ETHZ | D-ARCH | CAAD | About / Overview

CAAD - Chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design

Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt

We live in a post-digital world. The question whether analog or digital became marginal. Our thinking and acting are only in exceptional cases free from digital technologies. The symptoms of the digital world are however various and confusing. In this text I try to sort things out as an architect and engineer - not as a theoretician.

As a student of Fritz Haller - infrastructure (Hallers or Wachsmanns ‘Allgemeiner Knoten’) is the key-term of my research. Today two aspects are interesting:
Infrastructures become narrative. They are no longer neutral technical things, but become a multilayered stage, shown by the example of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg by Herzog & de Meuron. They are no longer realized in a linear fashion according to a given planning, but develop ' bottom up ' like the example of ‘Wikipedia’ shows.

Often our colleagues and us find ourselves accused of - fallen in love with technology - blindly wanting to invent a new architecture, which de facto would be worse than conventional architecture. This reproach does not apply! We explicitly follow the particularly concisely formulated conception by Marshall McLuhan (the medium is the message - 1964), that in course of the technical development, contents are not primarily changed, but their forms of representation. We are thus interested in the translation-process of architecture from the old into a new form of representation. We do not believe in the possibility of the invention of a new architecture. A house is a house is a house!