So instead of taking people my age, which is where a lot of people think digital technology really started, we decided to ﬁnd people who were in their ﬁfties and sixties when they started using the technology. These four projects were also very individual takes on how the digital could work. Even though the tools were around earlier than the 1980s, we tried to ﬁnd instances where they enabled a design that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and were an extension of the architect’s vision. These four architects were very early engagers with digital tools. How did you decide on the four practitioners in the show? And that’s where we started-to try to get as much stuff as we can, even if we don’t know what to do with it yet, because it’s going to disappear. So the CCA ended up doing a two-year study with the Langlois Foundation in Montreal and Library of Congress, asking the question, “What is an institution’s responsibility towards digital material?” I thought it was possible to identify 25 speciﬁc architectural projects to collect, all done before the turn of the century. It could open the ﬁles, but a lot of things would be dead in the migration. And the software, Alias and Wavefront, had merged into Maya. But it was done on old silicone graphics machines and you can’t open the ﬁles without them. They took more than 500 models and drawings, and I said, very innocently, “Would you like any of the digital material?” They said yes. W hy do we need an archaeology of the digital?Ĭlose to a decade ago, the CCA acquired the Embryological House, the ﬁrst project of mine which was natively digital.

Greg lynn projects