Digital Technology

Here we will discuss about the understanding of people in the digital age and about how technologies are used now and how they could be in future to understand how people & technologies interact and change each other in respect of architecture, thus creating new opportunities in today's architecture. The paper is an overview of some of the most relevant digital technologies, including AutoCAD, digital drawings, digital model making, etc, and how you can put them to use today.

Digital Technology, its Impacts and Evolution

Unless you're a hermit living on a remote desert island, your life is being affected by digital technology. We are living in a digital world and the evidence is all around us. At home, on the street, in school, at the office, everywhere. In most cases, digital technology has done much to improve our lives. Because digital information is stored electronically in simple numerical form (ones and zeros), it's less susceptible to damage and background noise, so it's pure, clean data. And, unlike analog data, it can quickly and easily be stored, transferred, edited and shared. Digital technology the language of 1s and 0s used by computers is reshaping the world we experience.

The old Chinese maxim “May you live in interesting times” applies today to architects with respect to computing. CAD software and other productivity tools have automated some laborious tasks over the past two decades, but they haven't fundamentally changed the way architect's practice. But new tools offer that promise, designers to overcome their ambivalence about technology. “Architects have a chance to regain ground they've lost to contractors and other parties,”. “We can overthrow traditional construction techniques, with profound consequences.” [1]

The digital revolution reshaped the operation, organization, and service offerings of entire industries, perhaps none more so than financial services—banking, insurance, and securities trading. As a consequence, downtown office buildings built to suit the pre-digital needs of financial institutions were rendered obsolete. Many of these buildings have floor plates too small to be utilized efficiently by information-age businesses, and their electrical and mechanical systems cannot tolerate the demands of high-density, high-bandwidth computer environments. By the mid-1990s, the central business districts of many American cities were dotted with vacant relics abandoned by the financial organizations that built them. Structurally sound and often architecturally significant, these crucial pieces of the urban landscape seemed to have no economically viable future.

But the times changed, and shifting economics of downtown development in the late 1990s created a new demand for centrally located businesses, shopping areas, and other services, including hotels. As an occupancy type, hotels can take advantage of smaller floor plates with relatively shallow depth from windows to core. And while a floor of hotel rooms requires more plumbing than the same size floor of offices, hotel layouts are much less demanding of electrical services, total HVAC loads, and elevator capacity. Historic building features that might be costly encumbrances for a modern office can be transformed into revenue-enhancing amenities for an upscale hotel. Ironically, the digital technologies that ...