Arquitectura Webde la reproducción a la producción en la era de internet

Abstract

This dissertation continues a line of research that assumes that media plays an important role in architectural design, for it determines the ways in which knowledge is transmitted among architects. Following this assumption, the dissertation studies the influence of the internet and the World Wide Web in contemporary architectural design, that is, a historical period that has witnessed the consolidation of these media as the paramount channels for the communication of architecture. In the last decades of the 20th century, the progressive incorporation of electronic technologies into all the spheres of material and cultural production resulted into major sociocultural shifts. In the field of architecture, these shifts were mirrored by the integration of the computer into all the spheres of production and distribution of the architectural work. Consequently, the computer became an important trigger of the most significant transformations that have defined architecture since the 1990s. These transformations have been widely studied from the perspective of computer aided design, that is, from the point of view of the computer as a design tool. However, the influence of the computer as a communication tool, especially since the universalization of the World Wide Web, has not been researched with the same intensity. As a result, the influence of this medium in the way architecture is conceived today remains largely unexplored from an academic standpoint. With the aim of filling this gap, the dissertation is structured into two parts that correspond with the two main objectives of this study. In the first half of the thesis, we investigate the adaptation of architectural communication to the World Wide Web since this medium went public in 1993. This research focuses on three distinct sectors: the publishing industry, including magazines and web platforms; the individual voices that have used this medium to develop new discursive practices; and, finally, architectural offices and their use of websites and social media. In the second half, we analyze a number of contemporary design strategies that have been developed in response to the way knowledge circulates online. Specifically, these strategies are related to three distinct ways of distributing and manipulating information typical of the web environment: memes, aggregators, and mashups.