Architectural Record: Digital Workflows

Digital Workflows in Architecture, edtited by Scott Marble. Basel: Birkhauser, October 2012,, 280 pages, $ 99.95.

Reviewed by Michael Leighton Beaman

Though the term "workflow" is relatively new to the design lexicon, its meaning is not. Workflow is the sequence of operations which translate information across media, materials, and industries, crucial in realizing a project. As digital computing has supplanted many of the mechanical processes architects relied on to develop and communicate information across fields and industries, new workflows have emerged. Digital Workflows in Architecture asks how digital technologies have redefined the relationships between information and production and what this might mean for the future of architecture.

Edited by Scott Marble, of Marble Fairbanks Architecture, Digital Workflows in Architecture is a collection of essays and case studies that examine the impact digital technologies have had on how we conceive of, develop, and construct our built environment. Marble begins with a straightforward premise: "the assimilation and synthesis of digital communications among architects, engineers, fabricators, and builders is dramatically altering how we work and our relationship to the tools we use."

The book is structured around three themes: Design, Assembly, and Industry. Contributions from established architects Thom Mayne, Neil Denari, Ben Van Berkle, and Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto are flanked by text from younger designers, computer scientists, and software engineers who are leveraging computational processes to create novel workflow scenarios. While at times the essays and case-studies cover familiar ground and well publicized projects, the book does offer new insights into each by delving deep into how digital technologies, operating at various scales and complexities, that have changed the way architecture is conceived and executed.

The essays explore how crafting, processing, assembling, and educating—as products of digital technologies, are shaping practice. Similarly, case-studies, written by the designers themselves, examine a project by unfolding its workflow and illustrating how digital methodologies made each possible. Interspersed between essays and case-studies are editor's notes addressing concepts and raising questions that span the three themes.

What Marble offers in this collection is not an overview of where the discipline currently finds itself as much as a survey of trends that have emerged in recent years, histories to be further examined, and futures yet to be fully formed.

Michael Leighton Beaman is a principal at OMO/GAC, a design non-profit, and Beta-field, a design research office, both located in Boston. Beaman is also a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design.