The activities of DEDICATE are coming to a conclusion and we are approaching the last initiative of this project – a seminar aimed at discussing the issues and initiatives related to the Information Management of the Built Environment related data. This event will try to present the diverse operative and disciplinary approaches to the curation of the digital information concerning Architecture to demonstrate the cultural and technical convergence of the initiatives in this field and propose a common agenda to tackle both its shared problems and its discipline specific issues.

Are solutions at the intersections between domains?

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From the 7th of May to the 13th of October, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) hosts the exhibition "On the Archaeology of the Digital" curated by Greg Lynn, a prominent figure in the sectors of the Digital Design and the CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) manufacturing. This exhibition is dedicated to the early implementations of digital design workflows through the example of four projects conceived between the late 80s and the early 90s - Eisenman's Biozentrum, Gehry's Lewis Residence, Chuck Haberman's Iris Dome and Shoei Yoh's Galaxy Toyama Gymansium.

In the video introduction to the exhibition, Greg Lynn explains the exhibition is addressing the early applications of CAD to balance the apparently common bias towards a futuristic interpretation of Design computing applications with an insight into the cultural evolution of Digital Architecture, that he defines a "not-inevitable" development.

Mattew Allen wrote in Domus reviewing the exhibition that to fulfil this mission the curator proposes an interesting but somehow autobiographic ontology of digital materials that in their display fall short of visitors' expectations because of the limited functionalities offered to observe the original CAD models - "given that the process of digital production is so easily reproduced (compared to, say, painting), interactivity could probably have been taken further" than simple geometry visualisation. This latter remark is a good example of the cultural impact of the curation of CAD data: semantic annotations and parametric constraints of the models document the design process, its aesthetic and ideological content as much as its geometry.

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