Compositional Physics and Other Diagrams of Force

At the beginning of every architectural act is an immaterial event. Volumetric fragments falling onto an open ground plane. Cubes casually stacked in a pile. A group of planks floating in zero gravity. Freestanding, unsteady walls falling in on one another. A thickened plane draped over geometric scraps. Beams dropped into a rectangular void. A wireframe lattice twisted into a confused knot. Ila Berman defines the “immaterial event” as a compositional tool mobilized in the early digital avant-garde works of the 1980s.¹ For contemporary practices whose work is characterized by a similar shift from object to process, many of these “events” have taken the form of choreographed operations of simulated physics.