Neighbours Vol. 5: Graph Vision, Theodora Vardouli / TPOD, THEMA, HITAM, LAPIS

As part of the Neighbors lecture series, Theodora Vardouli will be presenting her last book, Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (MIT Press, 2024). The book draws a history of architecture's early entanglements with modern mathematics and digital computing by focusing on a hidden protagonist: the graph. Fueled by iconoclastic sentiments and skepticism of geometric depiction, she explains that architects turned to the skeletal underpinnings of their work, and with it the graph, as a site of representation, operation, and political possibility. This publication combines close readings of graphs' architectural manifestations as images, tools, and infrastructures for design with original archival work on research centers that spearheaded mathematical and computational approaches to architecture.

Theodora Vardouli researches design and architecture’s entwining with digital technologies and computation. She is an Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University where she directs the Computational Design Exploratory (CoDEx). Her scholarship has been recognized with the 2022 Best Paper Award by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and the 2022 Mahoney Prize, for an article co-authored with David Theodore, by the Special Interest Group for Computing Information and Society (SIGCIS).