Foreword

Nicholas Negroponte 

No, the architect is not dead.

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. Keep in mind this predates both the Internet and personal computers. However, MIT computer science at the time was popping, full of excitement and adventure. Among other things, it was the birthplace of artificial intelligence, and I was there, hanging around the AI lab, absorbing as much as I could get. I am very lucky to have been able to count Marvin Minsky as one of my closest and subsequently life-long friends. Imagine your formative years in design school, with Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman as your teachers on the one side, and the nascent field of AI on the other. It only took gall to put them together. Gall plus research funding, which naturally flowed from the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA). I joined the MIT faculty in 1968.

Trust me, it is easier to be a pioneer in a field nobody has imagined, than to make an imprint on an already established profession. I was off to declare my new intellectual pursuit of “computer aided design” attempting to redefine the role of the architect as not limited to simply architecting. I must admit in retrospect, as added value to some contributions herein presented, that audiences listened to me mostly because of where I was from and who was funding me.

Several people in this book refer to the early years of AI as some form of hand waving and not practicable for many years to come. While that may be true at the obvious level of computational power at the time, it is not correct to view the early days of AI, say from the late 50’s to the early 70’s, as a merely fanciful or a somewhat shallow period. Quite the contrary, the early thinkers actually thought about thinking. They were very deep thinkers themselves. I was privileged to be at many of those luncheons and dinners. Gordon Pask, Heinz von Foerster, Warren McCulloch, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert did not talk about self-driving cars or ask about searching large databases. They wanted to know what made something funny. Or, why do people like music? Or they might ask: could you think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something? In that group, architecture and computation were perfect bedfellows and I was welcomed company. There existed a natural tendency to be playful and experimental in the juvenile excitement that accompanied the investigation of technological unknowns and its possibilities. 

Today, so little of the built environment goes through the hands of architects, that this topic feels like a discussion on cuisine by focusing on pastry chefs. Pastry may be dead, but cooking is not. I have never practiced as an architect, but I practiced architectural thinking every day, and this should be enough to regard me as an architectural thinker. It is this method of thought, that lead to much of the computer aided design explorations of my era, as well as in the present. Architectural thinking is alive and well, thank you very much. 

But what is it? 

It is perspective, not IQ. When I went to school, we learned how to ask questions. My colleagues in Engineering, by contrast, solved problems. On the surface, solving problems seemed more immediate and beneficial to the world. But a lifetime later, I can assure you that framing a problem is every bit as important - even more important - than solving it. In fact, it takes great maturity to realize than a question can have more than one answer, and both can be right; whether you engage in participatory design with other humans or computers, and design by hand or by machine.

Upon finishing my Master of Architecture, I followed my then girlfriend (future wife) across the street to the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center, arguably for my first (and last) job. It only lasted one month, because an MIT Professor of Mechanical Engineering, named Steven Coons, fell ill and suddenly needed to take the year off for medical leave. He asked me to come back to MIT immediately and teach his courses in matrix algebra and 3D modeling, about which I knew almost nothing. You’ll learn, he said. And I did. 

While MIT is a world renown institution for the pursuit of science and technology, it also has another distinguishing property, maybe even more important: it tolerates crazies. When somebody asks why you are working on a problem, a perfectly good answer is: because. 

It was in this environment, at twenty-something, that I decided to build a glass pen about the size of a ping pong table, fill it up with a few hundred two-inch cubes and about fifty gerbils. A robotic gantry picked up the blocks, realigned them to where the gerbils had pushed them aside or knocked them over, as if the gerbils wanted them that way. SEEK, as we called it, was their architect and the arrangement of the blocks kept changing; the design of the gerbils’ space was in constant state of change. That is the closest I could come to computer aided architecture at the time.

It was with all the bravado of youth, that I postulated a computer could do anything an architect could do. Whether that was true or not, matters less than the aspiration of building machines with intelligence, including but not limited to design intelligence. The challenge of doing so includes, among other things, recognizing the difference between knowing and understanding. Machines might be able to think without bodies, but probably not be able to design without them. The ability to experience architecture is surely a fundamental requisite for a computer to be an architect. Imagine a cook that cannot eat and taste…

Read on. You will see both the field and its master havecome a long way since.

Athens, Greece, 23 March 2022

copyright Nicholas Negroponte 2024