Archaeology of the Digital – Enric Ruiz Geli at the CCA

Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention is the third exhibition related to the development of a strategy for collecting and preserving digital archives at the Canadian Centre For Architecture (CCA). Curated by Greg Lynn, the exhibition comprises projects for which digital materials are integral to an understanding of the design process.

Rather than presenting individual projects that follow singular visions of the digital, the exhibition shows commonalities, hybridizations and cross-pollinations of the digital medium and methods. Indicating a diversity of practices and developed at a wide range of scales, the fifteen projects included in this exhibition represent the period during which digital technology moved from experiment to acceptance.

Villa Nurbs by Cloud 9 of IAAC Faculty Enric Ruiz Geli is featured in the exhibition. The project, still under construction after more than a decade, is an example of innovation in the construction methods. The new relationships between clients, builders, manufacturers, and architects took many of the middlemen out and made the design closer to the architect’s vision.

The exhibition galleries are organized according to five themes: High-Fidelity 3D, Topology and Topography, Photorealism, Data, and Structure and Cladding. The fifteen projects are dissected into their constituent digital contents according to these themes and are compared and contrasted with one another.

The exhibition features projects by Van Berkel & Bos Architects, Peter Kulka with Ulrich Königs, Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio, Foreign Office Architects, Neil M. Denari Architects, Reiser + Umemoto, Morphosis, OCEAN North, Office dA, Zaha Hadid Architects, Cloud 9, Preston Scott Cohen, Testa & Weiser, Coop Himmelb(l)au and R&Sie(n).