Curated as eight thematic chapters, with an introductory text and a sequence of projects paired with analytical drawings, the chapters are self-consciously treated as provisional conceptual vessels. Each contains the “dominant logic or morphological traits” of a set of explorations, acknowledging that many operate between chapters, with accrued associative qualities that bind them to ideas beyond a closed set of categories. Accordingly, Jenny Sabin’s complex and interactive contribution to the book, ADA, is set within the chapter “Multi-Agent Networks,” and yet one can clearly extrapolate its connections to operations adopted within “Cellular Clusters,” “Woven Meshes,” or “Emergent Surfaces.”

If it took the featured architects some three decades to develop the installations, mock-ups, and buildings that form the research of this body of work, the protocols to which they have given birth have also become mainstays of conventional architectural practices today. Though the book does not explicitly make this claim, its timing and reflective view brackets a moment revisiting this thinking within a more experimental posture, from long before the institutionalization of its techniques. That these methods are commonplace today—and some even on the verge of obsolescence, with the advent of artificial intelligence—marks the unprecedented speed of contemporary culture. The book is timed precisely to record this historical passage, at the threshold of an accelerated history analogous to the incremental evolution of stop-motion techniques in 20th-century animations contrasted to the immediate output of contemporary generative models like Stable Diffusion.

In this sense, Flux might serve as a distant cousin to Archaeology of the Digital (2013), where Greg Lynn identified another series of architects of an even earlier period—Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Shoei Yoh—who engaged the digital medium with innocence and speculative verve, though also with less precision. What stands out in the body of work presented in Flux is the clarity of its collective trajectory: the book is curated to tell a story, with a narrative that builds up ideas with techniques, elemental and raw in the beginning, gaining interactive complexity as it evolves through chapters. In this sense, the curatorial and analytical effort of this must be underlined as part of its critical contribution, if only because the projects contained within were certainly not conceived with that narrative in mind.

The consistency of the work also points to a salient characteristic of our contemporary condition; the omnipresence of the internet and the immediacy of communication has had the effect of collapsing time, geography, and culture in such a way that it makes the overlaps between the different projects not only possible, but inevitable. While this has also eliminated the singularity of architectural authorship—what for centuries has defined the allure of the architect’s “genius”—it has also exposed the degree to which the architect’s reading of others’ works (and in turn their influence) is part of a collective contract. In contrast, the narrative behind the Archaeology of the Digital is still woven around a set of architects whose design process invites the aura of mystification. Berman and Kudless’s carefully crafted genealogy effectively demythifies the protocols that produce apparent complexity, and in doing so also redefines the role of authorship in the digital age.

The birth of digital platforms has given rise to a significant shift in architectural practices, long defined by formal, spatial, and material disciplines, all visually based. The rule-based logics of parametrics instead produce algorithms and scripts as their prime contribution, feats that are nonvisual in the first instance, though with complex compositional consequences as their by-product. Berman and Kudless help to recenter this history, though never throwing the baby out with the bathwater; that is, theirs is not an argument against composition per se, but rather a demonstration of how these projects look beyond the rarefied object but invest in the multiplicities produced by this new paradigm. As insinuated by Berman and Kudless, “multiplicity” can be seen in many guises: in how one project relates to the next, in the mass-customization of elements, in the iterative capacity of the generative logics, and the compositional reach of a simple rule. Though linear as a narrative, the book sequentially layers these projects together, weaving commonalities strand by strand in what emerges as a rich array of interconnected themes under one cover.