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TAD Journal is a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in the field of building technology and its translation, integration, and impact on architecture and design.
View submission guidelines for our next issue or explore past calls for papers. The TAD Journal editorial board reviews all work submitted for consideration.
Vol. 11, Issue 1: Biogenic
Deadline: June 15, 2026
Submissions: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tadjournal
The upcoming issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) welcomes submissions addressing new and original research on architecture, design, and technology. The journal now welcomes research or scholarship on the topic of this call for papers or open topics on a rolling submission basis. We will consider all submissions for this or an upcoming issue.
Biogenic materials—renewable, biodegradable materials made by living organisms and/or composed from organic matter—have become a prominent research topic in architecture, design, engineering, and construction. From the microscopic scale of bacterial cell factories to the vast landscapes of regenerative land use, they offer a unique opportunity to shift toward a circular, resilient, and carbon-negative built environment.
The focus area for this issue of TAD ventures into the territory of biobased, bioorganic, bio-fabricated, and regenerative materials and their applications in the design and construction of environmentally sound, livable, healthy, and socially just built environments. It targets the full spectrum of biogenic materials—from traditional yet reimagined resources such as timber, hemp, straw, bamboo, cork, and flax to novel and emerging solutions including bio-composites, engineered living materials, bio-fabricated systems, and materials recovered from organic industrial by-products and post-consumer waste. We welcome contributions that address materials intended for standalone structures, as well as those designed to be interfaced and integrated with existing material, architectural, cultural, and historical contexts, particularly in areas such as preservation, maintenance, renovation, repair, and care of existing building parts, structures, and entire spaces.
Along with exploring architectural uses of biogenic, living, plant-based, and other renewable materials, this issue aims to showcase research across various related scales and fields: from laboratory material science, through testing and prototyping of building components and assemblies, to the actual construction of buildings and the development of new resource flows across cities, landscapes, and territories. It also seeks to critically analyze bioorganic materials within broader contexts of circularity and digitization, and to investigate the shifts and transitions, in mindsets, practices, legislation, user preferences, behaviors, material flows, life cycles, and market dynamics, that are essential for the full integration of biogenic materials in the built environment.
Topics of interest are extensive and include historical and theoretical views relevant to the contemporary shift toward biogenic, renewable, and resource-efficient material systems; current realities, opportunities, and challenges; and future projections, visions, and scenarios. Cross-disciplinary efforts spanning architecture, design, life sciences, biology, chemistry, materials engineering, industrial ecology, environmental sciences, and other related fields are encouraged, including those aimed at synthesizing, creating, exploring, validating, and implementing novel biogenic materials for a resilient, decarbonized future. The goal is to position, expand, reimagine, and challenge biogenic solutions in architecture and design.
The editors strongly encourage submissions from individual or multiple authors with related work, including those that demonstrate contributions from underrepresented groups in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2026. All manuscripts are double-blind peer-reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
Vol. 10, Issue 2
To Be Published November 2027
The upcoming TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) issue invites original submissions that interrogate the roles of soil—earth, mud, dirt, clay, loam, sediment, strata—as both material and ecosystem within the architectural sciences and design technology practices. This issue invites inquiry into soil not as backdrop but as an active thread in shaping form, structure, living habitat, and community. Soil is neither inert nor empty. It is a charged and living substrate that, materially and figuratively, underpins architecture. It is where gravitation meets structure, extraction meets economy, and permanence meets decay. Soil is a medium of transformation: chemical, cultural, and political. Soil supports and resists–shaped by forces of compaction and combustion, microbial life, and industrial processes. Elizabeth Povinelli writes, “Industrial toxicity makes it more difficult for rivers, winds, soil, mineral, and rock formations to maintain their shape and substance.” How can architecture help understand and act upon these shape-shifting substrates in critical, ethical, and innovative ways?
We invite work that frames technology as a bridge across cognate disciplines: from material science and structural design to environmental performance, ethical positioning in technology, and other related areas in design and technology within building, landscape, and urban domains. We highlight architecture’s role in engaging soil as a geotechnical concern and a living ecology with socio-political resonance. In this, we ask to metaphorically follow Astrida Neimanis’ proposition of a “moist soil that holds and grows the seed,” recognizing soil’s generative and gestational capacities across species and systems. We invite contributors to reflect on disciplinary boundaries, methods, and material imaginaries. Contributors are encouraged to expand architectural design and technology by critically examining soil’s agency, temporality, and potential—installation, algorithm, fabrication methodology, policy, or prototype.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: architectural technology and its large-scale impact on soil ecologies; geotechnical, biological, and political entanglements of soil within architectural design; soil as a material of architecture: compressed, cast, cut, or printed; earth-fiber assemblies, carbon-storing, nontoxic, and minimally-processed material techniques; structural design of soil assemblies and their variance; climate resiliency, erosion, and the politics of land use; the role of soil in environmental design education and pedagogy; Intersections of architectural technology with geoscience, chemistry, or agronomy; demilitarizing soils and architectures of displacement and remediation; landscape, terrain, territory, and urban/rural/natural land use; standards, codes, and regulation for soil-based construction; philosophical and scientific frames for understanding soil in built environments. We welcome contributions that challenge paradigms of stewardship by proposing more entangled, situated, or collective approaches. The editors seek submissions representing diverse voices, practices, geographies, and perspectives. As such, we affirm the value of architecture’s capacity to act as both a site and method for dialogue across knowledge systems.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on January 15, 2026. All manuscripts are double-blind peer reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
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(1) E.A. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 52.
(2) A. Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 3.
Vol. 10, Issue 1
To Be Published May 2026
Our world is increasingly interconnecting. By 2030, more than 90% of the world’s population and more than 50% of its physical infrastructure will be wirelessly linked through the internet, enabling people, objects, and places to interact with each other in virtually any conceivable way. Yet, the more accessible our environment becomes, the easier we overuse and consume it. The more we command the environment digitally, the more our conflicting needs and wants turn our collective use of it into an increasingly complex political issue that technology alone cannot resolve. One of our most significant challenges in the next decade will be to design and build environments that can turn diverse individualistic perspectives into ecologies of sustainable and equitable behavior while negotiating critically the boundary between the physical and the digital.
The upcoming issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN invites contributions in design, computing, informatics, human-computer interaction, ecology, systems thinking, history, and computational social science that advance the disciplines of architecture and urbanism through the following questions. What makes architectural space intelligent, and how does this definition change as scale increases from the individual to the collective? How might we design networked environments that enable the seamless availability, distribution, and use of shared resources in circular, sustainable, and equitable ways? What conditions induce cooperation across diverse social groups, and how can such conditions be designed and sustained in architectural terms? How can our built environment mediate interactions between people, objects, and places more critically and meaningfully? How might artificial intelligence (AI) facilitate social interactions toward more synergistic, sustainable outcomes? What tools, skills, and disciplinary knowledge should Architecture in an interconnected world have, and how should our pedagogical models evolve to cultivate them?
Topics for this submission may include but are not limited to innovative applied and scholarly research on shared models of urban intelligence, their design traits and limitations; design projects on networked human-computer interfaces for collective interactions; data-driven simulation studies on urban resource allocation networks; aesthetic projects on technologically augmented public engagement; case studies on current sociotechnical systems and their design characteristics; historical perspectives on the relationship between information technologies, urban operations, and planning specifications. The editors strongly encourage submissions highlighting contributions from those traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2025. All manuscripts are double-blind peer-reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at https://tadjournal.org/author-guide/.
TAD Vol. 9, Issue 2
To Be Published November 2026
The upcoming issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) welcomes submissions addressing new and original research on architecture, design, and technology. The journal now welcomes research or scholarship for the topic of this call for papers or open topics on a rolling submission basis. We will consider all submissions for this or an upcoming issue.
The focus area for this issue seeks to explore inventive topics from different aspects of the built environment. Innovation captures new ideas, methods, strategies, products, forms, designs, etc. Innovation is the action or process of innovating, introducing, or presenting novelties and modifying what is established by introducing new elements or forms. It is a change introduced to an existing product. Imaginative ideas include improvements that capture how components or processes are modified or configured in designs, systems, or domains, like building materials, data processing, digital fabrication, computation, history and theory of innovation. Innovation is critical to the success of any endeavor, such as an organization, enterprise, field or discipline, or industry. Invention is the primary driver of advancement in the built environment and other sectors, as it provides approaches, resources, and concepts generated and realized, leading to a better and more sustainable built environment. Invention guides all disciplines, and inventive ideas involve various players with diverse incentives.
The current issue seeks submissions that provide thoughtful and rigorous approaches to answer innovation-related questions and experiments. The issue seeks submissions that cover a broad range of topics in architecture. The journal seeks submissions that capture work on inventive renewable technologies and materials, innovations in sustainability, adaptive reuse, history and theories of innovation in the field, sustainable building strategies, systems, smart metering, sensing, monitoring, digital innovations, patents, advanced methods of data sharing, documentation, and interpretation of big data, application of digital twin and new technologies in the built environment to name a few.
Authors may address the following questions, but they can be broader than these areas. How do we approach and manage imaginative ideas? What is the notion of challenging or rethinking the concept of innovation in our discipline? When is it desirable? When can our actions or attitudes of privileging novelty over long-standing practices impact inventive ideas? What technological innovations save energy consumption in the built environment? How have innovations improved building performance, thermal comfort, satisfaction, and energy efficiency? What are the innovative strategies adopted to enhance various aspects of building performance? What are the historical trends of innovation witnessed in the built environment over the last decades? How has it influenced investigations on sustainable built environment, energy efficiency, low-carbon building envelopes, affordable housing, modeling and optimization, post-occupancy evaluation, field measurements, and environmental monitoring of indoor and outdoor thermal environments? How have regulations and policies shaped innovation? What strategies could industry, practice, and academia employ to foster and nurture innovation in the built environment? Are there any lessons we can learn from work on inventive studies? How do we see the future of innovation and its associated risks?
The editors strongly encourage submissions by individual or multiple authors with related work, including those demonstrating contributions from underrepresented groups in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 15, 2025. All manuscripts are double-blind peer-reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at https://tadjournal.org/author-guide/.
Vol. 9, Issue 1
Published May 2025
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have demonstrated the ability to create novel works (e.g., texts, images, and sounds) indistinguishable from those of human authors in fractions of a second. The ramifications of these emerging technologies for the allied design fields are profound and present a unique opportunity for the critical appraisal of how the design disciplines might move forward in the face of technological change that strikes at the heart of what it means to be a creative agent. How might generative systems augment and empower human agency, intelligence, and imagination in design? How can they be used to meet the challenges posed by resource scarcity, pollution, and climate change through sustainable design? How can they be applied in transformative ways to improve design education? What processes and policies can be developed to ensure their humane and ethical use? TAD invites manuscripts that critically examine the potential and impacts of generative systems and technologies in design education, research, and practice.
In design practice and education today, technologies infuse the design process across all stages of project development. Computer-aided design tools allow design problems to be explored in ways that impact human cognition and augment its capabilities. The emergence of generative AI technologies capable of human-like writing and image creation has the potential to supercharge these impacts – opening the door to new modes of knowledge and design creation and a host of new problems. Current generative AI technologies are built on massive amounts of curated data that can infringe on intellectual property and promulgate biases. These generative systems also problematize notions of authorship and responsibility, posing new legal and ethical questions. Therefore, the development and application of these systems in the design disciplines must be carefully considered from various perspectives to foster their humane and ethical use.
Topics for this submission may include but are not limited to the development, application, and role of generative processes and technologies in the design of the built environment across multiple scales; innovative applications in materials, fabrication, and construction; assessing the impacts of artificial and augmented intelligence on design cognition; innovative applications in design education; processes and methods for the critical curation of data; issues of authorship and intellectual property in the use of generative systems; the development of policies for their ethical use in education, research, and professional contexts; and the critical analysis of their historical, social, cultural, and economic impacts. The editors strongly encourage submissions highlighting contributions of women, minorities, and other people traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2024. All manuscripts are double-blind peer-reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
Vol. 8, Issue 2
Published November 2024
Replace the gerund with the verb and coding’s architectural connotations break through. Complying with regulatory frameworks – being “to code” – is a precondition for building; for leaving the drawing board and acquiring material flesh. Writers, enactors, and enforcers of building codes negotiate the bounds of what buildings and cities can and should be within conflictual landscapes of neoliberal capitalism, political lobbying, and social and environmental crises. Coding both engenders and delimits architectural possibility through constraints, rules, minima, and maxima, that designers and architects absorb, at times begrudgingly, through curricula, licensure, and professional practice. Coding also ignites activist and speculative projects that seek to reimagine these regulatory frameworks’ protocols and sociopolitical allegiances.
Constraints and constrictions of architectural possibility also penetrate architectural practices and pedagogies through codes of another kind. Computer codes underlie the software environments in which architects habitually imagine, draw, calculate, communicate, and market architecture. Codified descriptions of shapes, codices of building components, encodings of equations for computer modelling and simulations, and, more recently, codes that turn noise into intelligible images regiment design actions, delimit perceptual possibilities, affect decision-making, and broker relationships between architecture, the industry, and technoculture. Coding, in this context, becomes a question of architects’ agency on the informational infrastructures that undergird their creative labor and, to follow Eugene Thacker and Alexander Galloway, circumscribe architecture’s “forms of communicability.”
And while the dematerialization of architecture into shareable and remixable “source codes” ignites visions of open and participative practices, critical perspectives on coding as subservient to logics of colonialism, technocracy, and universalism raise troubling questions of power and sovereignty. Yet, the potential for emancipatory futures within the ever-diffuse omnipresence of codes renders the critical contemplation of coding as a practical political project.
TAD invites contributions that interrogate the complex milieu of coding in architecture and design through research, scholarship, and critical practice. We are interested in historical perspectives on architects’ role in the construction and hacking of building and computer codes, in activist practices overhauling legislative and informatic regulatory regimes in history and in the present, in critical contemplations on how the metaphor of code –as a linguistic or informational concept– has infused architectural discourse and practice, in applied research on coding in design and making, especially geared toward positive, transformative social and climate action.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 15, 2024. All manuscripts are double-blind peer-reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
Vol. 8, Issue 1
Published April 2024
The upcoming issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) seeks submissions that explore and better define the roles of architecture, design, and technology in meeting the challenges facing our communities from current and forecasted changes in climate. Climate change continues to be a major problem facing our communities worldwide. In what way does climate change affect our understanding of the role of architecture and technology within our communities? How can we better define the role of architecture and technology in addressing climate change? How can we prepare for a future with more extreme climate conditions and the associated socioeconomic and political problems? Can architecture take a leadership role in transforming the built environment from part of the problem to part of the solution? How can we change the current value system that rewards aesthetics over performance and environmental impact? Is architectural education providing future architects with the values, knowledge, and skillsets needed to tackle climate change effectively?
Recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continue to emphasize both the role played by the built environment in causing climate change, as well as the considerable potential offered by innovative and forward-looking designs of systems, buildings and cities in achieving the dual objectives of climate change mitigation and adaptation [1] [2] . Effective responses to climate change are not limited to those addressing the environmental performance of buildings and communities. They must also understand the socio-economic, cultural, and political performances associated with these buildings and communities. These responses also need to extend beyond individual solutions and identify the needed systemic changes in education and practice, which will allow for achieving the large-scale impacts required to effectively meet the current magnitude of the climate challenges we face.
Topics for this issue may include but are not limited to: critical perspectives on the role of architecture and technology in addressing climate change, innovative responses to climate change at the materials, systems, buildings, and city scales; the role of technology in enabling innovative solutions in both mitigation and adaptation; increasing climate resiliency at different scales; innovative pedagogical approaches to integrating climate change into architectural curricula; assessment and optimization of the environmental impacts of the built environment; design-decision-support technologies; regenerative architecture; policies and standards needed to enable more innovative responses and solutions; and effective integration of environmental issues into design processes. The editors strongly encourage submissions highlighting contributions of women, minorities, and others traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2023. All manuscripts are double-blind peer reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
[1] IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [P.R. Shukla, et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
[2] IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Published November 2023
Submissions: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tadjournal
For its upcoming issue, TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN seeks submissions exploring the nexus between technology and the re-utilization of materials and components in the built environment. The construction industry is a prominent contributor to carbon emissions worldwide. Reducing carbon emissions demands an urgent recalibration of resource consumption patterns. Design, manufacturing, and data technologies play a meaningful role in this transition. How does technology enable the detection and tracking of reuse-bound components in buildings? Can educated design interventions extend the service lifespan of existing buildings? How do technology and design guide the successful removal and redeployment of materials from buildings? How can technology aid anticipatory measures like a design for deconstruction? TAD welcomes manuscripts that define and analyze the connections, overlaps, and reciprocal impacts between design, technology, and re-utilization in the past, present, and future of construction.
Today, technology informs re-utilization not only at the end-of-use of buildings but throughout their entire life cycle and at multiple scales. Recovery-oriented design approaches that involve responsible extraction and processing practices, as well as resource-efficient production and deployment – all contribute to reduced consumption and greater circularity. Similarly, reuse and other forms of recovery are not limited to single buildings; they can also occur at the district, urban and regional levels. Each level necessitates technological solutions that allow data gathering, analysis, and management of material flows and stocks, and their sorting, remanufacture, and reintegration. Alongside its physical and technical dimensions, reuse has societal implications that tie to the act of defining, reinforcing, and evolving a community’s identity by documenting, repairing, dismantling, or repurposing its building stock. Such aspects suggest that implementing circularity in the built environment entails research into a diverse set of considerations.
Topics for this submission may include but are not limited to: the role of technology in facilitating circularity in buildings, cities, and landscapes; implementation of academic research on technology for re-utilization in professional practice; the history of material reuse from a technological standpoint; social and cultural facets of circular economy in the built environment; the evolving notion of materiality in circular scenarios; and insights gained from technology-aided applications of reuse at a building or city scale. The editors strongly encourage submissions that highlight contributions of women, minorities, and other people traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the field.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for the Circularity. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. Manuscripts for double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 15, 2023. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
Published April 2023
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN welcomes all original research in the fields of technology, architecture, and design. Submissions may choose to address the focus area identified in this call for papers but are not required to do so. All submissions are reviewed through a double-blind peer-review process with subject experts.
Changing performance criteria and evolving digital technologies contribute to the transformation of design mechanisms and question the logic of construction across all scales. The continuing digitalization of design, fabrication, and construction suggests a changing investigation of architectural tectonics, identifying updated frameworks that define the contemporary role not only of structures and their details but of all processes and supply chains involved. What are the driving and formative forces behind tectonics?
The impact of climate change adds further urgency to an evaluation of design approaches and outcomes, material use, forces at play, technology, and data involved. The concept of tectonics offered a valuable framework for linking craftsmanship and cultural narrative with constructive principles in architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Initially based on a largely mechanical world view, embedded in the principles of mass production and standardization of early industrialization, the discourse around tectonics expands in the twenty-first century to (re)consider the role of making and form, involving the impact of digital processes, advanced technologies, techniques, and media, examining new categories of materials, and addressing architecture through the lens of the Anthropocene.
Digital fabrication methods result in revised understandings of materiality and structural textures expected by traditional craftsmanship or industrialized production. These emerging tools lead to specific geometries and narratives – their reading needs to be better understood. The historic understanding of tectonics focused on the articulation of the joint and its related layers. Innovative materials and systems of assembly change the constructive mechanisms and visualization of forces that were formerly suitable for masonry and carpentry. The structure might no longer be the dominant force leading to architectural form and articulation – which other forces are at play and what is their impact?
The Tectonics issue investigates the intersection of structure and construction, together with the emerging research in intelligent buildings, building and material science (biomaterials, composites, assemblies), architectural kinetics, mass customization, and parametrically-driven digital fabrication and simulation. TAD is promoting research that redefines/deconceptualizes ways architecture and construction address the diverse technological, cultural, economic, and ecological imperatives of our times.
TAD invites original research manuscripts for consideration in the Tectonics issue. Manuscripts that relate to the focus area of “tectonics” are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2022. All other contributions can take advantage of TAD’s rolling submissions and be submitted at any time. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide available at TADjournal.org. TAD receives all manuscript submissions electronically through a ScholarOne Manuscripts portal located at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/TADJournal.
Published November 2022
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN welcomes all original research within our scope. All peer-reviewed manuscripts submitted to this call will be evaluated and selected with consideration of the issue theme. Submissions may choose to address the focus area identified in this call for papers, but it is not required for publication in the issue. All submissions to calls for papers are reviewed through a double-blind peer-review process with subject experts.
Just as developing an ability to design is not exclusive to designers, neither is the ability to engineer within the exclusive purview of engineers. AEC is a common acronym for signaling the three professional disciplines historically responsible for shaping the built environment. Such nomenclature may imply a systemic culture of siloed decision-making. However, decisions shaping the built environment do not originate and reside wholly within discipline-specific boundaries. Today, whether focused on a discrete intervention or a grand challenge, an effective agency within the built environment requires the cross-disciplining of skill sets for use across the phases of project conception, development, and execution.
Engineering asserts the most significant advances in architectural technology are not achieved through any singular disciplinary practice, but rather through the hybridization of design and engineering action combined. Legacy differences between their epistemological perspectives and methodological approaches to research are becoming less distinct for improved engagement with twenty-first century design problems. Although each discipline is constituted by their respective bodies of knowledge and individual standards for practice, contesting the separation between architecture and engineering opens a space for the reciprocal thinking and integrated operations necessary for breakthrough technological innovation. Further study of the dynamics within this disciplinary fusion is valuable for reconsidering the framing of current architectural research, pedagogy, and practice.
Engineering seeks to attract, curate, and forge a combined body of knowledge shaping the built environment from a more action-integrated perspective. Questions include but are not limited to: What are the catalysts and constraints affecting greater integration across architectural and engineering processes? What are the attributes of high-performing integrated design teams? Which features of engineering research ecosystems or architectural design culture are suitable for emulation by collateral disciplines? How are integrated curricula today nurturing meaningful and productive interdisciplinary action between tomorrow’s architecture and engineering professionals? Which state-of-the-art engineering practices are enhancing the built environment to meet twenty-first century challenges?
TAD invites original and creative research manuscripts for consideration in the Engineering issue. Manuscripts for double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 15, 2022, and can be submitted any time before this date. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide.TAD receives all manuscript submissions electronically through a ScholarOne Manuscripts portal located at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/TADJournal.
Published April 2022
For its upcoming issue, TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN seeks submissions exploring the multivalent relationships between technology and the history of the built environment. How are new technologies transforming historical research? How are practitioners and researchers utilizing technology to advance historic preservation, restoration, and archival practices? How have technological successes and failures shaped the evolution of architecture, landscapes, and cities around the globe? TAD welcomes manuscripts that define and analyze the connections, overlaps, and reciprocal impacts that occur between technology and history in any time period and at various scales. The editors strongly encourage submissions that highlight contributions of women, minorities, and other people traditionally excluded or underrepresented in the histories of technology, architecture, and design.
We find inflection points in the history of architecture, engineering, and construction when the invention or modification of technologies significantly shifted the trajectory of each discipline; we observe translations of technology from one field to another, and we see how technologies can facilitate new ways of understanding and analyzing the built environment. The history of architecture as technology is not limited to the study of physical objects such as buildings, materials, or tools, and their effects; it also illuminates the culture of technology—how it is developed, engaged, adopted, critiqued, restricted, or transformed by a diverse set of protagonists, including designers, engineers, governmental bodies, fabricators, contractors, and building users. Such research reveals the deep interconnections between social structures and building/construction technology.
Today, technology enables new research modes and methodologies in history and historic preservation. LiDAR and advanced sensor technologies are used to discover otherwise concealed information about past civilizations and forgotten communities. 3D scanning and GIS data facilitate research capacity for documenting and analyzing historically significant structures and sites. Virtual and augmented realities allow new forms of engagement with historic places. Traditional research methods in historical research continue to yield new insights as well. Through the study of archival collections, including technical material/product data, codes, specifications, project files, and construction documents, historians are theorizing new connections between the social, cultural, and technological contexts of designing and building in various cultures across multiple timeframes.
Topics for submission may include but are not limited to: the development of technologies that facilitate innovative forms of historical research; the role of technologies in shaping our understanding of the history of buildings, cities, and landscapes; the evolution of design, engineering, and construction techniques and tools; technology-related transformations of professional roles in the fields of design and construction; and insights gained through historical research about how and why people build.
TAD invites original and creative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for consideration in the upcoming Histories issue. While contributions focused on the issue theme are encouraged, all papers that meet the TAD mission statement will be considered. Manuscripts for double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2021. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org. TAD receives all manuscript submissions electronically via its ScholarOne Manuscripts portal located at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/TADJournal.
Published November 2021
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites submissions of original research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for consideration in the upcoming Intelligence issue.
Intelligence resides between sensing and acting. Intelligence, through data-driven technology and virtual experimentation, drives the capacity and catalyzes learning, understanding, and applying knowledge through tacit, explicit, haptic, visual, human, and artificial forms. Through this broad understanding, intelligence need not be future-focused. For instance, indigenous science, biomimetics, and the complex intelligence inherent to informal settlements can inform artificial intelligence (AI) through robotic-assisted manufacturing, machine manipulation, and iterative, modification-based approaches in design. While these processes relinquish some agency to machines, they can also establish creative synergy for designers, ultimately enabling more responsive and responsible built environments.
Intelligence seeks current and emerging research on building automation, smart systems, user-driven design optimization, design recommendation tools, deep learning, design optimization, generative design, spatial reasoning, cognitive modeling, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), planning, mixed reality, and ethics that rigorously examine the role intelligence can play in the built environment. Emerging fields related to human-machine interaction (HMI), sensor networks, and knowledge representation use artificial intelligence with augmented reality to engage the built environment across scales and fidelities, from smart cities to intelligent materials, from the experimental to the constructed. As machine learning and smart materials intersect with the architectural practice, designers increasingly use sensors to harvest post-occupancy data on building performance and users. How is this data utilized to improve occupants’ safety and well-being or reduce the impact of buildings on the environment? Through intelligence, architects, planners, and engineers turn to “big data” to address global issues and evaluate the impact their designs have on society.
Intelligence invites research investigating how intelligence expands practice (prototypes and workflows) and redefines design agency—who, what, and why—and contributes to the development of new knowledge. Investigations into surveillance and teleoperation seamlessly weave simulation, calibration, and optimization, impacting users across scales. Used ethically, interdisciplinary research in robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and human cognition can improve design and advance the human condition. However, rapid advances in technology require skepticism and caution, as well as the articulation and integration into our collective behavior to inform new policies, principles, and processes. Intelligence encourages contributions that question how these technologies reframe the efficiency of intelligent design and interrogate its ethical impact in the built environment.
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites original and creative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for consideration in the upcoming Intelligence issue. While contributions focused on the theme of the issue are encouraged, all papers that meet the TAD mission statement will be considered. Manuscripts for the double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 15, 2021, at TADjournal.org. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide.
Published April 2021
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites submissions of original research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students for consideration in the upcoming OPEN issue.
Research methods are a developing area of interest in the built environment and OPEN to discussion. Methods are part of our intellectual, social, and institutional contexts. Methodological choice often relates to the philosophical position of the researcher and the phenomenon under analysis. This is to say, closer consideration tells us that methods can be distinct from the aims and products of the research, such as prediction and knowledge. Methods are also different from the epistemic communities that inform the values and justifications of the research aims, such as reproducibility or objectivity and the use of a specific method or its evaluation. Methods cannot wholly be derived from the places, problems, phenomena, disciplines, technologies or conventions, and professional habits associated with research; there is a specific, rather than general integrity of methods based on the practices of the researcher, the place, and the type of research being done.
The practices associated with the development of built environments do not historically demand methodological consideration, for example: applied design as an investigation is open-ended with few strategies for how to do systematically structured research before, during, or after completion of a built project. Evidence-based design borrows methods from the social sciences, historical research from the humanities, and correlational research from engineering. In order to test current methods and develop new methodological approaches from within architecture, we point to distinctions between protocols, processes, practices, and contexts to clarify the differences between various methods in architecture research. The challenge is to determine what methodological approaches to research inform the processes undertaken by researchers in a wide variety of applications to the built environment.
We are interested in methodological approaches, outcomes, challenges, theories, and limitations in fields focused on the built environment. What are the methods best used in your research of the built environment, and why? What research methods or strategies are you using to implement practices over time? What are the meta-methodologies informing your research? What do you see as the most effective methods for specific types of research in the built environment? This OPEN issue asks researchers across architecture and related subfields to share their methods through original research including qualitative, quantitative, mixed, design studies, historical, correlational, causal-comparative, and experimental. This issue, like TAD itself, is OPEN to your creativity and your discoveries. Manuscripts for the double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on June 15, 2020, at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tadjournal. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards found in the TAD Author Guide.
Published November 2020
Materials – and their alchemical transformations through construction – have long been the subject of intense study and thoughtful deliberation by practitioners and researchers. When carefully considered, materials can perform specific functions, contribute to human well-being, and attune our perceptions of the world around us. When poorly considered, materials can contribute feelings of discomfort and alienation. In aggregate, they can be significant contributors to climate change and other human-made calamities. It is self-evident that materials matter. Yet, materials are never isolated. They are experienced through phenomena such as light and sound and they exist in the context of other materials and technologies, within economic and political structures, and in forms that afford new possibilities. Matter intends to explore a range of socio-cultural, political, historical, and technological questions concerning the nature of materials in architecture and design.
Materials articulate architecture and profoundly influenced the form and content of the built environment. In the early nineteenth century, avant-garde architects struggled to emancipate architecture from the tyranny of two fundamental historical modes: the trabeated mode, bound to the physical characteristics of timber, and the arcuated mode, bound to the physical characteristics of masonry. Advances in the production of inexpensive structural-grade iron precipitated a revolution as new forms and proportions were increasingly possible. At the turn of the twentieth century, structural steel provided the catalyst for another architectural revolution, further heightened by developments in reinforced concrete. And now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, mass timber, utilizing the only major renewable structural material, holds the promise for another architectural revolution in the struggle to combat climate change. A holistic understanding of Matter includes an examination of social, cultural, and historical uses of materials. What does an analysis of material industries reveal about our evolving culture of building? Are there new understandings of the relationship between material and human experience? How are material innovations responding to the challenges of our time?
Contemporary advancements in material exploration are, on several orders of magnitude, more rapid and divergent than ever before. As society increasingly reckons with the consequences of a petroleum-based economy, researchers are looking for opportunities to construct our built environment with materials that are beneficial to the natural world; from carbon-sequestration to habitat management and creation. At the same time, researchers are exploring ways to reduce energy demands with smarter materials and assemblies. From phase-changing materials to nanomaterials to robotic fabrication, technology is opening new frontiers. Biological materials, such as fungi and algae, are expanding the range of organic and renewable materials beyond timber and grasses; and biological processes, including microorganic activity, are contributing to this transformation. Even seemingly-anachronistic materials, such as raw earth, are being reconsidered. How are current material investigations responding to rapid climate change and the imperative for sustainability? What methodologies are researchers using to explore and test materials? How are designers, material scientists, and others engaging in material innovation, developing patents, and influencing business practices? How are emergent materials and cyber-physical processes altering the arc of architecture and design?
TAD: Matter seeks contributions of primary research and scholarship concerning material investigations in technology, architecture, and design. Manuscripts for the double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, January 15, 2020. Please reference the TAD Author Guide for manuscript submission requirements.
Published April 2020
From new design procedures, to the physical testing of materials and production techniques, to alternative construction methods and workflows, the process of advancing an architectural concept from initial idea to full material realization makes use of a broad array of strategies. For its upcoming issue, TAD seeks scholarly submissions, creative design, and primary research that investigate the means by which the design concept becomes translated into the built environment.
Physical testing has long been valued as an aid to concept realization. While digital models and virtual tools provide an affordable and ubiquitous alternative, prototyping remains a powerful means of exploring design options, vetting technologies, rehearsing processes, addressing performance uncertainties, assessing user experience, and gaining stakeholder consensus. Testing prior to and while building have enabled designers to advance construction methods, inform building code development, and initiate new workflows. How are testing methods diversifying, and how are these various methods impacting the design and decision-making processes? TAD invites research projects and papers that investigate the impact of rigorous testing methods on the Translation of ideas into construction.
Investigations of translation benefit from a consideration of the underlying organizational structures that enable architectural production. Throughout the last three decades, the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Owner community (AECO) has developed frameworks, certifications, and rating systems in order to contend with the economic, social, environmental, and regulatory contexts in which they must operate. Concurrently, business models, procurement and delivery systems, and contractual agreements have also evolved, creating opportunities to reconceive formats for design services and outputs. Are new organizational forms emerging as a result, and if so, are they leading to transformations in architecture practice and production? How are these practice innovations being implemented and evaluated? Translation invites research that examines both historical and emerging ecologies of practice.
Necessarily, research on translating design concepts into realized projects must take into consideration the emerging technologies of design, construction, and maintenance. The adoption of virtual and augmented reality across AECO sectors, for example, has democratized the design process while increasing support for those who build. Prefabrication and modularization offer the promise of reduced uncertainty surrounding project costs and scheduling. Proliferating methods for collecting project and site data have provided greater fidelity to the interrelationship of labor, design, and construction. How are these and other technologies changing the processes by which design ideas are realized? How are workflows and collaboration among project agents being altered by greater efficiencies in production, streamlined communication, and automation of labor? TAD invites papers and projects that critically interrogate the development, deployment, and impact of the technologies of Translation.
By examining these and related questions, Translation will expand the discourse around developments in the field and assess their implications for future practice. Manuscripts for the double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Saturday, June 15, 2019, at TADjournal.org. See TAD Author Guide for manuscript submission requirements.
Published November 2019
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites submissions of original research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students to be considered for the upcoming OPEN issue. From theoretical and empirical research to research methodologies, critical reviews, and case studies, this OPEN call welcomes all work that seeks to establish critical areas of research, development, and application in architectural design and technology.
Constant innovation in building technologies such as building materials, construction, computer-mediated design tools, automation, and virtual reality has yielded a strong impetus to value the expansion of research-based inquiry and method development in architecture. Adapting to an era of research-driven insights, practitioners and scholars alike are developing a more defined, functional, and analytical perspective on evidence, experiments, and accuracy in forecasts. This OPEN issue provides a forum for established and emerging talent to share insights from diverse perspectives about state-of-the-art research.
Data has been and continues to be essential to architectural research and practice. The definitions of data differ across fields, types, and methods, depending on the context in which the research question is proposed. In architectural and associated research disciplines, data can be tangible and intangible, experimental and simulation-based, numerical and textual, auditory and visual, or a representation of information. All types of research data are increasingly understood by architectural researchers and practitioners to be important inputs for research and practice. As evidenced by the international movement towards OPEN research and OPEN data, data outputs are also valued to advance knowledge, expand opportunities, and improve outcomes in architectural research. This issue is OPEN to various forms and applications of data that intellectually combine technology, architecture, and design, and provide novel framings, quests, and proposed solutions.
TAD is OPEN to all research methods including qualitative, quantitative, mixed, design studies, historical, correlational, causal-comparative, and experimental. We are also interested in how the concept of data is used within your research realm. What data and analytics are used in your research, and why? How do the norms and conventions of your discipline affect your determination of data formats and methods of visualization? How is data generated in the course of your work? This issue, like TAD itself, is OPEN to your creativity and your discoveries. Manuscripts for the double-blind peer review are due before 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, January 15, 2019, at TADjournal.org. Manuscript submissions must follow the standards found in the TAD Author Guide.
Published March 2019
Urbanizing is an active process. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and by the year 2050 greater than two-thirds will be urban dwellers due to migration and increased birth rates.[1] Meanwhile, our urban footprint comprises only 3% of the earth’s surface, establishing a density that imbues the effects of past decision-making, and underscores the importance of future ones.[2] We find ourselves now accelerating into global urbanization with neither the certainty of past slowness nor the benefit of applicable precedents. As the rate of urbanization outpaces its research outcomes, a groundswell of problem-oriented research is needed.
While cities are shaped by differentiated forces in context-specific combinations, their respective urban dwellers experience many similar problems. Housing shortages, supply chains and lifeline infrastructure systems warrant assessment and demand solutions. Acute shocks and chronic stresses prompt resilience, and environmental impacts compel drawdown. The sharing economy elicits new policies, and autonomous technologies await testing in the urban realm. At the same time, municipal leaders are desperate for civic innovation and seek to initiate smart city capacities as technological readiness and fiscal cycles allow.
Questions about research in the urban space include but are not limited to:
What are the constraints that define urban problems and how have they developed over time? What are the legacy, state-of-the-art, and foreseeable technologies for use in future urban habitats and what are their anticipated effects? What are the interdependencies between architectural amenities and infrastructural systems that enable urban dwelling and how effectively can we address their challenges? How ought we design, construct and analyze cities in their specific contexts for improving future urban dwelling?
Both basic and applied research are necessary for advancing disciplinary expertise, and initiating interdisciplinary engagement on urban solutions for use in this twenty first century. A range of generative and analytical action will also be necessary including the methodological assessment of existing conditions, the generation of design-actionable research, and the authoring of inventive designs. Urbanizing seeks to attract, collect, and forge a combined body of knowledge for use in our inevitably urban future.
TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) invites original research from educators, practitioners, researchers, scholars, architects, engineers, and scientists whose work on the active process of Urbanizing engages the fields of technology, architecture, or design. Manuscripts featuring empirical, theoretical, and practice-based research utilizing an array of methodologies are welcome. Manuscripts for double-blind peer-review are due before 11:59pm Eastern Time on Saturday, June 30, 2018 to TADjournal.org. Standards for peer-review manuscripts can be found in the TAD Journal Author Guide.
[1] https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects.html
[2] Biello, David. “Gigalopolises: Urban Land Area May Triple by 2030,” Scientific American, September 18, 2012.
Published November 2018
Measurement is fundamental to the discipline of architecture. Through measurement, one gains a more complete understanding of what is intended to be produced and how to produce it. Designers test ideas through digital and physical analyses, and communicate design intent through dimensioned drawings. Even after construction, predicted performance is measured against actual effects in post-occupancy evaluations. In this sense, measurement is a way to negotiate between the built construct and the ideals, performances, and evaluations that frame it. Thus, measurement is a form of translation and assessment that is both quantitative and qualitative.
Technology plays a vital role in the mediation between design ideas and their physical manifestation. Increasingly more precise digital design, analysis, and fabrication processes allow for more efficiency in architecture, a goal driven in part by the desire to curb waste and lessen the negative impacts of construction. Through this measured approach, structures and systems can be lighter and perform better, thereby enhancing environments and experiences. Similarly, measurements of admired built constructs can help to establish new design goals. In this way, the act of measuring can be aspirational.
Yet through stipulations ranging from statistical tolerance and standard deviation to verify in field, the discipline acknowledges the lack of absolutism in measurement, which is not always easy or even possible. With new material assemblies, for example, their performance may be difficult to assess without physical testing. On the other hand, an optimized daylighting design might not consider the variety of occupants’ habits, complicating performance analysis. Consequently, some have argued that measurement, especially in terms of optimization, can be a hindrance to design and the designer’s intuition about aesthetic experiences. So, like simulation, measuring is not always clear-cut. Some measurements require deep knowledge for interpretation and comparison. Similarly, depending on the context, there may be a small tolerance for inaccuracy, whereas other times there is a wide acceptable range. This suggests there is both a science and an art to measurement.
This issue of TAD seeks scholarly submissions and primary research concerning measurement in technology, architecture and design. Have new forms of measurement caused us to rethink architecture? How is quantitative research translated qualitatively? What are the frameworks, standards and scales that impact measurement in research? Have engagements with other disciplines caused us to measure or evaluate architecture differently? Through examining these and other questions, Measured intends to provide a forum for expanding the discourse on measurement and its implications for architecture and design.
Published April 2018
Open represents inclusion, exploration, and open-mindedness. With this issue of TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD), we direct this receptivity towards research and creativity in the varied work of our contributors. The TAD mission engages numerous fields including emerging materials, information and building technologies, and history and theory of technology. These specializations encapsulate the physical world, dominant technologies of our era, and ways to understand both. Open is a platform for those conducting research in any of these areas, while simultaneously asking researchers to make connections between their investigations and practice, between empirical and design research methods, or between professional disciplines. We seek submissions that propose conceptual frameworks and solutions for current and vital issues facing society, architecture, and technology. This research often starts with the spark of an idea or an intellectual curiosity, and TAD is interested in project beginnings as well as those that are the most advanced. Opportunities must exist to support research that is outside journal themes, in various stages of development, or even beyond our collective imagination. TAD is Open to sharing it.
Open also provides a forum to discuss not what we do, but how we do it. It is a chance to be inquisitive about discipline and to question established modes of thinking and research. If design is its own culture, as N. Cross suggests in Designerly Ways of Knowing, what are the scholarly and research standards in architecture? How are creative processes included in these standards? Are the aims of this research creative, meaningful, and applicable? Contributions to TAD spotlight innovative research in technology and architecture, and demonstrate multiplicitous approaches to research. With Open, we offer a venue for an array of research questions, methodologies, and analysis techniques that are integral to the work of our authors.
Inherent in Open and the conception of TAD are the values of interdisciplinarity and translation between disciplines or professions. J.T. Klein, author of Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice, identifies that there is a body of knowledge and theoretical basis for integrative research. What are the keystones and vocabulary of this knowledge in architecture? What are the roles of designers on interdisciplinary research teams? How can design-thinking strengthen collaborative partnerships, and assert the merits of architectural research? It is the Editorial Board’s intention to regularly pause from dedicated themes so that the direction of the Journal may respond to the emergent themes in the work of our contributors. This Issue, like TAD itself, is Open to your creativity and your discoveries.
TAD (TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN) seeks original research from scholars, practitioners, architects, scientists, and engineers who engage with technology, architecture, and design. Empirical, theoretical, and practice-based research representing a broad array of methodologies is welcome. Manuscripts are to demonstrate a connection, translation, or integration between technology and design.
Published November 2017
The simulation of physical reality is a necessary preoccupation of the architect, engineer, builder and systems specialist. For centuries, simulations have existed in the form of heuristic techniques used in establishing rules of thumb for architecture and design. These drawings, physical mock-ups, models, and other forms of mediated representations were surely satisfactory, but rarely optimal. In the twenty-first century, architecture benefits from the availability of near-immediate performance simulations executed during the design process and enabled by advanced computation software and rapid prototyping. In this context, prescriptive codes and standardization give way to hybrid models that integrate design goals, site and climate conditions, available resources, and building systems. Whether used for construction sequencing, parametric design comparisons, or structural, lighting, air flow and energy analysis, these simulations generate large amounts of complex performance data requiring a rigorous interpretation of results.
All good simulation models however, —whether made of sticks or bits—necessarily simplify in order to isolate and test relationships. Increasingly, digital simulation platforms operate as scripted add-ons, linking simulation engines to design software and embedding default values for building-based parameters. So doing, they rapidly generate performance data albeit with less user specified information. Feedback is immediate, results are plentiful, and queries are customizable, even when user expertise is limited. And while it appears the integration of data and performance in design has never been more accessible, the process is also more susceptible to false results from incorrect parameters and the blind acceptance of black box output. As we embrace the role of simulations in supporting generative design, we invite a critical evaluation of their assumptions, fidelity, limits, and potentials.
Designing increasingly smarter, integrated, and efficient systems requires a nuanced understanding of the benefits and constraints of simulations. How might we assess whether they truly result in better performing buildings? Rarely studied post construction and almost never evaluated from the perspective of end-users, how do we know if completed works of architecture actually perform to their simulated measures? What are the standards by which we might validate and establish consensus for parameters needed to construct increasingly elaborate models? How might methodologies in collateral fields inform our approaches to architectural simulations? And most critically, in what way are designers expanding the objectives of a practice historically driven by engineering economy? Beyond measuring “efficiencies”, how can simulations disrupt the process of design itself by transforming the very way in which we communicate, collaborate and legislate? And how might simulations help us define and generate improved architectural outcomes?
TAD (TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN) Issue 2, seeks empirical research, creative design, and critical theory manuscripts that investigate the role of simulations in the built environment. The issue aims to question the full spectrum of methodologies, models and measurement paradigms attendant to simulations of the built environment. It is equally committed to investigating the potential of this 21st century technology to disrupt the very practice of design.
Published May 2017
According to Kevin Kelly, founding member of Wired magazine, technology is ubiquitous, ever present and our destiny.[1] Smart materials, performance sensors, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, robotics and drones are but a few of the emerging technologies vastly transforming the way in which buildings are designed and experienced. And yet the role these information technologies play in shaping architecture is rarely at the center of architectural thinking, criticism or design. Are architects uninterested or reluctant to address the proliferation of data-based, digitally-centered, and smart technologies that are impacting the allied fields of construction, engineering, material science, and product design? Most recently, celebrated architect Rem Koolhaas suggested the possibility of a nefarious relationship between architecture and smart technologies, stating; “There is a potentially sinister dimension to …being surrounded by a house full of sensors that can follow you on the moment of entry, to the moment you set your bedroom temperature, to the moment you set your likely return to your house.” [2] Is this seeming aversion to sensors and data points similar to that of nineteenth-century architects who neglected to consider the impact of emerging industrialized technologies of cast iron, glass, and steel; and who hesitated to acknowledge the many ways they were destined to redefine architecture? It was fifty years before architects embraced ferrous metals and sheets of plate glass in service to design, and this, only after historian Sigfried Giedion conceptualized their potential. Similarly, at the end of the twentieth century, we were slow to recognize the impact artificial environmental systems, such as air-conditioning, had on design.
In this light, VIRAL–the inaugural call for papers for TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD)–asks whether architecture is once again on the threshold of significant changes in the material, technical and procedural context of design. In the twenty-first century, information technologies are transforming how buildings are designed, constructed, delivered, occupied and assessed. From crowdsourcing to collective wisdom, information technology is redefining our relation to the environment and to each other. Yet, to what extent are architects, and those who educate them, actively involved in articulating a path for such technologies within their work—be it in their research, scholarship, or design work? Alternatively, to what extent are architectural educators cautious, resistant, or critical of this highly speculative engagement with barely recognizable or material forms of technology?
TAD seeks contributions from scholars, educators, designers, and architects who research, test and create using these emerging technologies and who seek to articulate and theorize the impact they will have on the built environment. The journal seeks articles that feature primary research in information technologies and their impact on materials, construction, structures, building systems, energy studies, environmental design, sustainability and resiliency, project delivery, and practice-based innovations. Papers should advance scholarship with a focus on the impact, translation and integration of technology in architecture and design.
[1] Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Viking Press, 2010
[2] Published in Dezeen
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