The Dodecahedron and the Basket of Fruit

Abstract

Starting from the late 1980s, the advent of digital design—the possibility to ideate, develop, and generate projects via computers—has progressively pushed the disciplinary discourse to rethink architecture’s role in society, as well as its formal manifestations. The contemporary evolution of digital architecture has taken different directions, which are sometimes contradictory and ambiguous in their intents. This paper especially focuses attention on one of those directions—the opportunities that artificial intelligence can offer in the future production and communication of architecture. Recent episodes are analysed and contextualised within the historical antinomy between two diverging worldviews that, since the fifteenth century until the end of the twentieth century, have informed the architectural discourse. These worldviews can be exemplified in the dichotomy between the dodecahedron and the basket of fruit.