situation today. Vitruvius and Alberti expressed the meaning of architecture in their Roman antiquity and the Renaissance. Hovestadt has done the same for the present day, incorporating considerations of physics, mathematics, technology, literature, and philosophy. Books 1 to 3 deal with the role of the architect and the objectivity of architecture. Books 4 to 6 address the modalities of speaking about and encoding the secret, the public, and the private. Books 7 to 10 are dedicated to actual digital artificial intelligence, natural communication, gnomonics, and cultural heritage.

Recent developments in computer science, particularly ”data-driven procedures“ have opened a new level of design and engineering. This has also affected architecture. The publication collects contributions on Coding as Literacy by computer scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, cultural theorists, and architects. The main focus in the book is the observation of computer-based methods that go beyond strictly case-based or problem-solution-oriented paradigms. This invites readers to understand Computational Procedures as being embedded in an overarching ”media literacy“ that can be revealed through, and acquired by, ”computational literacy“, and to consider the data processed in the above-mentioned methods as being beneficial in terms of quantum physics. ”Self-Organizing Maps“ (SOM), which were first introduced over 30 years ago, will serve as the concrete reference point for all further discussions.

Professor Ludger Hovestadt’s Institute for Computer-Aided Architectural Design at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) is widely regarded as one of the world’s most important institutes currently working at the interface between architecture and information technology. The combination of these two makes it possible to see architecture no longer as a separate sphere of technological reality but rather as one element of a society based on information technology. As a universal tool, the computer encourages one to think in terms of information structures and systems that span individual fields. This "rethinking" of the nature of architecture is leading to a paradigm shift at the methodological level of design, planning, construction, and economy. After a decade of experimentation, it has now become possible to see information technology for architecture as the basis for a new and energy-saving practical approach to building. This publication presents the work of the chair for CAAD using numerous examples – from the spectacular Monte Rosa Alpine hut of Andrea Deplazes to the residential development of KCAP.

“SHEAVES” will not describe anything. It will not judge. It will inspire. There are no continuous texts, but a wide range of topics. How to read this book? Take the notions seriously. Search the Internet and they will lose their generalness. They will begin to speak to you vividly. Bundle these riches with the riches of other notions and they will activate each other. Also take the pictures seriously. Photograph or scan them. Use them as an index, while searching the Internet. Again, you will find rich stories. Bundle those riches, concentrate them into new identities that are interesting to you. Let yourself be inspired by the intellectual wealth of our world. You can expand it. It is an exciting adventure, demanding and optimistic.

A path out of the technological and economical excesses in contemporary architecture:A book on research and education in architecture and information technology, conceived of as philosophical interplay between two species similar in kind. The one 2500 years old and dignified, the other just 50 years of age and impatient.

Symbolizing existence deals with the current rapidly happening "deterritorialization" of everything which was once regarded stable and binding. What we today regard as statistically encoded information is capable to explicate and index the entire realm of what can be expressed and represented through a cascade of geometrical, functional, or finally logified schemes. We are currently experiencing a rapid loss of "grounding" of that which we once considered binding in our cultural and intellectual history. How can we obtain an articulate, cultivate way of thinking about "instances" that does not fall back into a schematic model Platonism (thereby falling behind Plato), and that does not remain enmeshed in an Aristotelian realization dynamics with a naturalism organized by original genus, kinds, and specific marks of distinction? The central phenomenon considered was the technological process of doping material: At the quantum level, a particle or its representation, the point, is no longer "that which has no parts" (Euclid)