exploring the excitement and anxiety between the architectural profession and technological advancement
In an age where technology weaves itself ever more intensely through the fabric of quotidian life, it was thought that humans would slowly be relieved of laborious tasks in an effort to increase their leisure and enriching their spiritual life. Upon surmounting the Digital Revolution, and commanding its reverberations however, the architectural profession witnessed violent professional balkanisation, superspecialisation and the unprecedented dissemination of tools initially only available to specialists. Decades of increments in computing power also gave way to advanced “independent” design tools that seem to become increasingly more accessible. Could this make everyone an architect, and thus, no one would be an architect?
As has been explored in previous generations, the role of the architect must be reassessed once again. Simply by observing recent technological progress, it is evident that forward lies a crucial vocational time that is vulnerable to a significant paradigm shift in architectural thought and design process. In a transition that postulates the architect’s potential self-demise, if it is the beginning of the end of architectural transcendence in man, and in the words of Nietzsche, God (the architect) is dying, who shall concern itself with building? Architects? Machines? Everyone else? Or all?
To get you started…
Opening Remark
Peter Eisenman
Foreword
Nicholas Negroponte
I was at the right place, at the right time – MIT in the 1960’s. I enrolled as a student of architecture in 1961 and never left. Why did I go to architecture school? I wasn’t even 18-years-old when I made that decision, one that affected me ever after. I naively thought that because I was good at both mathematics and art, that the natural blend was surely architecture. When I told this to my then school headmaster, he said he liked grey suits and he liked pin-striped suits, but he hated grey pin-striped suits... Huh? In retrospect, a conservative sense of resistance towards a growing collision between disciplines. It took me five years and two so-called professional degrees to understand him and to realize that an even more natural blend of math and art was computer science ...
An Introduction to Death
Francesco Catemario di Quadri
There are a great deal of ways to go about questioning the survival of one’s own profession. A brief investigation – beyond the consequential clichés of automation – of professions concerned with creation over the last century reveal similar paths: the laborious process of creation is increasingly less laborious. Although this might sound exciting to professionals saturated with generations of PC desk jobs, it does not promise less labor, and it does little, if anything, to provide the comfort of being protected by their creative vocations. A variety of these have been erased, splintered, or bootstrapped on account of the slow, and then sudden automation and computerization of creative tasks. While “splintered” or “bootstrapped” …
Chapter 1: Will Design Remain a Human Activity?
Antoine Picon
Co-founder of the MIT Media Lab (1985) and the Architecture Machine Group (1977), Negroponte was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, developing from software to robotics for architectural applications, including a predecessor to Google’s street view. The author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital has served on the board of Motorola for almost 20 years and is a partner at a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment.
Born in 1994, Francesco completed his RIBA Part I at the Architectural Association in London (2016), and is curently delivereing a Master’s thesis at Universidade Autonoma in Lisbon to become an architect. He has worked for architecture firms in Europe, Asia and the US, and regularly participates in both tech and industrial startups at different capacities.
In search of tools with more comprehensive morphological possibilities, renowned architect, educator, theorist, and member of the "The New York Five" group, Peter Eisenman (1932) was an early adopter of architectural software. Although commonly associated to Deconstructivism, some have considered he invented the parametric aproach to design; repeating and adapting an architectural idea over time.
For a very long time, the discourse regarding the consequences of the rise of automation and artificial intelligence was all about the substitution of machines to humans for repetitive, low-level tasks and jobs. The new landscape that is emerging reveals a strikingly different situation. Surely, robots will replace labor in many cases — they have already begun to do so in factories and the time is coming when they will multiply on constructions sites — but automation will not stop at the replacement of workers in industries such as automobile or building. With the development of artificial intelligence, it is highly probable that activities of conception, which are still seen as bastions of irreplaceable human ingenuity, will be impacted as well. Moderately intelligent programs are already able to write simple pieces of news for journals and websites. The time will soon come when machines will be able to feed media with more sophisticated content …
Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. From 1988’s French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment to 2015’s Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, Picon’s prolific writing has explored the relations between society, technology and utopia, but more recently, reviewing the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture. He has received a number of awards for his writings.
Chapter 2: Improvisation in Architecture: An Interpretation of Our Role
Yona Friedman (1923 - 2020)
Architecture, in a general sense, could be described as a set of “protective boxes,” disposed in arbitrary patterns provided they rest linked by paths. In a paper about theoretical physics, I described it as an “assembly of constituents into a meaningful whole”. A sense of meaning derived from a participatory culture of encouraged user-assembly and experimentation. The last half-century has brought the opportunity for improvements to this scheme. The maturing of certain technologies has facilitated it, and more importantly, its access. First of all, architecture can be “mobile:” boxes and the pattern ordering them can be moved, disposed and re-arranged at will. This trend of change corresponds to individual and social need (and how data increasingly facilitates catering to these). Secondly, new technologies make such “improvisation” relatively easy and economically low-cost. It can be effectuated by the layman-user himself, without expert assistance …
Born in 1923, Yona Friedman was a Hungarian-French architect and theorist whose utopian projects dealt with urban issues via the empowerment of the user, forever questioning the role of the architect. His admiration for the instinctive human process of building shelter has resulted in many widely distributed publications since the 70s. His work has catalyzed and influenced many notable architects, theorists and thinkers throughout the 20th Century.
Chapter 3: Architecture Comes Alive: From Responsive to Spontaneous Environments
Patrik Schumacher
The Architect is Dead: Long Live Architecture! No, false alarm: There can be no architecture without architects, no matter how far AI is advancing. The more AI tools for architectural design will be developed, the more architects will be empowered to concentrate on the sophisticated, creative and reflective aspects of their responsibility and the more they will be able to expand their ambitions, i.e. their speculative-predictive reach and agency with respect to the built environment’s social functioning. My research project, “Agent-based Parametric Semiology,” contributes to this computational (and methodological) empowerment of our discipline in an aim to advance our discipline’s capacity to simulate the way spatial arrangements shape social interaction processes, i.e. the final purposes of our space-making investments. This envisaged Life Process Modelling is much more ambitious and general than currently available crowd modelling systems in that it goes far beyond circulation problems to encompass the full richness of user interactions …
Born in 1961, and widely known for coining the term ‘Parametricism’ in 2008 through his Manifesto at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and later, the article “Parametricism: A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”, Patrik is the Principal, Director and sole partner of acclaimed Zaha Hadid Architects, where he has practiced since 1988. He has also founded, and now codirects, the Design Research Lab (AADRL) in 1996, a well established post-professional design programme at the Architectural Association in London.
Chapter 4: Defensive Postures Against Robot Architects
Phillip Bernstein
“The Architect is dead!” declares the editor of this collection, and no doubt numerous contributors herein have penned yet another obituary for the profession. Here they channel Nietzsche, who was apparently anxious that empirical reality had killed God and worried about the collapse of what he seemed to believe had been the previous coherence of the universe under the direction of the Deity. Somehow, the interposition of the Architect in the assertion is somehow both ridiculous and appropriate, as we architects seem to believe that at some point, we had the agency (and the right) to order the universe. Let’s see, when was that? Phideas? Michelangelo? Perhaps Le Corbusier? Patrik Schumacher? Those of us of a certain vintage, amongst whom I count myself, have seen this movie before, and multiple showings. For me it was first screened when I graduated from college to bleak prospects at the end of the energy and inflation crisis of 1970s and mass unemployment of architects. I survived doing working drawings of dreadful shopping centers whilst awaiting admission to grad school …
Phil Bernstein is an architect and technologist who is an Associate Dean and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Architecture where he has taught since 1988. He was a Vice President at Autodesk where he was responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for BIM technology. He has also authored Machine Learning: Architecture in the Age of Machine Intelligence (RIBA 2022), Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (2018) and co-editor of Building (In) The Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture (2010 with Peggy Deamer), and consults, speaks and writes extensively on technology, practice and project delivery.
Chapter 5: You will not make any more boring architecture You will not make any more boring architecture You will not make any more boring architecture…
Theodore Spyropoulos
In the summer of 1970 John Baldessari drove all 123 paintings that were in his studio, made by the artist from May 1953 to March 1966, to a local mortuary. He proceeded to cremate them. The ash produced by this act was baked into cookies that would later be placed in a vessel taking the form of a leather bound book. In this one action Baldessari shed his practice from the orthodoxies of medium specificity, while at the same time creating the opportunity to conceptualise questions anew about art and his practice within the discipline. The creative impulse at times demands acts of erasure. Beyond action, style or statement, experimentation is the only means we have to question and challenge the habitual. What is of consequence in this pursuit is to challenge everything and enable our understanding of the world. A year after his action Baldessari declared, “I will not make any more boring art”, which led the artist to embark on a life’s foray as a pioneer of what would become known as conceptual art. Experimental practice demands more. Experimentation – this fluid word within architecture haunts the discipline. To experiment has always stood for something that attempts to go beyond in order to expand the finite orthodoxies of what is taught and the assumptions made in this world. It is an action that affords understanding. Experimentation in method and practice is enabled by curiosity, the desire to create and evolve. Even when the experiment fails it is during this struggle an offering emerges. At its heart experimentation is an attempt to ask more informed questions of the world and our participation in it. This act allows to move beyond building, style, economy, history or discourse. Architecture with all of its paradoxes…
As an architect and educator, Dr. Theodore Spyropoulos is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London, Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and resident artist at Somerset House. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and a teacher in UPENN, the RCA Innovation Design Engineering Department and the University of Innsbruck. In 2002 he co-founded with his brother the experimental art, architecture and design practice Minimaforms, whose work has been internationally recognized and exhibited. He has worked for the offices of Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Farjadi and Farjadi and Populous, and in 2013 was awarded the ACADIA award of excellence in educational work through the AADRL program.
Coming Next, Chapter 11…
Realising Architecture’s Disruptive Potential
by Shajay Bhooshan
