Monday Readings are a series of convivial situations to research our technological and infrastructural inter-dependencies. They bring our everyday technical encounters in conversation with theoretical and political thinking, by close-reading technologies as if they were texts, and viceversa.

Architecture has always been located at the intersection of various forms of thought, expression, representation, comunication, and physical manifestation. In contemporary practice, the radical influence cybernetics and informatics, makes architecture inseparable from software and computing. Digital drawing techniques and renderings, computer model and simulations, digital fabrication technology and building management systems are not just ubiquitous for architecture practice, they increasingly determine how and what is being designed and built. Software is consequently not just the means or the medium, but one of the chief agents in the making of spatial environments.

In this context, the tension that between form, representation and technical means that has formed the basis of architecture practice, has been re-shaped by the massive adoption of CAD and CGI technology.
This "Monday Drawing" session proposes to engage with the cultural history of software in architecture both in the larger critical context and as well as specific questions, through a series of readings and drawing exercises.

What can we learn from the way space is and has been drawn? How can we draw (upon) a critical examination of architectural design software? What shape does power take in digital design tools and how does modelling risk the reduction of the possible to the probable?

This encounter will take place in Timelab’s recently rebuilt space in Gent. It is a large space that will allow all the necessary precautions to be take to have this meeting safely.

Monday Readings has been supported with a project subsidy by the Department of Culture, Youth and Media of the Government of Flanders