The Making of the Digital Avant-Garde: The Anglo-American Digital Avant-Garde Discourse in Architecture

In the 1990s, an Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse emerged in architecture. This discourse narrowly defined digital avant-gardism through a set of theoretical explorations and formal experimentations and popularized a narrative of a young generation of architects—mainly white male architects affiliated with Anglo-American institutions—leading the discipline into a new digital age. This discourse’s narratives have been widely circulated, documented, and reproduced and often presented, unqualified, as the story of the digital revolution or the digital turn in architecture. This dissertation defines the boundaries of this discourse, rooting it in an Anglo-American institutional context, and studies the cultural, economic, and disciplinary conditions and discursive constraints that led to its emergence and prominence. Instead of an avant-garde that challenges the status quo, the Anglo-American digital avant-garde was a product of the status quo of Anglo-American architectural culture. As this dissertation argues, unlike the historical avant-garde that has been defined through its movement against the institution, the Anglo-American digital avant-garde was an institutional construct. It was a concept that was devised by architectural publications, universities, and cultural institutions as a promotional and branding tool that allowed these institutions—through association with a vague notion of the “new” and “cutting edge”—to thrive in an increasingly competitive and privatized higher education market and architectural cultural industry. In its redefining of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde as an institutionally constructed concept instead of an architectural movement or revolution, this dissertation traces the emergence and development of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse, not in specific groups of architects or works of architecture, but in a series of institutional and discursive moments: the emergence of the discourse from within a US neo-avant-garde discourse in which high theory debates were prerequisite for avant-gardism, the publication of the Architectural Design special issue “Folding in Architecture” in 1993 and its subsequent branding as the manifesto for the digital avant-garde, Columbia University’s Paperless Studio experiment launched in 1994 and its branding as the birthplace of a new digital architectural style, and a number of publications and exhibitions that popularized and disseminated the discourse’s narratives such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Archaeology of the Digital project launched in 2013. Through its analysis of the discourse, rendering its boundaries visible, situating it with its institutional and regional context, and identifying its network of actors, this dissertation sheds light on the mechanisms of discourse-building and the cultural and disciplinary conditions that privileged the Anglo-American-affiliated architects and the narratives of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse and marginalized more diverse yet less publicity-driven digital discourses.

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