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………the contents of the publication were created as part of a lecture series at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich……………the timeline recalls Charles Jencks's Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture and is the collision of a structure that situates architects in time with thematic associations……as they interact, the form, extent, and location of these areas seem to act both like a connective tissue that binds the information as well as a mechanism for exposing particular strands within the underlying grid……….

…….Coding was once a means to formal complexity; not so long ago. It was a way out of the impasse of reductionist formal intent and a creative way to introduce uncertainty, by superimposing and juxtaposing multiple levels of representational perception. It was a question revolving around possibilities enabled and empowered through digital tools. This premise is already obsolete, though what is it replaced with?…….The world is splitting between us as users and players of blissful games and us as enablers of new directions and new natures as lumps of big data. Coding is thus no longer an issue of form making or even of optimization……….

…………As Hubert Damisch writes, the cloud is a body without surface, but not without substance. Although it has no surface, the cloud is visible. In this sense, the emerging ecology of the cloud- the lump of data- is our contemporary obligation to translate. At the center of the lump discourse lies the question: How does the cloud affect our relationship to knowledge? The permeation of organizational tools in our discipline is not innocent. It is not merely about facilitating and managing knowledge; it also transforms the nature of design, with no return. Is it not critical that we give equal attention to reconsidering our classification systems and how they are affecting architectural discourses?………………

 ……………………….what is the contemporary?…………………..what is the scale, duration, and position in history of the contemporary? Is the contemporary best understood as a historical moment, an ever-receding temporal horizon, or a cultural worldview, condition, a style?……………………how do space and place (private and public, regional and national, global and planetary) determine what counts, or doesn't count, as contemporary?……………………………Giorgio Agamben [“What Is the Contemporary?” from What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009)] interprets the contemporary as an experience of profound dissonance: ‘Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it’………….In his discussion, Agamben attempts to articulate the idea that the contemporary is an ahistorical concept; not a label of periodization, but an existential marker…………….