The entwined relationships between the physical and the computational continue to produce sensibilities where our understanding of the division between them is becoming blurred. The prolog to Rustic Figurations identifies a growing interest in disciplinary questions on the role of history and the history of digital tools and techniques of representation to support and understand the cultural context of architecture. The second part of the text tries to describe, define and situate rustic figuration as an aesthetic and material concept in architecture that has developed through the architectural design research of the practices servo and Brrum, in parallel with research into the history of rustication.

The notion of rustic figuration is imbued with architectural qualities that oscillate between the legibility of form and geometry and the disappearance of that legibility. Aspects of legibility are discussed in relation to related discourses in architectural history, as well as in the context of a few contemporary practices and projects that engage both computational and analogue techniques for design, communication and fabrication. The qualities of rustic figuration in the projects are neither bound by the unique properties of the building materials, nor by the computational information but happen in the translations between digital information and material manifestation or vice versa.