SUMMARY

David Ruy discussed his early adoption of advanced digital tools, becoming one of the first architects outside Columbia GSAPP’s paperless studio to own and run Alias software in the mid-1990s. After learning the program in Columbia’s engineering department, he began producing renderings for New York architects, most notably Reiser + Umemoto. His role with them quickly expanded to design work on significant projects such as Jeff Kipnis’s Water Garden, leading to teaching collaborations with Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, Sanford Kwinter at GSAPP and Princeton, and Cecil Balmond at UPenn. Ruy developed a distinctive digital practice influenced by Gothic architecture and the ornamentation of Louis Sullivan, made possible by the computational power emerging in the 2000s.

At Pratt Institute, he created a long-running course on the image in architecture, overlapping with Hernan Diaz Alonso’s own writing on the topic. When Diaz Alonso became director of SCI-Arc in 2015, he invited Ruy to lead graduate programs where students explored advanced computation to produce sublime, hyperreal, and surreal imagery, an approach that, in Los Angeles, expanded naturally into moving images.

Ruy’s background in music, he nearly pursued a conservatory career, shaped his view of architecture as an art form on par with music or gastronomy. His interest in aesthetics led him to introduce Object-Oriented Ontology into architectural discourse, drawing on his personal connection to philosopher Graham Harman from their time at St. John’s College. Ruy saw in Harman’s argument for aesthetics as first philosophy a theoretical foundation for an architecture deeply invested in aesthetic experience.