Architecture in the Post-Digital Age: Towards Integrative Design

Abstract

For many, integration within the building industry is an inevitable outcome as architecture, engineering, and construction enter a ‘post-digital’ age. This paper argues that the challenge is to avoid closed systems of integration and to keep integrative tendencies as open as possible, conceptually and operationally. An alternative vision of integrated design is proposed that is more open, fluid, pliable, and opportunistic in its search of collaborative alliances and agendas. This alternative approach is referred to as integrative design, in which methods, processes, and techniques are discovered, appropriated, adapted, and altered from ‘elsewhere’, and often ‘digitally’ pursued.