Instabilities of the Image

Architects have relied on image-making technologies and techniques, both analog and digital, to speculate on and document architecture. However, since Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad - a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software - in the mid-1960s, computation in architecture has largely been situated in the realm of workflow optimization, replicating analog image-making processes digitally to make them more efficient. This thesis proposes instead to use the digital image as a point of departure, affording an opportunity to explore architecture from a perspective outside of analog image-making. In the spirit of Peter Eisenman’s explorations of architecture’s interiority, this work uses the digital image as both a methodology and a foil in the context of architecture’s analog, lineament-based, image-making history. This attempts to expand on architecture’s disciplinary boundaries by using the discrete, statistical substructure of the digital image as the protagonist to study architectural constructs which have emerged and settled in an analog paradigm.