2013 Book publication. Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher co-edited a new upcomming book publication entitled Architecture in Formation to be released in 2013 after a peer review process with Routledge/Taylor and Francis Publishing. 

Architecture In Formation,On The Nature of Information in Digital Architecture Edited by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher, Routledge, New York 2013  http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415534901/

Architecture in Formation is the first digital architecture manual that bridges multiple relationships between theory and practice, proposing a vital resource to structure the upcoming second digital revolution. Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians and theorists look at how information processing informs and is informed by architecture. Twenty-nine experimental projects propose radical means to inform the new upcoming digital architecture.
 
“We grew accustomed to live together with machines, which provide us endless access to information. Our computational companions, now in our pockets, have had also a profound impact on how we foresee future scenarios of transformation and change. Now is the moment that we reconsider critically the emergence of new paradigms and protocols that computation has determined within architecture, and this collection of essays establishes a potent cornerstone of a much needed history of that recent past.”
 
Fabrizio Gallanti, Associate Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture.
 
Featuring essays by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher, Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Ingeborg Rocker and Christian Lange, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges and Martin Bressani.
Interviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, CiroNajle, and Greg Lynn
Projects by:  Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Mark Burry; Yehuda Kalay; Omar Khan; Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab; Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa; Anna Dyson / Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE); Philippe Rahm; Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros  Tsamis; Neeraj Bhatia, Infranet Lab; Jenny Sabin, Lab Studio; Luc Courschene, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT); Eisenman Architects; Preston Scott Cohen; Eiroa Architects; Michael Hansmeyer; Open Source Architecture; Andrew Saunders; Nader Tehrani, Office dA; Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis; Reiser + Umemoto; Roland Snooks, Kokkugia; Philip Beesley; Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger SPAN; Michael Young; Eric Goldemberg, Monad Studio; Francois Roche; Ruy Klein; Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.
 
Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is an associate professor adjunct at The School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.
Aaron Sprecher is an assistant professor at McGill University School of Architecture.

Editors: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher; Copy Editor: Michael Wen-Sen Su; Graphic Designer: Atelier Pastille Rose; Crowdsourcing Diagrams: Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter; Translation: Barbara McClintock; Editorial Collaborators: Eduardo Alfonso, Zulaikha Ayub, Luo Xuan.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415534901/

pre-order at amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Formation-Nature-Information-Digital/dp/0415534909/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363646167&sr=1-8&keywords=architecture+in+formation

INTRODUCTION: [excerpt]

Architecture in Formation comprises a dialog among architectural theorists, historians, and experimental architects based on the many and complex relationships between information processing and its representation. This collection of historical examinations, critical essays, and design projects provides a cross analysis that aims to re-conceptualize the current state of the discipline of architecture as it has become, of late, increasingly structured around advances in computation.

We follow the trajectory of a critical, alternative axis deviating from the way digital technology has usually been understood since its widespread adoption in the 1990’s. While previous trajectories privileged a visual logic, thus repressing digital architecture to a merely representational role, we emphasize the architectural specificity of a disciplinary potential, which recognizes the role of computation in actually processing the relational capacity of systems and structures. Our ambition is to produce both a historical venture against the mere actualization of technology and an intellectual understanding of the digital project through the more generalized notion of Information. However, we are not proposing to dismiss visual and formal logic. Rather, we hope to foster the integration of these levels of cognition and representation with deeper, usually inaccessible, relational structures.

An architecture of information implies the constitution of a critical, intermediary, and abstract interface-space that is capable of transforming the discipline by mediating the relationships among cognitive structures, codes, information processing, and form. The associated disciplinary shift drives a general movement towards engaging an emergent, formal aesthetic that is based upon profound structuring relationships. In particular, due to the increasing ease of writing and manipulating computer programming codes, the architecture community recently began to question the hidden, form-giving roles of software developers, thereby precipitating a new “deconstruction” of software structures to produce novel, unexpected modes of architectural design. Yet, this questioning also provoked the emergence of a form of structuralism, one that would have to be displaced in order to avoid the idealistic dimension of the architectural object – even as the object itself becomes invisibly embedded into reactive and dynamic systems. Such an object-system, then, would necessarily consider architectural design in terms of latent possibilities.

In this volume, the architectural questions inferred by information structures and interfaces have been framed through our combined dialectical and editorial voices, the result of which necessarily redefines both the limits and nature of the discipline. Specifically, our dialectical positions address the intrinsic, disciplinary notions of representation, information standardization, and formal autonomy, as well as extrinsic notions regarding the boundaries of the discipline. This dialectical approach is investigated in three forms: interviews, curated essays, project essays and experimental projects, the summation of which generates the necessary conflicts, contradictions, and continuities capable of reorganizing certain fundamentals of the discipline as it continues to expand through computation.

This book consists of six chapters. Each chapter in this book begins with an interview and ends with an extended, critical essay. Together, they frame the chapter’s specific discourse Inquiring the nature of information. By specifically fostering a progression from conceptual to perceptual structures, each chapter reveals a particular cartography of influences and cross relationships of the featured theorists, historians, and practitioners. This cartography takes the form of a crowdsourcing diagram depicting the informational content of each chapter, thereby offering alternative, formal readings of the chapter. The six chapters are:

Chapter 1, Structuring Information introduces the historical, theoretical, and conceptual backgrounds underlying current architectural explorations of various information systems, codes, and cognitive structures. In this chapter, architectural historians, theoreticians, and experimental practitioners question the multi-layered role of information in architecture.

Chapter 2, Information Interfaces explores the nature of abstract systems that process data and induce information. This chapter includes an overview of relational systems in architecture – in particular, the mathematical principles and protocols that layer information.

Chapter 3, Responsive Information investigates interactive systems in the context of the contemporary production of spaces and environments. This third topological level features experimental projects and essays expressing the potential of responsive systems in terms of their spatial and programmatic organizations.

Chapter 4, Evolutionary Information addresses questions regarding both the use of evolutionary protocols in architecture and the innovations arising out of evolutionary, time-based architectural systems and topologies.

Chapter 5, Material Information focuses on the extensive aspects of information systems through an investigation of the various processing logics derived from forces acting upon materials – even as these systems challenge categories and intuitive assumptions..

Chapter 6, Information Affect extends the preceding discourse on materiality, while also scrutinizing the role of deep structures – both relative to the output of information, and within the context of spatial perception.
 

2014 July: Architecture In Formation, ed. Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher has been featured and reviewed in Archinect by Amelia Taylor-Hochberg.

2014 The book Architecture In Formation, edited by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher is being exhibited at The Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. Julian Varas, director CEAC. School of Architecture Dean Ciro Najle.

2014 Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa and Aaron Sprecher, Editors of Architecture In Formation were interviewed by the Young Architects Forum-Connection 12.04 of the AIA - American Institute of Architects.