Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape

by Molly Wright Steenson

In Architectural Intelligence, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies—including cybernetics and artificial intelligence—into their work and influenced digital design practices from the late 1980s to the present day.

Alexander, long before his famous 1977 book A Pattern Language, used computation and structure to visualize design problems; Wurman popularized the notion of “information architecture”; Price designed some of the first intelligent buildings; and Negroponte experimented with the ways people experience artificial intelligence, even at architectural scale. Steenson investigates how these architects pushed the boundaries of architecture—and how their technological experiments pushed the boundaries of technology. What did computational, cybernetic, and artificial intelligence researchers have to gain by engaging with architects and architectural problems? And what was this new space that emerged within these collaborations? At times, Steenson writes, the architects in this book characterized themselves as anti-architects and their work as anti-architecture. The projects Steenson examines mostly did not result in constructed buildings, but rather in design processes and tools, computer programs, interfaces, digital environments. Alexander, Wurman, Price, and Negroponte laid the foundation for many of our contemporary interactive practices, from information architecture to interaction design, from machine learning to smart cities.

Genres: Design, Architecture, Technology, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Computers

312 pages, Hardcover

Published December 22, 2017

Reviews

[Rilka]

Started reading this book over the summer as penance after I glibly slandered Christopher Alexander in front of someone I met at a party. I'm so glad I did. It almost felt like a comfort read, a map of meaning for someone (me) who wandered into architecture from software and isn't quite sure what to do now or afterward. I lost steam around the Negroponte/MIT Media Lab part (which is why it took me so long to actually finish), but the sections on Richard Saul Wurman, Christopher Alexander, and Cedric Price were gold. Overall Steenson produces this really fascinating, trippy picture of how architecture is inextricably entangled with digital interface and information and system design, how we can redefine the limits of the built environment in the 21st century, and how to situate a human-centric approach to design amidst it all.

And Steenson is the perfect person to write about all this. Her background is wild (designed the Netscape search page, then got an architecture PhD, idk just go look at girlwonder.com lol) and, like, I might be biased, but she just really gets it!! I've spent the past year and a half struggling to translate between tech people and architecture people and reading Steenson is amazing because she is neither and both. All of my friends should read this book. That's all.