Carpo - The second digital turn: design beyond intelligence

WritingArchitecture series

A project of the Anyone Corporation; Cynthia Davidson, editor

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The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

Mario Carpo, 2017

Mario Carpo

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Filosofia OT and Trade Gothic LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carpo, Mario, author.

Title: The second digital turn : design beyond intelligence / Mario Carpo.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Series: Writing

architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054313 | ISBN 9780262534024 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262341233

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and technology. | Architecture--Information

technology. | Architecture--Computer-aided design.

Classification: LCC NA2543.T43 C37 2017 | DDC 720.72--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054313

ePub Version 1.0

While researching and writing this book I had to dabble in an inordinate number of disciplines and subjects, including some that are manifestly outside of my expertise. I am aware of the risks this entails; specialists in each of those fields will no doubt find errors of all sorts. As often happens, I could only outline a more general picture to the detriment of local detail; going against the logic of the artificial intelligence I try to describe, I was often obliged to merge, neglect, or compress plenty of data in order to allow some visible patterns to emerge. I am grateful in advance to the scholars and colleagues who will correct my arguments and flag my simplifications and omissions. I am also thankful to the many colleagues and friends with whom I discussed the ideas in this book over the course of the last three years, and who generously offered tips and advice: in particular, Alisa Andrasek, Marjan Colletti, Marcos Cruz, Christian Girard, Jeff Huang, Achim Menges, Marco Panza, Gilles Retsin, Jenny Sabin, Patrik Schumacher, Axel Sowa, and the faculty and students at the B-Pro program at the Bartlett School of Architecture, with whom I had many fruitful sessions and discussions. Almost weekly discussions with Frdric Migayrou left an evident trace throughout chapter 2, and Philippe Morel generously shared technical and mathematical insights, particularly on the history of spline making. A grant from the Bartlett School of Architecture allowed me to purchase some reproduction rights, and to hire Alexandra Vougia as a research assistant and Tina Di Carlo as a copy editor during the first phase of writing. Cynthia Davidson guided all stages of the making of the book, from conception and development to editing and delivery, with her usual flair and professionalism.

London, September 2016

Architects tend to be late in embracing technological change. This chronic belatedness started at the very beginning of the Western architectural tradition: Vitruviuss De Architectura, one of the most influential books of all time, was composed in the early years of the Roman Empire, but it described a building technology that, by the time Vitruvius put it into writing, was already a few centuries old. Vitruvius refers for the most part to trabeated, post-and-lintel structures, and he doesnt even mention arches or vaults, which were already a major achievement of Roman engineering. When Vitruvius mentions bricks, he seems to have in mind the primitive sun-dried brick of the early Mediterranean and Mesopotamian traditions; yet when writing his treatiseas a retired military engineer living on a pension from the Roman army and a grant from the emperors sisterhe was probably sitting in a modern Roman house made of solid bricks baked in a furnace. Why did Vitruvius choose to celebrate an obsolete way of building, and concoct the fiendish plan to bequeath to posterity a building technology that nobody, at the time of his writing, was using any more? We dont know. But perhaps it should come as no surprise that his treatise soon fell into oblivion, only to be revived fifteen centuries later by the Humanists of the Italian Renaissance, who, of course, could not make heads or tails of Vitruviuss often opaque technological and scientific lore. The most alert among Vitruviuss Renaissance readers did remark, meekly, that Vitruviuss treatise, and the extant Roman ruins they could still peruse all over Italy, did not seem to match.

But again, the technological ambitions of most Renaissance architects were simple at best, and early modern classicists did not need much technology to build in the classical styles they cherished. When the Renaissance came, European architecture had just gone through an age of astounding technical renewal: the high rises of Gothic spires and pinnacles were so daring and original that we still do not know how they were built (and we would struggle to rebuild them if we had to use the tools and materials of their time). But when Renaissance classicists and their Italianate style took over, the technical skills of the medieval master builders were abandoned, and early modern architecture fell back on the good old post-and-lintel structures of classical antiquity, this time with arches, vaults, and domes added when needed.

For centuries, and with few exceptions, modern classicism continued to stifle technological innovation in building: in the nineteenth century, while the Industrial Revolution was changing society, the world, and the way we build, architects mostly used the new industrial materials to imitate the shapes and styles of classical antiquity (and, at times, of other historical periods too). Even the golden age of twentieth-century modernism, when architects finally decided to come to terms with the industrial world, waswhen all the pizzazz is taken awaya sadly