Comparing the mental capacities of a computer geek with the data transmission capacities of the machine he uses, even if it can still be as provocative as it was 40 years ago, is, in truth, a challenge recovered from the 1970s. The question that provides the title to this essay is taken from a button launched in the 70s by Computerworld magazine as part of a series of collectibles featuring humorous wordplays relating to what was then a brand-new sub-culture obsessed with the information technologies. The idea that technological sophistication could serve, through their ease in causing wonder, to make up for shortcomings of diverse orders, is nothing new. Ever since the invention of the lever, man has augmented himself through his objects, and regardless of the degree of sophistication of the prostheses, they always give rise to the question as to where the instrument begins and the capacities of the person using it end. However, this will remain a question unanswered when one thinks that, unlike the processor, the human brain is probably the organ about which science knows the least and the one we have the greatest difficulties in evaluating.
Despite the major breakthroughs that the neurosciences have achieved in recent years, most of the secrets of our neural computation networks have still effectively to be decodified. Accordingly, the functioning of the human brain may still remain mysterious and romanticised. Without claiming total knowledge of the processes described above, Beatriz Colomina suggests that the comparison should be made, but in the effective simplicity of an analysis of the methods of representation of both components. In Skinless Architecture1 she argues that, to ask ourselves about the existence of a virtual architecture, we have to look at the means of representation of contemporary medicine. The issue of architectural representation being transferred from medical representation and health theories, an argument she also makes in Sexuality & Space2, would seem to take on new expression when the subject turns to digital architecture. After the Modern Movement, which Colomina interprets as a direct consequence of tuberculosis – treated by architects with hygiene and whiteness, sun, ventilation, physical education and life lived in the open air – the turn of the millennium has been marked by cancer, which is associated with mutation and the anomalous and out-of-control growth of cells, and HIV, with its connotations of devious behaviour closely linked to sexuality. This is also the era of obesity and the sedentary lifestyle and, at the same time, a pathological desire to be thin and obsession with the perfect body. It is in the context of this awareness, in an on-going period marked by widespread aesthetic surgery, 3D ecographs and laser surgery that we can point to the recent introduction of new architectural representation technologies, such as rapid prototyping machines – 3D printers, milling, laser cutting – in file-to-factory systems. The adoption of three-dimensional modelling programs as an integral tool in the spatial design process can likewise be an object of this reflection, to the extent that such programs now make possible real-time spatial projections that previously only the human brain was able to produce.
Bang Bang (My Baby shut Me Down)
Curiously enough, computer science was born out of the context of the warfare sciences, when, in 1941, the two first computers in history were developed to assist the war effort. In the midst of a worldwide conflict, the Colossus was developed in England, in a project led by Alan Turing aimed at breaking the code system of the German Enigma cipher machine. At the same time, at Harvard University, IBM developed the Harvard Mk I, in the quest for a system the US military could use to execute boring calculus tasks, such as the production of firing tables for the artillery. Later, in 1946, the American army sponsored the development, at the University of Pennsylvania, of another machine used by the military for ballistic trajectory-related calculations. These electro-mechanic machines are acknowledged as the first generation of computers. This was followed, from 1947 onwards, by a second generation that differed from the first generation through the introduction of a transistor. The appearance of the first integrated microchip circuit in 1959 marked the transition to the third generation, which gave way to the fourth and so far latest generation of computers in 1970, marked by the launch in that year of the first commercial microprocessor.
Although processor performance and data storage capacities have grown continuously since the 1970s, the hardware technology used by machines today is basically the same as when those processors first appeared. The ensuing development of the software industry led to the market launch of a series of progressively sophisticated computer aided design programs. In recent years these programs have reached remarkable levels of specialisation in a quest for ever-growing versatility and capacity of response to specific, and increasingly diverse, architectural problems. The speed with which they generate large amounts of data and the ease with which they make real-time modelling and visualisation of highly complex geometries possible mean that these new tools enable architects to effect spatial manipulations never before possible. The widespread use of these software programs in the practice of architecture is a relatively recent phenomenon, but despite the fact that the computer is only a recent addition to the design studio, and that it is easy to think we are the precursors of something, the truth is that we are only the latest version of an old story. It is important, therefore, to make it clear that the incorporation of computing processes in the exercise of architecture predates the emergence of CAD quite considerably. Before the image there was the process. And before the giddiness, the logic.
In the 1950s some ideas pertaining to cybernetics began to be discussed by architects in the avant-garde circles of the Independent Group in London, which discovered the emerging discipline in the USA. Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at MIT, had defined cybernetics in 1947 as the comparative scientific study of control and communication systems in the animal and the machine. The Independent Group’s intention in applying Wiener’s models to visual culture was, first and foremost, born out of their interest in understanding the complex nature of popular culture and the advantages of crossing it with the new thesis, which appeared able to provide a means to analyse that culture. Also in the post-war period in Europe, but in the distinct context of the Situationist International, Constant Nieuwenhuys developed his iconicNew Babylon project, the design of which – lasting from 1957 to 1972 – incorporated individual notions of cybernetics as technological support for the socialist ideas of the utopian Situationist city. Both in its origins and its development during the latter half of the 20th century, cybernetics was
applied to a variety of language-based systems – from the social sciences to business administration – and its integration into computer science was a direct consequence of its information control and analysis processes.
While the pioneers of cybernetics had some discreet impact on the architectural output of their day, it was not until the early 1960s that a new generation of cybernetics, strongly influenced by the figure of Gordon Pask, was to consolidate the relationship between cybernetics and architectural design. In 1953 Pask became a consultant for cybernetic systems to the design project for the construction of a socialist amusement, culture and education space in Lea Valley in London: the Fun Palace. Pask was to play a crucial role on the committee for the design project which Cedric Price, as the architect in charge, envisaged as a large flexible, living and moving structure akin to a shipbuilding yard. Through the establishment of a system of rules and the introduction of notions of dynamics, control and movement through technology, the architecture became a movable scenography of cranes, scaffolding, platforms and articulated modules that served the purpose of allowing the public to adapt and personalise the space, giving rise to a new type of leisure centre.
In the 1970s the premises of cybernetics led to speculation as to the possibility of the construction of a machine capable of creating buildings. In this context, the architect Nicholas Negroponte summarised in The Architecture Machine3 the results of a series of research projects carried out by his team at MIT into the possibility of creating a computational system for the automated generation of architecture. The research proved to be inconclusive, as it implicated sensitive processes such as interlocution, self-reflection and empathy – definitions that do not easily translate to the binary system of computer programming.
After the Fun Palace, in 1979 Cedric Price was responsible for Generator, a similar project sponsored by the Gilman Paper Company in Florida. Price’s design based its functioning on computational systems, for which the programming strategy was developed by Julia and John Frazer, who were also much influenced by Gordon Pask’s ideas on cybernetics. Generator consisted of a set of simple structural 4 x 4 m cubes, with each side equipped with a range of options. Each cube was to have inbuilt chips capable of informing a central computer as to its position and location. The computer was to be able to instruct a number of robotic cranes to relocate the cubes, thus configuring infinitely new architectural cases in line with the users’ needs. Generator was spatially proactive, given that it had the capacity to autonomously generate new, successive spatial configurations; it had a sense of its own archaeology, of fun and of repetition. Although it was never built – a fate shared by all preceding projects involving cybernetics – Generator remains as a fundamental milestone in the convergence between the two disciplines.
The 1990s began as the decade in which architects clearly began to appropriate the software tools the market offered. At the beginning of the decade a small number of vanguardists began conceiving spaces infiltrated by the new technology, very much based on the idea of cyberspace from the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, a new terrain conditioned by new ethereal rules. For these architects, the publication in 1991 of a collection of essays edited by Michael Benedikt and entitled Cyberspace: First Steps4 was a very important catalyst.
After working with the Generator team, in 1995 John Frazer published An Evolutionary Architecture5, a work in which he investigates the fundamental architectural form-generating processes alongside a huge scientific research project for a theory of morphogenesis of the natural world. The work proposes nature as the generating force of architectural form and a perspective in which architecture is considered as a form of artificial life that should be subjected to principles of morphogenesis, genetic codification, replication and selection, as in the natural world. In 1996 William J. Mitchell published City of Bits6, a conceptual approach to the digital architecture of the virtual large city, in which he examines various aspects of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ever-increasing presence of electronic devices in everyday life and the growing domination of software over materialised form.
In the last two decades the British magazine Architectural Design has taken on a central role in the publication of content related to computation matters. In 1995 Neil Spiller and Martin Pearce were the guest editors of the Architects in Cyberspace issue, which featured works by Marcos Novak, John Frazer, Neil Spiller and W. J. Mitchell7. It is probably the first monograph-like synthesis of a pronouncedly digital architectural output. From December 2003 to March 2004 the Centre Pompidou in Paris was the venue for the Non-Standard Architectures exhibition, the first large-scale show featuring a selection of works of contemporary architectural investigation focusing on the use of digital technologies in all design phases. Twelve teams of architects (Asymptote, dECOI, Greg Lynn FORM, NOX, Oosterhuis.nl, R&Sie(n), Servo, UNStudio and others) were invited to show built and speculative work that reflected the dynamism of their experiences of the relationship between architecture and computing.
In the revolution: pixels or hormones?
What one could call the digital revolution is, as we have seen, deeply rooted in the first half of the 20th century and is still an episode that is difficult to demarcate in time with any precision. One thing is certain, though: its very recent arrival on the domestic scene, given that its infiltration of everyday life is indeed a very recent development. It is also beyond doubt that its arrival as overwhelming, so much so that we at times are reduced to trembling in awe at the view of the global village we have from the windows of our computers. In the early 20th century, when mechanisation was going through a process of diffusion similar to that which we are experiencing now, that same tremulation and awe contributed to the emergence of celebrated artistic vanguards that reacted to the phenomenon first hand. The Italian Futurist movement was probably the most extreme and daring of those reactions – as impulsive and intense as teenage love. For the Futurists, the machine was so beautiful and absolute that everything that was not directly related to it became insignificant and, for that reason, could gladly disappear. According to its virile manifestos, the history of humanity should subjugate itself forever to the new invention of this all-conquering form, to which they recognised no alternatives. However, the heroic ideas they sought to spread found no expression beyond the inspiring words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the beautiful designs of Antonio Sant’Elia. And while these manifestations remain as the revered marks of a fearless vanguard, the 20th century went on to receive the machine in other forms, without the expressive hysteria of the Futurists having any great influence on that. José Bragança de Miranda explains, in “Machines: The Functional Impossibility”8, man’s fascination with technology on the grounds of the approximation it brought to something profoundly disquieting for mankind: the promise of perfection. For here, Miranda argues, to speak of perfection is to speak of eternity. To the extent that it is the inhuman side of the machine that saves it from mortality and for man that is the most important meaning of desire. Danger and perfection at the same time.
In his book Understanding Media, published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan looks at man’s blind love for technology in the chapter entitlted “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis”9, using the myth of Narcissus as an allegory for the almost hypnotic effect technology has had on mankind down through time. McLuhan argues that with the emergence of electrical technology man created, outside his body, a model of his own central nervous system, which allows him to perfect himself and, accordingly, love the self he sees in it. In his book, The Skin of Culture, Derrick de Kerchove, a disciple of McLuhan, also dedicates a chapter, entitled “Technofetishism”10 to these issues, in which, in addition to exposing his view of our fascination with technology as a fetish, he also adds his considerations on the ideas expressed in “Narcissus as Narcosis”. Supporting McLuhan’s idea that this anxiety is not caused (at least not exclusively) by the mechanisms of seduction of advertising or marketing strategies but by a voluntary projection of the individual through the gadget, de Kerchove brings in the additional idea of the potential of self-improvement, illustrated by the figure of the narcissistic cyborg who, with his own body transcended by the machine, insatiably seeks to perfect himself with each and every new invention in a spiral of never-ending and addictive upgrading.
This growing and effusive desire for continuous connection to the digital machine has also been studied by other authors who associate it directly with mechanisms of passion and erotic desire. Claudia Springer examines the hypothesis of contemporary techno-eroticism inElectronic Eros11. She explains the eroticism through the blurring of the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic that technology made possible, allowing finally for the so hoped-for fusion of body and machine that man has dreamt of for so long as the answer to all his dreams and limitations.
Michael Heim interprets the intensity of our connection with digital devices as a contemporary application of Plato. According to this author, our fascination with computers is, indeed, erotic in a symbiotic relationship and, in the final analysis, in a kind of mental marriage with technology. Heim also argues that the world processed with pure information not only fascinates our eyes, it also steals our hearts.
In recent years, some of the most renowned universities in the world have opened study programmes and set up research teams in the field of architecture and computing. In London, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architectural Association offer two of the most prestigious study programmes on these questions worldwide. Delft University of Technology has set up the Hyperbody laboratory and offers two master’s degree programmes in this field: one in Computational Architecture and one in Interactive Architecture. At Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, three reference study programmes are taught by Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid and Hani Rashid. Elsewhere in Europe – in Zurich, Stuttgart and Barcelona – and in the US – at MIT and Columbia University – similar study programmes have been created.
Many of these incubators of digital architects have emerged on the back of having already educated a significant community that profoundly believes in the possibilities of digital architecture. Even though little has been published of their work thus far, these small, illuminated ghettos, are very actively divulged within the scene through blogs, websites and other platforms, through which they avidly follow the works of their peers, thus taking on the aura of a secret society. More and more separated from, and even disinterested in, the more mainstream circuits of contemporary architecture, these digital whizz-kids seem to be going through puberty pixelised by the promise of the next big thing. With the sense of heroism of those who know they are at the forefront of developments, they can be seen as a more sophisticated version of the chests swollen with pride of Italian Futurism in that it seems that they, at times, want to move only in closed cycles of awe in relation to their new instruments, but also in relation to themselves.
How to love a monster
As Umberto Eco points out in History of Beauty12, since the appearance of the first mechanical looms man has always expressed his horror of machines. Their strangeness and a lack of knowledge of their real power have indeed given rise in human beings to a fear of any new device that promises an upgrade of modern life and, at the same time, threatens to take control of it. Most of the architectural output that is pronouncedly digital in its genesis – with its functional ambiguity, its fluid, anthropomorphic, mutating or even alienogenic complexity – easily feeds this kind of generalised irritation in relation to the threat of its domination. Not very democratic, and for that reason not very loveable, it comes frequently in the form of difficult-to-read images. In the certainty (at times, almost arrogance) of their visual impact, rarely do these digital creatures have a clear capacity to communicate beyond that impact. We always fear what we don’t know, and when that which we don’t know even appears to have claws and teeth in a video game about the apocalypse, the monster is not an easy thing to love. There is no doubt that digital tools have enabled the development of unprecedented aesthetic investigation, but many doubts will remain as to the real impact of that new aesthetic on the architecture of the 21st century.
In the early 20th century, well into the age of the machine, Oskar Schlemmer began to express, at the Bauhaus, his concerns in relation to the unquestioned and passive acceptance of the new monster that threatened architecture, art and life at the time. In his essay, “Man and Art Figure”13, Schlemmer embraces mechanisation as the true emblem of his period, recognising in it the marvellous potential for generating entirely new hypotheses and the promise of the most daring fantasies. However, faced with a scenario in which, he argues, everything that could be mechanised already is mechanised, the mastery was merely in recognising what could never be mechanised. But that intimate and precious place was, according to Schlemmer, seriously threatened by a generation of creators, which, absorbed by the avalanche of technological advancement they were witnessing, accepted the marvels of the machine as completed forms of art.
Schlemmer, who saw them merely as instruments and pre-requisites for true creation, denounced the imminent approach of art without purpose – art that was profoundly alienated from the truth, from subtlety and the human genius. The materialistic and practical era had, he argued, lost its true sense of diversion and the miracle.
In the era of the new machine that same sense of nervousness and insecurity remains. While, on the one hand, the architects of this digital avalanche seem to have forfeited, somewhere along a line of code, some of that space to the miracle and, above all, to diversion, on the other hand, the general opinion seems to not want to leave the consensual zones of comfort in which the personal computer still lives in the contradictory cliché of people finding it “very impersonal”. The last decade has, however, seen some committed effort at mediation between the two extremes. Committed because it does not just place hot towels on the discussion, because, in more ways than one, it risks taking hold of the monster and making it more easy to love, and simply because it offers it what Schlemmer referred to one hundred years ago: a purpose.
Diller and Scofidio did this in 2002, by way of example, through an old well-known, and almost always effective, manoeuvre: humour. Taking the cliché of interactive architecture, one of the promises of this era, they designed the Blur Building as an amorphous mass that was possible thanks to major investment in technological systems. As a good-humoured reaction to the contemporary dictatorship of HD and the trend towards world exhibitions being a showcase for technological virtuosities without end, they proposed for the Swiss Expo a pavilion of intentionally low resolution that was simultaneously a banner for the anti-spectacle. The building is nothing more than a mass of fine mist, inside which the visitors lose what Diller and Scofidio regard as a modern-day epidemic: dependence on vision. Unable to see beyond the first unfocussed plane, users explore the space with the help of an interactive navigation system designed in collaboration with an artist and a team of electronic media developers. The high-definition visual fidelity of immersive environments is contrasted with this analogue mist that furthers disorientation and, accordingly, recovery of the true sense of experience.
François Roche from R&Sie(n), who carries out work that is very much infiltrated by digital technologies, uses ecology as a weapon to offer purpose to his artistic exercise. The untouchable concept of sustainable architecture is without doubt a noble purpose and a green monster will always be a more docile monster. However, Roche does not limit himself to putting a green label on his designs and letting them create that respectable reputation by themselves.
Phenomena such as global warming (in recognition that the ecosystems were violently altered and that the natural world is reacting out of control) are for him the only and real reason why one can now design building with morphogenesis principles. A paradigmatic example, which Roche recurrently cites when speaking of his works, is a recent evolutionary phenomenon: hermaphroditic mutations of polar bears. Subject to the acceleration of evolution caused by global warming, in a scenario in which wildlife is force to deal directly with the danger, the polar bear negotiates and absorbs the change, subjecting itself naturally to the sexual and physiological mutations necessary for the adaptation of its body and its identity to the present-day conditions. For Roche, this is the behaviour model that the contemporary architect should assume – mutation, symbiosis, adaptation – taking into account the ecological and technological conjuncture of our time, negotiating while avoiding both the moralising path of aiming to purify the planet and the catastrophic path of refusing to acknowledge the dramatic implications of his changes.
Marc Fornes, who trained at the AA and began his career at Zaha Hadid’s firm, now carries out architectural research at his THEVERYMANY collective that is heavily centred around computation. In his work, the commitment to digital processes as a means of speculation for new forms of building is clear. The parallelism between structural investigation and aesthetic investigation is, without doubt, the full purpose of his work. Fornes’ research has focused most recently on attempts at fusion between structure and surface, exploring the possibilities of developing self-supporting skins in double-curved geometries.
Labrys Frisae is an installation he created in 2011 for Art Basel Miami in which he applied one of the structural systems he is currently researching: the use of linear components – here laser-cut in aluminium sheeting – to embody complex surfaces. Defining these components (of which there are more than 10,000 in Labrys Frisae) and the system of aggregation between them, involves modelling, surface analysis and material investigation processes that are solely possible through advance computation methods.
The weapons of seduction are, as is known, something one should not speak much about. Particularly not in public. But these three – humour, ecology and structural systems – called upon here to given a lesson in how a monster can be loved, also serve, very much appositely, to illustrate a kind of response to the question with which we began. Is the brain as good as the machine? It should be. Because intelligence, strangely enough, is quite easily seen. |
* based on the masteris thesis “Anatomia Now: o corpo na arquitectura da revolução digital”, apresentada ao presented to the Departamento de Arquitectura da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra in July 2011, under the orientation of Jorge Figueira.
1 Cf. Beatriz Colomina. Skinless Architecture. [Online.] Thesis. Weimar : Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Nº 3 (2003), p. 122-124. [Consult. 3 Mar. 2012]. Disponível em: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:W3_Aa89DqhcJ:e-pub.uni-weimar.de/opus4/files/1254/colomina.pdf &hl=pt-PT&gl=pt&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg7Bnwvop_xxacJ9khKYY_9ZmKjJqnid1wdZW4Rn3Xer4pap2GKFEFZwl3g_
2 Cf. id. The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. in Sexuality & Space. Beatriz Colomina, ed. Meaghan Morris [et al.]. New York : Princeton University School of Architecture, 1996. (Princeton Papers on Architecture; 1), p. 76-130.
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3 Cf. Nicholas Negroponte. The Architecture Machine: Towards a More Human Environment. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1970. ISBN 0-262-64010-4.
4 Cf. Michael Benedikt, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. William Gibson [et al.]. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, © 1991. ISBN 0-262-02327-X.
5 Cf. John Frazer. An Evolutionary Architecture. [Online]. London : Architectural Association, © 1995. ISBN 1-870890-47-7. [Consult. 20 Mar. 2012]. Available at: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/intro.html
6 Cf. William J. Mitchell. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, © 1991. 232 p. ISBN 0-262-63176-8. [Online, 110 p.]. [Consult. 20 Mar. 2012]. Available at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:cKM0q_XCbEUJ:www.kejvmen.sk/cob.pdf &hl=pt-PT&gl=pt&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjIZ9RcBplueDNHmUyVbLxr3xMwm9Uy2ejIwyWPoBXGjjhWWBiK_7ZjzSyexiv3hrfndSGAGk5hZHhsJ1qB5KoyRYEbso7igq-Dprv8WKXk6a_z_bdlecqHS5J3M7n
7 See texts compiled in: Martin Pearce; Neil Spiller, eds. Architects in Cyberspace. Martin Pearce [et al.] London : Architectural Design, 1996. (Architectural Design Profile; 118).
8 Cf. José Bragança de Miranda. Machines: The Functional Impossibility. [Online.] Prototypo. Lisboa : StereoMatrix. Nº 1 (Jan. 1999). [Consult. 21 Mar. 2012]. Available for consultation at: http://www.prototypo.com/Essays/Essays1/001_1.htm
9 Cf. Marshall McLuhan. The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis. in Understanding Media: The extensions of man. [Online]. New York : McGraw Hill, 1964, p. 45-52. [Consult. 21 Mar. 2012]. Available for consultation at: http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog/files/2010/10/mcluhan_understanding_media.pdf
10 Cf. Derrick de Kerchove. Tecnofetichismo. in A Pele da cultura: uma investigação sobre a nova realidade electrónica. Lisboa : Relógio d’Água, 1997.
11 Cf. Claudia Springer. Electronic Eros. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1996. 192 p. SBN: 978-0-292-77697-5.
12 Cf. Umberto Eco. A História da Beleza. Miraflores : Difel, 1999. 438 p., ilust. ISBN: 9789722907163.
13 Cf. Oskar Schlemmer. Man and Art Figure. in Walter Gropius; Arthur Wesinger, eds. The Theatre of the Bauhaus. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 17-32. ISBN: 0801855284.