Alise Upitis on the origins of CAD

Two architectures and the process of design

This week Alise Upitis will join us at the Forum. In her talk “Two architectures and the design process” she will discuss how post-war technological changes dramatically shaped conceptions of the design process. A great opportunity to understand the technological context -and the sensibility- that gave origin to the tools that define architectural and design practices today. Not to be missed!

Two architectures and the process of design.

This talk seeks to illuminate the technical details of how early computer architectures enabled and constrained the development of early computational tools for design and in turn how these tools conditioned how the process of design was conceived. It focuses on two trajectories in the development of digital computers, the TX series that developed at MIT out of Project Whirlwind and the IBM 700/7000 series, and two areas of computer-related research at MIT between WWII and 1964: computer graphics and architect Christopher Alexander’s computer programs for architectural design.

Mini-bio Alise Upitis is a Visiting Scholar in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology, where she is investigating new modes for understanding and disseminating archival productions surrounding time-based art. Alise received a PhD in Architecture: Design and Computation from MIT in 2008.

Image Credit

Diagram of Whirlwind I architecture. From Anonymous, Whirlwind I (Cambridge, MA: Electronic Computer Division, Servomechanisms Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951), 10-11.