Molly Wright Steenson - Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape

List of Illustrations

Alexander showed the relationship of requirements to each other in an object, using the example of the considerations that go into designing a kettle. By organizing the requirements in this fashion, a designer could break down the complexity of the design problem. NOTES ON THE SYNTHESIS OF FORM by Christopher Alexander, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright renewed 1992 by Christopher Alexander.

Alexander, with Sara Ishikawa and Van Maren King, applied the tree diagram and requirements grouping method to the design of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART). Christopher Alexander, V. M. King, and Sara Ishikawa, 390 Requirements for the Rapid Transit Station (Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure, 1964), 2. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander.

Alexander defined trees and semilattices as follows: Tree: A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection, either one is wholly contained in the other, or else they are wholly disjoint. Semilattice: A collection of sets forms a semi-lattice if and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, then the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection. Diagrams A and B show the relationship of overlapping sets that make a semilattice, whereas diagrams C and D show the independent sets that create a tree. A City Is Not a Tree favors semilattices and rejects trees. Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree, Part 1, Architectural Forum 122, no. 4 (1965): 59. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander.

A semilattice diagram shows the relationships between the vehicles, pedestrians, and other objects that make up a street corner in Berkeley. Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree, Part 2, Architectural Forum 122, no. 5 (1965): 59. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander.

Although he struggled to find semilattices in existing cities, the structure that Alexander proposed in The City as a Mechanism for Sustaining Human Contact is a semilattice. He developed twelve pattern statements, requiring houses (the black squares) to be within one hundred yards of twenty-seven other houses, accessible on through streets, with communal rooms visible from the street and next to a garden. Tracing diagonal lines along the sides of the pads in the figure produces a semilattice diagram. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander.

Twenty-six diagrams show considerations in the locating of highway routes. They are more literal than the figurative diagrams of the Indian village that Alexander includes in Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Christopher Alexander and Marvin Manheim, The Use of Diagrams in Highway Route Location: An Experiment (Cambridge, MA: School of Engineering, MIT, 1962), 7. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander and MIT Press.

The tree structure of diagrams for highway design, showing how the higher-level diagram encompasses aspects of the other diagrams. Christopher Alexander and Marvin Manheim, The Use of Diagrams in Highway Route Location: An Experiment (Cambridge, MA: School of Engineering, MIT, 1962), 1213. Courtesy of Christopher Alexander and MIT Press.

This composite diagram at the top of this tree rolls up all Alexanders subdiagrams that represent the dynamics of some functional aspect of the village in India that he used as a worked example in Notes on the Synthesis of Form. NOTES ON THE SYNTHESIS OF FORM by Christopher Alexander, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Copyright 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright renewed 1992 by Christopher Alexander.

Paul Baran characterized three kinds of networks similar to the ones depicted here: centralized, decentralized, and distributed. A centralized communications network was more vulnerable to attack, whereas communications could better reroute through a decentralized or distributed network. Pattern languages fall between decentralized and distributed networks. The distributed network topology was important for the architecture of the Internet.

Richard Saul Wurman chaired the 1976 AIA convention under the theme An American City: The Architecture of Information. It made information and its communication a concern of architecture, and made architecture an approach to organizing and navigating information. An American City: The Architecture of Information (Washington, DC: AIA, 1976). Image courtesy of The American Institute of Architects Archives, Washington, DC.

The attendees of the 1976 AIA Convention received a booklet, an illustrated fable titled What-If, Could-Be: An Historical Fable of the Future, illustrated by R. O. Blechman. Wurman was the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination of the country of What-If and the City of Could-Be. Wurman republished the contents of the fable in his 2009 book Understanding Change and the Change in Understanding. Image courtesy of Dan Klyn. Permission granted by Richard Saul Wurman.

In their visualization of urban demographic data, Joseph Passonneau and Richard Saul Wurman produced Urban Atlas: 20 American Cities. The atlas was, among other things, a way to experiment on the feedback loop between the information that a designer might assemble and how it would be visualized. This map of Minneapolis/St. Paul shows personal income levels throughout the cities, the darker dots referring to higher income. Joseph R. Passonneau and Richard Saul Wurman, Urban Atlas: 20 American Cities, a Communication Study Notating Selected Urban Data at a Scale of 1:48,000 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) with permission of Richard Saul Wurman and MIT Press.

In the Making the City Observable volume that Wurman edited for Design Quarterly, he situated the cities as systems for information and communication and environments for teaching and learning. Richard Saul Wurman, Making the City Observable, Design Quarterly, no. 80 (1971). Courtesy of the Walker Art Center.

LA Access was the first of many guides produced by Access Press, Wurmans publication company. He called it Access because the maps and guides were intended to offer a different kind of access to the city. This was the first edition of