Reappraising Configuration and its Potential for Collaborative Objects

This year's conference theme `Towards a new configurable architecture', provides a good starting point for reappraising and reapplying previous concepts of `Configuration' in architectural design. The concept reappears often, but was particularly powerful whenever new computational tools and architectural concepts emerged and revealed strong synergies. In the 1960ties there was such a moment when configuration's pluralistic properties embraced architectural concepts of structuralism and early computing. Therefore this paper looks back at previous concepts of configuration to identify capacities that could inform current synergies of computational tools, such as open platforms, and architectural concepts of the second digital turn in architecture. The way we communicate, access, and exchange information recently accelerated towards realtime sharing of data, bits & pieces, and experiences. Open platforms that enable user-generated content and collective production of value are becoming more common in design. This paper discusses ways in which this collective content production can enable a computational and human-centric architecture, by reappraising previous concepts of configuration such as: open configurations, latent structures and variable infills.