In the late 1950s, the art critic Mario Pedrosa stated that Brazilians were condemned to be modern.  His words referred to his country’s  seemingly irreversible drive toward the new. Pedrosa’s phrasing echoes that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who only years earlier stated that “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” [1]

Condemned to be Digital picks up on this theme of inevitability. The digital era has been here for quite a while now, and the domain of the digital only continues to expand. The field of architecture has embraced digital change and laid the groundwork for new techno-social paradigms. As the implementation of digital technologies has affected design in its various disciplines, this issue aims to evaluate the increasing impact of the integration of digital media technologies in architecture.

[1] Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989