Digital Technologies in Latin American Architecture A Literature Review from the Third to the Fourth Industrial Revolution Pablo C Herrera1, Frederico Braida2 1Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas 2Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora; Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná [email protected] [email protected] This paper approaches the literature that combines the fields of Architectural Computing and Architecture and Urbanism produced in Latin America during the first two decades of the 21st Century. The main objective is to map the advancement of Digital Technology in Architecture and Urbanism in the context of the Third Industrial Revolution, in order to identify perspectives towards a Fourth Industrial Revolution. As methodology was applied a chronological survey of the literature produced in book format, predominantly printed in the 21st Century by Latin Americans researches in leading digital themes. At last, it can be verified that the production is still very scarce and still has not incorporated, in a significant way, the themes related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Keywords: Latin America, Digital Technologies, Industrial Revolution, Literature Review, Architectural Computing INTRODUCTION search, the bibliography considered was the one de- In the history of Architecture, the topics on emerging veloped in the geographic territory where SIGraDi digital technologies have been transversal to Econ- has been present during the first two decades of the omy, Society, Industry, where construction and ar- 21st Century. chitecture computing are not the exception. Schwab It is expected that this research contributes to (2015) argues that the Fourth Industrial Revolu- the thematic of History and Future of CAAD, mapping tion has its origin in the automation of production the academic bibliographic field that discusses the is- through electronics and informational technology sue of the implementation of Architectural Comput- and is not an extension of the Third Industrial Rev- ing in the field of Architecture and Urbanism, identi- olution, but a result of three reasons: velocity, scope, fying topics that may be linked to a Fourth Industrial and system impact. Revolution in Latin America in the future. To analyze the evolution of the Third to the As known, the bibliography published in book Fourth Industrial Revolution in Latin American Archi- format in Latin American territory is very modest tecture, a thematic literature review about digital and when compared to the amount of North American emergent technologies was carried out. In this re- and European books. There are several factors that Challenges - HISTORY AND FUTURE CAAD - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 | 431 Figure 1 Location of SIGraDi Conferences, 1997-2018 contribute to this, among which it can be supposed lem faced by the publishing of books refers to their the bureaucratic difficulties, the high costs and the distribution, which is also expensive. High invest- scarce resources assigned to books production, as ments are necessary so the books get to the book well as the framing of an internationally incipient store’s shelves to be purchased by readers. Therefore, and little influential (academic) editorial market, and, when all of the difficulties of producing books have therefore, not so profitable. Added to these prob- been surpassed, the problem of low circulation of the lems is the lack of funding for long-term studies that piece is faced, although the propagation over the In- generate results earning to be published as books. ternet is also an alternative. It is also added the current stimulus and valoriza- Given all these issues, it should be considered tion to academic publishing in the form of papers in that the research presented in this paper is not ex- scientific journals, preferably distributed over the In- haustive, but it proposes to bring to light some of ternet in free access systems. In fact, another prob- the main publications and their authors. The effort to 432 | eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 - Challenges - HISTORY AND FUTURE CAAD - Volume 1 make a literature review reveals evidence of the ways topics and conferences papers related to Computing of thinking from each period of time, consolidating Architecture, such as the work of Tassia de Vascon- the developed intellectual production and laying the celos and David Sperling which analyzes the teach- basis for future connections. ing strategies supported by architectural digital tech- The SIGraDi Conferences (since 1997), as well niques and produced by the Latin American commu- as the eCAADe (since 1983), disclosed papers that nity between 2010 and 2015 (Vasconcelos and Sper- present thematic analysis based on bibliography. ling 2016). Months later they set a retrospective from Therefore, this paper justifies itself by the importance 2006 to 2015 (Vasconcelos and Sperling 2017) con- of reviewing only published books, in order to pro- sidering a systematic review of CumInCad database. vide a new panorama that includes some of the top- Thus, it can be verified that one of the main con- ics related to those recommended by Industry 4.0. tributions of the literature review is the establish- It should be noted that the history of publica- ment of panoramas, which can provide the compre- tions by members of SIGraDi has had a very close re- hension of the ways of thinking that have been con- lationship with eCAADe, in part due to the friend- solidated over time. Therefore, the main objective of ships of its founding members, such as Arturo Mon- this paper is to evidence the panorama of the books tagú and Thomas Maver. Thus, in the year of 2001, published in Latin America in the almost twenty years SIGraDi presented at the 19th eCAADe the history of our century, pointing out their main topics. of its region (Montagú et al. 2001) where differ- ent authors reviewed the scenario of their countries. MATERIALS AND METHODS The experiences developed coincided with the first Our analysis takes as its starting point the work of eCAADe round table led by Earl Mark, Bob Martens Clayton and Vásquez de Velasco (1999) which seeks and Rivka Oxman (2001). Yet, in 2019, when SIGraDi to answer the question from educators in Architec- and eCAADe hold their conferences together, actual- tural Computing: “What do we need to teach our stu- izing collaboration and exchange of experiences be- dents now to be ready for this future?”, in order to tween the two fellow societies, we present a review identify “the topics that we have taught in the past of the books published in Latin America. can help to identify those that should be continued Towards the end of the 20th Century, at the and those that should be abandoned to make way 17th eCAADe, Mark Clayton and Guillermo de Ve- for new topics”. Likewise, this research seeks to rec- lasco (1999) presented a review of texts, which high- ognize the topics proposed by the authors in the ref- lights the intense presence of Computer Program- erence set. ming. This review allowed the identification of 12 Clayton and Vásquez de Velasco proposed 16 new topics in architectural computing education. topics in the Architectural Computing education: Some years later, on the 20th eCAADe, Regiane Pupo Design methods, Knowledge systems, Computing the- and Gabriela Celani published Trends in Graduate Re- ory, Future (speculation on future systems), CAAD The- search on IT & Architecture: A Qualitative Comparison ory, Computer literacy, Business applications, Program- of Tendencies in Brazil and abroad. With 19 themes, ming, General computer graphics, CAD management they compared the trend of topics in digital technolo- and practice, 2D modeling applications, 3D model- gies in Master thesis and PhD dissertations from Brazil ingapplications, Hypermedia, Animation, Communica- and other countries between 1999 and 2006. Com- tions, World Wide Web. In their projections they have paring it with the work of Clayton and Vásquez de Ve- proposed five trends: Distributed computing and elec- lasco, both coincide with the little production of Pro- tronic commerce, Convergence of telecommunications gramming, Algorithms and Math Models topics. and computing, Real-time navigation through spatial In recent years, it has been seen the mapping of simulations and, finally, Time-scaled animation phe- Challenges - HISTORY AND FUTURE CAAD - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 | 433 nomena that we have also included in our analysis list. that historically developed these initiatives and make In addition, for the analysis of the books, it was them sustainable. included a list of trends associated to the Fourth In- It is worth mentioning that, in this paper, we dustrial Revolution, that were not identified in previ- do not contemplate Proceedings, although they con- ous researches for this sort of analysis: BIM, Robotics, stitute a bibliographical material of extreme rele- Personal fabrication, Additive manufacturing, Big Data, vance, such as the Proceedings of SIGraDi Confer- Cloud computing, Blockchain, Nanotechnology and In- ences, whose works can be accessed both by SIGraDi ternet of Things. website [1], as well as directly by the CumInCAD This way, this work is the result of a qualita- database website [2], or, still, by Blucher Proceed- tive research, based mostly in a literature review. At ings platform [3]. We have neither included in our first, the CumInCAD database was sought in an ef- literature review dissertations, thesis or research re- fort to bring up papers that came up with a wider ports, not even scientific magazines or journals. At review of the Latin American bibliography produc- last, books that present a purely theoretical approach tion. It was found that there were a thesis survey were also excluded, being directed to the teaching (Pupo and Celani 2007) and a database of scientific of certain software, for example, some titles of the papers (Vasconcelos and Sperling 2016, 2017), how- brazilian publisher ProBooks, or manuals of a more ever, the book-based analysis had not been previ- pragmatic nature, such as the book published in ously addressed, as proposed in this study.