title: The Architectural Trait. Lineages of the computational project of continuity
Creators: name: Font Vacas, Anna
Publisher: name: The Open University
Year: 2024

description: <i>The Architectural Trait</i> is the study and activation of pieces of architecture that constitute forms of continuity in building organisations. These units of intelligence, or traits, are the medium of analysis and projection of an investigation that inquiries into the culture of computation as it emerged in the 1990s. A period not yet fully historised given its relative chronological proximity, the thesis unpacks the phenomenon tendentiously overwritten under the rubric of the <i>digital</i>, to propose an alternative reading of the meaning of the early computational practices in architecture and through this, to project them back into the present in a new form.
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From the study of the period between 1993 and 2003—marked by the first and second edition of the Architectural Design magazine’s ‘Folding in Architecture’ issue—the thesis proceeds to unearth the implicit principles of a culture that had exhausted its foundational terms only a decade after its appearance and rapid proliferation. The study of publications is complemented by the construction of an archive of materials, which helps to synthetise and activate the vitality of lines of work prior to the post-theorisation and progressive 
 commodification of stylistic approaches in the field. With the attention placed on the experimentation carried on in academic contexts, studio briefs and student work become the platform for a different programmatic approximation to the culture of complexity.
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In the construction of this critical affirmative outlook, the transition from the notion of <i>fold</i> to the concept of <i>trait</i> constitutes the underground infrastructure of the thesis, anchoring the proposal on the imperative shift from the formalist, syntactic and expressionist readings of the impact and influence of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy in architecture into an uncompromisingly organizational one. This involves a fundamental change of focus from the interest in the design of formally creative procedures to a concentration on the strategic capabilities of organisational <i>assemblages</i>, that is, from formal representation in search of expression to organisational operativity and problems of integration.
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The drive towards integration—both conceptual and material—embedded in the quintessential computational trope of the <i>continuous surface</i> articulates, in this context, the two parts of the thesis. The first part, <i>Cultural Assemblage</i>, brings forward aspects that mobilise the project of computation beyond form-finding and fabrication through the de-naturalisation of fixed notions of type and program and the dismantling of stereotypical architectural dichotomies (public-private, interior-exterior). The second part, Trait Lineage, presents
a process of conceptualisation and activation of organizational singularities in
buildings in a transhistorical manner, resetting the lineages of the continuous
surface through a method of analysis, classification, and projection.