Risky Business

The advent of post-industrial fabrication promises to simultaneously extend and compress of design practice and building production; thus the new economy produced by digital technology creates the potential for a new system of relations—a new ecology—for architectural practice. To date, many discussions of new design practices associated with post-industrial or digital fabrication have relied upon popular formulations of ‘market-driven’ economic models developed from industrial models of the firm. However, the new economies created by emerging production technologies create forms of realizing value distinct from the market relations described in these conventional models of business organization. The projective character of design practice, with its ability to work between the concrete and the abstract, the instrumental and the speculative, and the real and the virtual, actually achieves a more flexible and fertile model for understanding the new terrains for practice created by digital technologies. New heuristics, emerging simultaneously from economics and ecology, have the potential to engender more productive and robust relations between the practice of architecture and its markets.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2