Architecture is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called
imaging. Yet the technical status and nature of that imaging must be
reevaluated. What happens to the architectural mind when it stops
pretending that electronic images of drawings made by computers are
drawings? When it finally admits that imaging is not drawing, but is
instead something that has already obliterated drawing? These are
questions that, in general, architecture has scarcely begun to pose,
imagining that somehow its ideas and practices can resist the culture of
imaging in which the rest of life now either swims or drowns. To
patiently describe the world to oneself is to prepare the ground for an
as yet unavailable politics. New descriptions can, under the right
circumstances, be made to serve as the raw substrate for political
impulses that cannot yet be expressed or lived, because their
preconditions have not been arranged and articulated.
*Signal. Image. Architecture.* aims to clarify the status of
computational images in contemporary architectural thought and practice
by showing what happens if the technical basis of architecture is
examined very closely, if its technical terms and concepts are taken
very seriously, at times even literally. It is not a theory of
architectural images, but rather a brief philosophical description of
architecture after imaging.
