Alicia Imperiale’s New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture presents an engaging study of how digital technologies have transformed the relationship between architectural representation and built structures. The core of Imperiale’s argument demonstrates how digital tools have established a new architectural paradigm that uses surface and flatness as creative platforms for exploration.
Published in 2000, the book captures a transitional moment in architectural discourse, where the boundaries between virtual and physical space began to blur. Through her multidisciplinary education, Imperiale connects philosophical investigation with technological and design-based research to study how digital processes transform spatial perception and architectural aesthetics. She moves beyond trend documentation to create a critical framework that connects conceptual changes to the material and formal developments to reveal the digital transformation’s embedded tensions and possibilities in architecture.
The Surface as a Site of Tension
Alicia Imperiale’s central argument is that digital architecture has unsettled long-held distinctions between surface and depth, virtual and real, and flatness and dimensionality. According to her, surface functions as an active mediator in digital architecture which transforms the way architects design, depict, and construct architectural forms. Imperiale uses Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism to analyze how digital tools challenge the postmodern “depthlessness” by making architectural surfaces operate independently as decorative elements instead of revealing structural or spatial logic.
The transition from modernist clear design to postmodern decorative surfaces serves as the foundation for Imperiale’s research. Through her analysis, Imperiale reinterprets Jameson’s work to demonstrate how digital tools like Alias and Maya enable architects to create unorthodox forms through their advanced surface manipulation capabilities. The concept of new flatness describes both the actual flatness of digital displays and drawings and the decorative architectural surfaces found in contemporary buildings. Imperiale maintains a careful position in her evaluation: Digital design techniques enable new formal possibilities but she doubts their ability to produce substantial changes because many of these innovations exist only in theoretical or speculative visualizations. The book analyzes both aesthetic transformations and the fundamental ideological and spatial effects that result from digital architecture’s evolution.
From Theory to Practice
The book unfolds through a series of case studies that illuminate how contemporary architects engage with surface as both a conceptual and material condition in the digital era. Through specific examples, Imperiale demonstrates how digital technologies have transformed architecture from being about static form compositions into dynamic surface-based designs. The architectural shift from static geometric forms to fluid systems occurs in Neil Denari’s Interrupted Projections and Greg Lynn’s Embryologic Housing projects. Digital tools enable architects to adopt topological thinking which allows them to treat buildings as deformable fluid systems instead of rigid geometric structures.
Herzog & de Meuron’s silk-screened concrete façades and Bernard Tschumi’s media-integrated surfaces demonstrate how architectural envelopes have developed into communicative platforms that display images, narratives, and interactive content. The projects also demonstrate how architectural surfaces transform into interactive interfaces that unite architecture with media and urban observation.
The Wells Fargo Court in Los Angeles serves as Imperiale’s main postmodern reference point during her examination of digital-era architectural strategies. The building’s floating façade according to Jameson represents postmodern flatness because it creates visual tension between its present and absent qualities. The Palais des Beaux-Arts extension in Lille presents a sophisticated interaction through its reflective surface which displays both the contemporary building and the historical museum in real-time. Through these comparative examples, Imperiale reveals the central conflict between surface display and depth exploration which runs throughout the book.
The Virtual and The Real
The main theme of New Flatness explores the conflict between digital design spaces and actual construction requirements. Imperiale questions the common belief that digital tools automatically bring democratic changes to architectural practice. She demonstrates that numerous avant-garde digital projects exist only as renderings, animations, and gallery installations because they fail to become physical constructions. She refrains from adopting a completely doubtful perspective. She maintains that virtual space should not function as an escape from physical reality because it provides a platform for developing new architectural concepts.
The authors present Entropia as a collaborative multimedia project between Kadambari Baxi and Reinhold Martin to demonstrate this balanced perspective. Entropia operates as an interactive digital archive because its forms and meanings transform continuously. According to Imperiale, this represents a complete transformation of architectural surfaces because they exist as interfaces that change instead of fixed envelopes. Surface functions as a transformative tool in this context which challenges established concepts about structure and identity and permanence. The book demonstrates through its examples how digital design transforms both architectural aesthetics and the fundamental ideological structures of architecture.
Critique and Limitations
New Flatness is a deeply ambitious and intellectually rigorous work, but it is not without its challenges. At times, the book’s engagement with philosophical theory—particularly in its references to thinkers like Deleuze and Leibniz—introduces a level of abstraction that may be difficult for readers unfamiliar with post-structuralist discourse. The dense conceptual material creates barriers for readers who want hands-on architectural practice engagement.
Another limitation lies in the book’s scope. The book presents an engaging view of digital experimentation through avant-garde projects and famous “starchitects” yet it neglects conventional and widespread digital tool applications. The book devotes insufficient attention to the everyday changes brought by Building Information Modeling (BIM) and parametric urban design and algorithmic construction processes which significantly affect architectural production and coordination across different scales.
The book presents insights that stem from its historical period. The book was published during the year 2000 before the emergence of new architectural trends including social media and artificial intelligence and accessible digital fabrication methods such as 3D printing. The arguments Imperiale presents about surface, spectacle, and virtuality remain relevant today but readers may question how she would modify her statements in present times. The growing practice of designing buildings for camera visibility instead of occupant needs requires a reevaluation of her analysis through the lens of Instagram platforms where visual appearance dominates spatial perception.
Despite its limitations, New Flatness remains a foundational text for understanding architecture’s evolving relationship with digital media. Imperiale presents her most valuable insight by avoiding two extremes in her analysis of digital design through the rejection of superficial views and the acceptance of transformative perspectives. Through her historical analysis Imperiale demonstrates how architecture’s representation methods have evolved from drawing to photography to digital modeling which transformed architectural imagination and communication and construction processes.
Her analysis stands out because it focuses on conceptual transformations instead of new stylistic elements. Imperiale leads readers away from the common digital architecture associations with parametric forms and immersive virtual environments by focusing on the fundamental changes in spatial thinking and surface representation. Digital tools create more important effects through their ability to generate new questions about authorship and materiality and experience mediation rather than through their ability to create new shapes.
New Flatness serves as an essential work for architects and theorists and critics who study the field. Readers must look past digital form aesthetics to understand the fundamental spatial and conceptual conflicts which these forms reveal. Through her work Imperiale provides both an evaluation of current architectural practice and a method to envision architecture’s future development.
References:
Cache, B. (1995) Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Imperiale, A. (2000) New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lynn, G. (1999) Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
