Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (The MIT Press)
Authors: Molly Wright Steenson
ISBN-10: 0262037068
ISBN-13: 9780262037068
Released: 2017-12-22
Pages: 328 pages
Book Description
Architects who engaged with cybernetics,artificial intelligence,and other technologies poured the foundation for digital interactivity.
In Architectural Intelligence,Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander,Richard Saul Wurman,Cedric Price,and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies―including cybernetics and artificial intelligence―into their work and influenced digital design practices from the late 1980s to the present day.
Alexander,long before his famous 1977 book A Pattern Language,used computation and structure to visualize design problems; Wurman popularized the notion of “information architecture”; Price designed some of the first intelligent buildings; and Negroponte experimented with the ways people experience artificial intelligence,even at architectural scale. Steenson investigates how these architects pushed the boundaries of architecture―and how their technological experiments pushed the boundaries of technology. What did computational,cybernetic,and artificial intelligence researchers have to gain by engaging with architects and architectural problems? And what was this new space that emerged within these collaborations? At times,Steenson writes,the architects in this book characterized themselves as anti-architects and their work as anti-architecture. The projects Steenson examines mostly did not result in constructed buildings,but rather in design processes and tools,computer programs,interfaces,digital environments. Alexander,Wurman,Price,and Negroponte laid the foundation for many of our contemporary interactive practices,from information architecture to interaction design,from machine learning to smart cities.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Architects，Anti-Architects，and Architecting
Meet the Architects
Architecture，by Definition（s）
Computers and the Changing Architectural Profession
Augmenting the Architect
0The Architecture and the Computer Conference
W Computational Paradigms
Christopher Alexander: Patterns，Order，and Software
A Brief Biography
An Operating System for Architecture
PWalking in the Footprints of the Gods
PVisualizing Complexity
PNetworks and Pattern Languages
Generativity
Christopher Alexander’s Digital Influence
Patterns in Software
PBringing Design to Software
Alexander’s Unpopularity with Architects
uWConclusion
Richard Saul Wurman: Information，Mapping，and Understanding
PAmerican Institute of Architects （AlA） Convention，Philadelphia
Understanding through Architecture
Making Things Relative
PNarrative Interfaces
Communication，Convergence，and Conversation
Pconclusion
Information Architects
xerox，IBM，and the “Architecture of Information”
The Computer Reaches Out”
Information Architects and the Web
Conclusion
Cedric Price: Responsive Architecture and Intelligent Buildings
Cedric Price: A Brief Biography
P The Anti-Architect and the Anti-Building
PArchitectural Machines for Teaching and Conversing
Generator
Conclusion
Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group: Interfaces to Artificial
Intelligence
“To the First Machine That Can Appreciate the Gesture”
A Theory of Architecture Machines
The Closed World”and Funding for Architectural Research
Microworlds and Blocks Worlds
Changes in Funding Culture
Graphical Conversation Theory and the National Science Foundation
“Supreme Usability”
Mapping by Yourself
0 Media
W Conclusion
Architecting Inteligence
