Breakthroughs for Architecture in Software & Software (Culture) in Architecture

Idea by

kaman lam

Puriverse

Grossheidestrasse 20, Hamburg, Germany

Kaman Lam is an architectural and transdisciplinary designer and programmer who surveys the expanded field among architecture and situated technologies. She received her master degrees in Media Architecture from Bauhaus-University Weimar and State University of New York at Buffalo. Her transdisciplinary approach has brought her into collaboration with computer scientists and more, with a goal to question architecture’s place amid technological acceleration and environmental breakdown.

Call for ideas 2020

A knowledge transfer between Software and Architecture should be reintroduced following breakthroughs in 1970s, by adapting to immersive version control (variation of Github) and an open culture of the digital.

# Technology

Systemic changes

Architectural thinking was once the force behind major breakthroughs in the software landscape— when Cunningham and Beck discovered Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language, they saw an insight that could be transferred to possible forms of software technology: modularity, hierarchies of structures, scalability, assembly, system sets. Today, Architecture must reinvent itself too through learning from Software.

This research proposes technical analysis of Software Culture today and a next-generation software to promote general acceptance of systemic, open-source architectural maintenance. Could we imagine an open-source GIT version control for the built environment? For example: in ways similar to how codes are shared but data monetized, grant open-access to architectural innovations, modularize them, situate them in context (through AR), and monetize implementation and physical labor only. In so doing, this proposal aims to provoke architectural disciplines into reinvention.