On the Patterns of Digital Design

Here is a good brief explanation by Mark Garcia on how patterns re-emerged in the digital age after Modernism and Postmodernism.

…In the 1980s and 1990s, Postmodernist patterns predominated, and especially those of Robert Venturi, Rem Koolhaas, Stan Allen and Sanford Kwinter (fields), along with historicist, folding, sprawl, cross-programming, high-density/proximity, non-places and other Deconstructivist and high-tech patterns. In 1992, Henri Lefebvre’s last book Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life was published. Because Lefebvre’s keystone concept of ‘rhythm’ is identical to ‘pattern’, it stands (together with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notions of ‘difference and repetition’) among the decade’s most important theories of pattern in space. Postmodernist patterns opposed the hygienic, white, rectilinear, legible, navigable, functional, light, rational and transparent ones of Modernism with the fragmented, decentred, warped, heterogeneous, disembodying, delirious, disorientating, formless, chaotic and illusory ones that reflected the fragile contemporary subject and the now more problematic spaces of social and everyday life. [Garcia 2009:12]…

…the most compelling reason for an urgent reappraisal of contemporary and future spatial design patterns is that new technologies are accelerating and expanding the kinds of spatial pattern that can be designed. It is timely, then, to consider the possibilities for rethinking ourselves in relation to the impacts of the technological shifts in the design of our spatial patterns. [Garcia 2009:8] …

…(the) rash of books, shows, designs and designers is evidence of spatial patterns as a whole reorienting towards greater, more hightech and conceptual, dynamic, virtual, intangible, immaterial and invisible functions, effects and types. It is only new technologies that have allowed design to expand the range of types and the accuracy with which we are now able to visualise, diagram and realise these other, stealthier, more inconspicuous new patterns of designed space. Only now can patterns enhance cultural, social, programmatic and environmental, material and structural performance in a single pattern design system. Design has only recently, through new digital design and diagramming techniques, been able to incorporate these stealthier, more inconspicuous new patterns into viable spatial designs. [Garcia 2009:13]…

GARCIA, Mark. 2009. Prologue for a History, Theory and Future of Patterns of Architecture and Spatial Design. Architectural Design: Patterns of Architecture. Mark Garcia (ed.). Wiley. 79(6):6-17