3 July 1998
Source: Hardcopy Lingua Franca, July/August 1998, pp. 40-48

I  N  V  I  S  I  B  L  E

C  I  T  I  E  S

BY ALEXANDER STILLE

A NEW GENERATION IS SHAPING UP THE ARCHITECTURE PROFESSION WITH GRANDIOSE DIGITAL DESIGNS. BUT HOW MANY OF THE CYBERARCHITECTS' BUILDINGS WILL EVER BE BUILT?

AT A RECENT ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE in Buenos Aires, Greg Lynn, one of the profession's rising stars, made a statement that shocked many in the audience: "It is always more interesting to begin with an inventory of what machines want to do to us before we start asking what we desire from the machines."

A heated exchange followed between Lynn and his mentor and former employer, Peter Eisenman--considered the unofficial dean of the architectural avant-garde. "The day the look of my buildings is determined by the computer is the day I leave architecture," Eisenman said. Then perhaps it was time for the master to quit. Lynn, a professor of architecture at both Columbia and UCLA, responded cuttingly. "You can tell from looking at their buildings that Peter is using Form-Z and that Frank Gehry is using CATIA," he explains. "Each software has a very particular way of making shapes. You can tell a curve in Form-Z from a curve in Alias, the program we use. I said: 'If it comes down to it, I would have to give the software 51 percent of the credit for the design of my buildings.' "

Between architecture's grand old men like Eisenman and its Young Turks like Lynn lies a technological sea change. Today, for the first time, architects are designing wild curves and complex non-Euclidean shapes that would have been virtually inconceivable without animation software. Some young architects are using the computer to mimic dynamic forces, such as tornadoes and traffic flows. Others are producing designs that they describe as mutable or interactive--buildings with liquid-crystal skins that function like giant computer screens for broadcasting art, news, or advertisements. The majority of these projects are emerging from the country's top architecture schools, where devotees of cyberdesign enjoy substantial university discounts on otherwise unaffordable computer hardware.

For its proponents, the new cyberarchitecture represents nothing less than a social and spatial revolution, an opportunity to liberate us from the constricting--even oppressive--buildings of the past and propel us into a future in which ordinary people control their experience of the world around them. "For the most part, architecture has been a prison, because it defines our subjectivity," explains Stephen Perrella, an architect who edits the newsletter at Columbia's architecture school. "The house domesticates the subject, imprisoning it with traditional values. It sets up hierarchies, just as the kitchen has traditionally assigned a domestic role to women." According to Perrella, conventional architecture is unfortunate because it invites us to see ourselves in rigid, reductive ways.

In rhetoric borrowed from French poststructuralist theory, radical architects extol the computer as a destabilizing force that will break down concepts that have defined Western architecture for centuries: form and function, inside and outside, surface and structure, and, perhaps most crucially of all, the role of the architect-author as "master-builder. " Announcing their originality with bold neologisms--"animate form," "liquid architecture," "hypersurface architecture"--and in densely argued, theoretical manifestos, cyberarchitects have made academe the laboratory of their field's future.

A rhetorical offensive is clearly under way. But whether the computer designs and political aspirations lauded in Columbia and UCLA classrooms are good for the profession is hotly contested. As a practical matter, can architecture, a conservative art anchored in the stubborn realities of a physical site--walls, roofs, corporate clients, and a fixed budget--be rendered liquid or animate? The computer may allow the architect to turn complex algorithms and poststructuralist ideas into swirling parabolas on the computer screen, but will all this intellectual labor make any difference in the built woild? After all, though theoretical essays can win an architect prestige among his peers, eminence in the field generally remains a matter of accumulating lucrative contracts with important clients, from Disney to the Museum of Modern Art. How can the young radicals overturn the controlling hierarchies of Western metaphysics and wage their protests against late-capitalist culture while competing for building projects and tenured teaching posts?

"I JOKINGLY refer to this as the 'toilet problem,' " says Roger Sherman who teaches architecture at both UCLA and the Southern California Institute of Architecture and has an active practice in Los Angeles: "In the course of every project, there is a moment when a workman, who may not even have a high school education, comes and tells you that there is a pipe in the way and asks whether he should move the toilet over or not. Architecture is very physical. I think that for a lot of the people involved in poststructuralist theory, the more building becomes about actual construction the less it is about architecture."

It is true that most of the new cyberarchitects are busier erecting theories than buildings. "It takes a great deal of strength to resist the temptation to build," says Perrella. "I'm a licensed architect, but I decided to take ten years to think about this culture, to build a discourse." Instead of making buildings, Perrella has devoted his energies to designing on the computer, reading French theory and philosophy, and writing: He has just finished editing Hypersurface Architecture (Academy Editions), a collection of theoretical essays.

In fact, the idea of the architect as someone who thinks and writes about architecture but doesn't actually build anything is not a product of the computer age. There is a long tradition of architects' designing paper projects that went unrealized--from the ideal cities of the Renaissance architect Filarete to the fantastic spherical monuments of the Étienne-Louis Boullée--but it's only recently that the idea of not building became an ideological credo. In this regard, many of today's cyberarchitects have been heavily influenced by Peter Eisenman, who has always emphasized the importance of theory over building. For Eisenman's disciples, the story of his very public love affair with theory has served as both an inspirational and a cautionary tale.

"I NEVER thought I would need to build," Eisenman told The Wall Street Journal in 1989. "I thought it would be enough to know about architecture." During the first twenty-five years of his career, he built little more than a handful of private houses while becoming known for his theoretical writings in architectural journals. Eisenman's first major public commission in this country-- Columbus, Ohio's Wexner Center for the Visual Arts--was not completed until he was fifty-seven. It was considered such an event that Progressive Architecture, the field's preeminent journal, put the building on its cover with the headline: "Eisenman Builds."

In the 1960s, Eisenman had been anointed one of the New York Five, together with his well-known contemporaries Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Michael Graves, and John Hejduk. Unlike the others, however, Eisenman was already deep into theory. Under the influence of linguist Noam Chomsky's notions of "deep structure," Eisenman wrote about the architect's need to understand the underlying forms of architecture--such as the ubiquitous L-shape. By the 1980s, Eisenman had left the universalist certainties of Chomsky and modernism for the self-undermining locutions of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. In many ways, the Wexner Center is the apotheosis of Eisenman's effort to introduce Derridean "undecidability" into his architectural practice: For example, columns descending from the ceiling fail to touch the floor. Clearly, they cannot provide structural support. But then why are they there? As bizarre decorative touches? Form or function? Eisenman makes it impossible to decide. The building was widely praised. It may be "the first major example in the United States of deconstructionist thinking," gushed The New York Times.

As it turned out, however, the romance between Derrida and architecture proved short lived and unhappy. In 1985, when Bernard Tschumi, dean of the Columbia architecture school, invited Eisenman and Derrida to collaborate with him on a project at Parc de la Villette in Paris, the results were less than successful. Eisenman and Derrida were supposed to co-design a garden, but once their plans were set, the Paris city government refused them funding. So, they produced a book called Chora L Works (Monacelli, 1997 ) instead; an emblem of the sterility of the collaboration, its pages are perforated with a grid of large holes so as to make the text literally unreadable.

Summing up the history of that failed relationship in a recent essay, Michael Speaks, an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia, observes: "In the period between 1988 and 1994, there was a growing and palpable disappointment with deconstruction, some of which was directed towards Derrida himself." The problem, Speaks concludes, was that Derrida "did not offer the architects a clear way to convert deconstruction (as the theoretical protocol) into architectural form."

MEANWHILE, as Eisenman and his numerous acolytes in New York combed the canon of French theory for new sources of inspiration, on the opposite coast an architect of undisputed stature was quietly using the software created by the French aerospace manufacturer Dassault Systèmes to demonstrate how titanium steel could be manipulated to resemble ocean waves. Last year, this architect's latest project, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened to universal cries of exaltation. Many critics hailed the building as Frank Gehry's--and the decade's-- best work. More important, the building could not have been executed without the computer.

In the past, Gehry's career suffered from his reputation as a brilliant dreamer, someone more artist than architect, whose buildings either could not be built or would simply take too much time and money to make. For several years, his commission to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles had been held up because of widespread skepticism about its feasibility. "What Bilbao proved was that he could build a complex building and build it on time and on budget," says Perrella. "He will now get a chance to do the Los Angeles concert hall." What's changed is not Gehry's vision so much as the technology necessary to reproduce it.

Although he begins by designing a cardboard model with his hands, Gehry specializes in complex, malleable shapes that are not readily reducible to Euclidean geometries. Eventually, the handcrafted model is scanned into a computer and rebuilt on a much larger scale. Thanks to the high-powered software, Gehry's firm can resolve structural problems on the computer before tackling them at the construction site. "Frank is definitely an 'auteur,' an architect as master-builder," says Sylvia Lavin, chair of the UCLA department of architecture and urban design, where Gehry teaches part time. "But his mastery has been fundamentally transformed by the process he has adopted."

Thus, from Eisenman the cyberarchitects inherited a passion for theory, and from Gehry proof that the computer could indeed produce architecture of a sort no one had seen before. But after the debacle with Derrida, they lacked an intellectual framework that would tie high theory and computers together.

THE LATE French philosopher Gilles Deleuze seemed to provide the answer. "Deleuze talks about the production of space and power relations, and all that appeals very much to architects," says Lynn. According to Lynn, the Deleuze boom started in 1987, with the translation into English of A Thousand Plateaus. Thanks to his singular combination of disdain and reverence for techno-capitalism, Deleuze had an immediate and obvious appeal to today's cyberarchitects. A member of the radical French left, Deleuze viewed the triumph of capitalism as inevitable. In his writing, he is in turn horrified by and admiring of capitalism's raw power and extraordinary fecundity in transforming the world. But capitalism's strength, according to Deleuze, is also its weakness. As it moves toward global dominance, capitalism's inherent instability becomes increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Rather than preaching outright revolution, Deleuze proposes a "micropolitics": the establishment of local zones of freedom that tap the energies of capitalism to create a "war machine" against the "state apparatus."

From a practical point of view, Deleuze offers architects a way to have their cake and eat it too. "The fact that Deleuze tries to launch a political project from within an institution appeals to architects who have to work with clients who have money to build," says Lynn. They can accept plum commissions while feeling that they are subverting capitalist culture by placing a doorway at an odd angle or using a curved surface rather than a grid. To the cyberarchitects, the extreme flexibility of the computerized manufacturing process enables the literal fulfillment of Deleuze's call for a world of "differentiation" and "multiplicities" against "repetition" or standardized form.

Greg Lynn is one of the more outspoken Deleuzians in the architecture world. Unlike most of his peers, he has also had an opportunity to test his theoretical musings in the real world. His working methods, he insists, are highly unorthodox. For example, he might begin the design process by feeding his computer a series of numbers that relate to a proposed site--average wind speeds coming in from the ocean or the flow of traffic from a nearby highway. Then he watches the computer translate these numbers into a series of algorithmic curves. Using animation software, Lynn allows the curves to unfold themselves and interact in order to suggest a possible design for the building; when they take on an interesting configuration, he freezes the computer frame. This process reflects an almost cabalistic faith in the power of numbers. The computer's ability to generate unexpected shapes introduces an element of randomness into the architect's conscious aesthetic choices. "The architect is not so much a form giver as a form director," Lynn says.

He compares the use of the computer to having a pet animal in the house. "Just as a pet introduces an element of wildness to our domestic habits that must be controlled and disciplined, the computer brings both a degree of discipline and unanticipated behavior to the design process," he writes. But where Lynn sees his mathematical efforts as creative innovation, his critics see undistinguished results or--worse--an architecture that is far more interesting to design than it is to look at or live in. "Greg talks about forces, about complexity theory, about wind and tornadoes," says UCLA's Roger Sherman. "But if you see the buildings, they look pretty static. The critical question to me is one of legibility. If you are in a building, are you going to understand that its design has something to do with the weather? I don't think so. Do you need to read the book before you can understand the building? These people are too smart. They are so smart that the world as it is is not interesting enough."

LYNN'S most ambitious project to date, a Korean Presbyterian church, illustrates his working method as well as the difficulties of applying Deleuzian notions to building in the real world. The congregation--three thousand Korean Americans--asked Lynn and his partners to convert an old Art Deco factory in Queens into a massive church for only $10 million. Lynn decided to erect a new building right on top of the old. Accordingly, he took the measurements of the existing factory and plugged them into his computer along with projected measurements for the church he planned to build on top of it. In this way, he was able to generate a series of visual ideas from the mathematical relationships between new and old structures. "You are not sure if you are in the new or old part. That kind of fusion is very Deleuzian," Lynn says. "We used the old as a kind of chrysalis, to create an alien structure out of an existing logic."

Even as the project moved into active construction, the design continued to evolve dramatically. In the past, Lynn explains, architects tended to start with a dominant visual motif--the spiral in Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, for example--and make it the organizing principle for the whole building. "One of the big assets of the computer," he says, "is that you don't have to make a decision about the form in the first stage. We found with the Korean church we were still changing the design during the construction because of input from the contractors. The architect's role is to put these decisions together, to connect them, and let the form result from that process."

But Lynn readily admits that his dynamic, collaborative--he would say Deleuzian--approach to building has limitations. Originally, for example, he wanted to avoid the traditional church form: the Latin cross. A legacy of the Renaissance belief that a building has an ideal set of proportions modeled on the human body, the Latin-cross church is a recognizably anthropomorphic structure. The altar is the head of the body, the side aisles are the arms, and the congregation's seating area resembles a human torso. Not only does this shape lock the architect into a set of rigid rules, Lynn argues, but it is fundamentally oppressive: The "head" at the altar turns the congregation into a passive, obedient body subjugated to its priestly leadership . By contrast, if we think of the body as "a mobile, multiple, mutable form," rather than a static whole, Lynn believes we can avoid the "reduction to ideal types (circles, spheres, cubes)" that the conventional image of the body implies.

But substituting a "mobile, multiple, mutable" body for the static Latin cross proved harder than Lynn had anticipated. The congregation demanded a center aisle, which in turn affected other design choices. In addition, the group's reverend insisted on a prominent altar. When Lynn began plugging his client's requirements into his Alias software, the program, like a kind of Ouija board, kept placing the altar in the front and center of the church. "A lot of hierarchical humanist elements crept into the Queens project," Lynn admits. "We tried putting the altar in the middle of the room or over on one side, but with all of the functional constraints and all of the dogma and ritual, it wanted to gravitate toward one end, on center." He says ruefully: "It's difficult to design a church that doesn't end up resembling a body."

Lynn's built projects have made him vulnerable to criticism from other cyberarchitects. The problem, argues Columbia's Hani Rashid, lies in the architect's uncritical reverence for technology. "Greg is kind of at the mercy of what the software tells him to do," he says. "Alias consulted with Reebok to help the company produce new shapes in running shoes. Now it's in the hands of architects who are producing buildings that look like running shoes." In a recent essay, the theorist Michael Speaks takes Lynn to task for failing to make buildings that challenge the status quo. Lynn, he implies, has sold out: "It will only be a matter of time until Lynn and other members of the American avant-garde assume their places at the board room meeting tables. Perhaps they have already been seated."

ACCORDING to his critics, Lynn has failed to realize the truly radical implications of the information revolution. He uses the computer to generate curved shapes and grand rhetoric but ignores the explosive potential of interactive technology and the World Wide Web. Buildings shouldn't merely be designed differently with computers, they should be pulsing with information. Stephen Perrella envisions buildings with thin plastic skins of liquid crystal, like enormous computer screens. A version of this already exists in Las Vegas, where an entire street is enclosed in an enormous television screen with constantly changing Imagery.

For some cyberarchitects, this embrace of consumer culture's busy aesthetic is a politically charged act. Perrella believes that a media-saturated culture like ours gives us the tools to free ourselves from constricting social forces. All we need to do is to recognize and embrace this fact. The Internet, he says, is a good example: "Something started by the military has become one of the most liberatory forces in history." He believes architecture can accomplish the same thing. "I am trying to build a virus to insert within the new membranes that capitalism will inhabit that elicits an unanticipated vitality, that loosens up control," he says--with a few Deleuzian flourishes. "TV screens are getting bigger and bigger, and the home is going to be more intertwined with electronic imagery. I'm trying to distend the television imagery into the wallpaper and drapery."

In the same vein, UCLA's Marcos Novak dreams of creating buildings that incorporate interactive technology. Combining virtual reality and "intelligent" computer sensors that respond to the wishes of a building's inhabitants, Novak envisions something he calls "liquid architecture." "What is liquid architecture? " he asks in a recent essay. "A liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be.... Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve." Novak's writings all sound the same lyrical, utopian note, in which virtual space and the Internet allow individuals to create their own communities along with other like-minded souls. It sounds great, but for now at least these projects exist only on Novak's computer screen. For the moment he remains more of a performance artist than an architect, creating virtual utopias on the Internet or in exhibitions.

Indeed, once you try to envision Perrella and Novak's notions as actual standing buildings, the task becomes decidedly more difficult--or banal. What would media-inspired architecture look like? "Well, when I visit my mother on Staten Island," Perrella says, "you see all these houses with satellite dishes. As anyone can tell, they look terrible just stuck there. But since they are part of our landscape, why not build houses with the satellite dish as part of the design?" One can also see how the utopian world of the Internet could resemble a corporate version of George Orwell's 1984. The so-called intelligent buildings in existence have greatly expanded the potential for social control: Offices with magnetic-strip passes at every doorway have allowed companies to track the whereabouts of employees to an unprecedented degree.

"What they're talking about sounds an awful lot like Bill Gates and would look a lot like Las Vegas and Times Square," scoffs Greg Lynn. "I disagree that interactivity is inherently democratic and that anything stable is inherently fascistic."

EVEN AS the cyberarchitects debate the merits and demerits of taking their politics and ideas to corporate clients and the real world, another computer-based architectural project at UCLA is quietly proving that the computer can transform the practice and execution of architecture--without a high-theory gloss. This project, directed by Bill Jepson of UCLA's Urban Simulation Laboratory, is titled Virtual Los Angeles. Although it has none of the metaphysical pretensions of liquid architecture or animate form, the program may significantly affect the relationships among architect, client, and public. Jepson's long-term goal is to reproduce all four thousand square miles of greater Los Angeles in three-dimensional cyberspace so that developers, corporate clients, and community boards, as well as the ordinary citizen, can see the design impact of new construction before the ground is even broken.

Because it uses virtual reality technology rather than simple two-dimensional photography, Virtual Los Angeles allows for movement and shifting perspectives. Directing a mouse or joystick, Jepson steers a car through the Los Angeles streets depicted on his computer screen, as one might in a race-car game at a video arcade. But here the Silicon Graphics machine creates an experience of incomparably greater realism, capturing detail down to the graffiti on walls and cracks on the sidewalk. By flashing thirty images per second--the rate of a typical television broadcast--the program allows you to move through the cityscape in what feels like real time. In this way, if you look up as you turn west at a particular intersection, you might see the imposing skyline of downtown Los Angeles, and if you turn around you can see how the new facade of one building harmonizes with the other buildings on the block. Jepson has already digitized about six hundred blocks, or fifteen square miles, of the city.

Just as developers now have to perform an environmental-impact study before getting approval for a project, Jepson would like them to use Virtual Los Angeles to assess a proposed building's visual impact on the cityscape. Already, he says, developers and architects are coming to him on a private, voluntary basis. By plugging their specifications into his computer, they can get a glimpse of what their buildings will look like within the larger urban context. And the results don't always work out in favor of the developer or the architect.

So Richard Meier discovered while designing his much ballyhooed Getty Center in Los Angeles. At the behest of the Getty trustees, Meier volunteered to show his plans to Jepson's team in 1987. At the time, Jepson was not using full-fledged virtual reality technology but rather one of the most advanced softwares then available, which allowed him to print three-dimensional renderings of Meier's plans with near photographic quality. "We were working with Richard, and he really liked what we were doing," Jepson recalls. "He completely changed the art history building because we were able to show him that he was not getting the views and perspectives from the lobby that he wanted. " But the relationship turned sour when the trustees began to question Meier's design for a staircase inside the center's main entrance. According to Jepson, the trustees asked to see what the staircase would look like on Jepson's computer and decided that the original design was not sufficiently "museum-like." Meier made alterations, and soon after stopped cooperating with Jepson's team. "I don't hold that against Richard," Jepson says now. "It was difficult for him to have this third party between him and his client. He needed to control the information that was flowing back to the trustees, and so we were removed from the process."

Thus Meier's experience with Virtual Los Angeles illustrates an important point: Virtual reality can facilitate a redistribution of power in the building process. In this case, the beneficiaries of Jepson's technology were the architect's clients. But ordinary citizens may also benefit. Jepson cites a recent case in which developers of an elaborate shopping mall, complete with residential towers and an IMAX theater, decided to sell a skeptical local neighborhood on the project's merits by holding a town meeting in Jepson's lab. But the virtual reality model only reinforced community opposition to the project. To their chagrin, the developers found themselves back at their drawing boards, trying to devise a more palatable version of their grand scheme.

Predictably perhaps, the radical cyberarchitects in academe regard Jepson's project with scorn, as part of a tradition of social engineering they find highly suspect. Says Perrella: "Even with the most humanistic of intentions, I can see this as an easily instrumentalizable technology"--one that can readily serve the interests of corporations or the government. The same complaint, however, could be made about Perrella's conception of "hypersurface" architecture. Earlier this year, the nonagenarian Philip Johnson, always quick to spot the latest trend, presented his latest proposal for two corporate towers in New York City's Times Square: sheathing the buildings in plastic or other synthetic material that would serve as a constantly mutating surface for advertising. Thus while Perrella sees hypersurface architecture as subversive, the kind of media-saturated building he dreams of could just as easily play into the hands of corporate forces as a splashy and effective means of extending their reach.

For all their talk of radical indeterminacy, Perrella and other cyberarchitects may be too quick to assume that a concrete form can directly express their political intentions. "You can't separate a building from its cultural and political context," argues Lynn. "The same building can change its meaning w hen the institution that occupies it changes. You can't solve political problems with new forms." Lynn may well he right, but just because buildings rarely succeed as political statements doesn't mean that architects themselves can't make various kinds of political decisions. "Designing space has always been a political act," reflects Columbia's Hani Rashid. "The dilemma for architects has always been a moral one, whether it's building a cathedral for a corrupt pope or a tower for AT&T."

Nonetheless, he says, potential projects must be considered on their individual merits. Rashid cites a current client: no less an icon of American capitalism than the New York Stock Exchange. Rashid's job is to create a virtual reality model of the entire market that will enable officials at the Exchange to simulate past fluctuations, including, for example, the events preceding last year's Hong Kong crash. "In this case," says Rashid, "we're producing the engine of the industry, not exporting its image or virtues to the public." In the end, a theorist like Deleuze offers little guidance to an architect making tough choices about old issues, including what kind of clients he is willing to work for, the cost of the buildings he wants to construct, and the uses to which those buildings will be put.

In the meantime, virtual building in cyberspace--where tough choices may be endlessly deferred--will continue to beckon. "I think there is a problem with imagining buildings where the technology is so extraordinarily expensive that it is out of sync with reality," says Roger Sherman. "That is why a lot of these people are content to remain in the virtual world. I'm not sure that much of this will be buildable. And a lot of it will end up going the way of visionary projects from the past. But even if any of these projects are built, I'm not sure anyone would be able to perceive them as being the fulfillment of true democratization."

Alexander Stille is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Penguin) and Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (Vintage).

BIT MAP Computer programs may never replace the architect's traditional toolbox of blue pencils, modeling clay, and T-squares, yet software proficiency is becoming a requirement for today's job market as architecture firms increasingly go digital. Of course, not every school is equally enthusiastic about the new dispensation. To see how architecture schools are contending with the new technology, Lingua Franca made in informal survey of five of the country's top programs. COLUMBIA Four years ago, under the direction of young professors Hani Rashid and Greg Lynn, Columbia inaugurated the "paperless studio." This provocative (though misleading, title was intended to announce Columbia's commitment to a future of computer-dominated design. In fact, in the paperless studios of instructors like Lynn and Steven Holl, there's no moratorium on traditional tools or wood-based products. But for Rashid, at least, paper is already a thing of the past. "Communication and information technologies have replaced stone, glass, and steel," trumpets Rashid, who believes that students reared in a media-rich culture should be encouraged to "republish" the materials already at their disposal instead of being limited to conventional drawing methods. In his class, students cut, splice, and morph sound and visual media and then project three dimensional holograph-like images into interactive, multimedia spaces. HARVARD Harvard's top-rated Graduate School of Design has been fickle in its approach to computers. In the mid-1980s it was the home of Bill Mitchell, the guru of Computer-Aided Design (CAD). With the help of a supportive dean, Mitchell set up the network infrastructure that now provides a computer hookup for each student in every classroom. But cyberenthusiasm waned dramatically after Mitchell defected to MIT in 1992, leaving professors like Malcolm McCullough free to declare architecture "inherently low tech." Harvard's more technology-oriented administrators are determined to rebound. Last year, the school unveiled a brand-new Digital Design & Information Research Unit, which will try to distinguish cutting-edge technologies from the already passe. MIT At his new home, Bill Mitchell has spearheaded an ambitious five-year plan to keep MIT's School of Architecture and Planning on the same cutting edge as its more famous colleague, MIT's Media Lab. Never known for fostering aesthetic creativity, MIT's architecture program is attempting a new tack. The school now conducts remote studio collaborations with teams in Europe, Japan, and Australia and enjoys generous grants from major computer and software manufacturers like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. PRINCETON "Computing is not in and of itself an architectural design topic," says Ralph Lerner, dean of the Princeton School of Architecture. "We haven't yet identified computing as a pure area of knowledge in architecture." Historically cautious, the school's attitude toward computers is changing. Student interest is strong, and all students use CAD in their design work. And despite the school's concern for strict disciplinary boundaries, Princeton counts cyberusers like Judith Barry and Peter Eisenman among its visiting faculty. YALE Yale has been offering CAD courses since 1967, alongside classes taught by the likes of Charles Moore and Robert Venturi, yet it was only last year that CAD became a core requirement. With only forty five computers for 150 students, the school risks falling off the technological bandwagon. Next year, however, the school plans to rewire its studios under the guidance of visiting professor Robert Frew. But with the search for a new dean reportedly mired in political infighting, one forlorn student wonders, "Who'll be steering the ship?" ELEANA KIM