Description:
Examining the contrasting, and often conflicting, sensibilities that converge into CAD and BIM discourses--globalism, utopianism, entrepreneurialism, and architects' desires for aesthetic liberation--Builders of the Vision argues that software systems and numerically controlled machines are not merely "instruments," or "tools," but rather versatile metaphors reconfiguring conceptions of design, materiality, work and creativity.
Review Quotes:
"In this fascinating interdisciplinary study, Cardoso Llach combines the past of MIT visionary Steve Coons and his CAD innovations with the present of global 'starchitecture'. The result is an important contribution to our understanding not just of software tools but of the future of design itself." - Matthew Wisnioski, Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, USA
"Combining extraordinary fluency in design, computation and STS, Builders of the Vision is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the confluence of cultural imaginaries and material practices in modern technological projects. Cardoso Llach deploys a rich conceptual and methodological repetoire to explicate how dreams of bodily transcendence and political realities of embodied labours combine in the architectures of the most visible artefacts and invisible infrastructures of the contemporary world." - Lucy Suchman, Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK