Table of Contents

List of Figures. Preface. Unfamiliar Metaphors: Mirrors, Scaffolds, Slaves. Unexpected Theorists. A Journey to the East. Acknowledgments. 1. Introduction: Seeing Software as a Cultural Infrastructure 2. Codification Before Software: Architectural Inscriptions and the Design-Construction Split Part One 3. Software Comes to Matter: Encoding Geometry, Materials and Machines 4. Perfect Slaves and Cooperative Partners: Steven A. Coons and Computers' New Role in Design 5. Computer-Aided Revolutions: CAD Experimentalism, Participation and Representation in the Architecture Machine 6. Visions of Design: Software Stories About Design, Creativity and Control Part Two 7. The Architect's Bargain: Building the 'Bilbao Effect' in the Abu Dhabi Desert 8. Contesting the Infrastructure: Resistance Against and Re-Appropriation of a Digital Model 9. Rethinking Redundancy: Parametrics of Trust-Building in Digital Practice 10. Coda Bibliography. Index

About the Author

Daniel Cardoso Llach is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University, USA, where he teaches courses on the history and theory of computational design and fabrication media, and on creative computing. He holds an S.M. and Ph.D. in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and a B.Arch from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá.

Reviews

"In this fascinating interdisciplinary study, Cardoso Llach combines the past of MIT visionary Steve Coons and his CAD innovations with the present of global 'starchitecture'. The result is an important contribution to our understanding not just of software tools but of the future of design itself." - Matthew Wisnioski, Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, USA"Combining extraordinary fluency in design, computation and STS, Builders of the Vision is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the confluence of cultural imaginaries and material practices in modern technological projects. Cardoso Llach deploys a rich conceptual and methodological repetoire to explicate how dreams of bodily transcendence and political realities of embodied labours combine in the architectures of the most visible artefacts and invisible infrastructures of the contemporary world." - Lucy Suchman, Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK