The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

Writing Architecture #21

by Mario Carpo

The first digital turn in architecture changed our ways of making; the second changes our ways of thinking. Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn , Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted—no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new technical logic of the digital digital mass-customization (the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost) has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything, and the same technology applied to commerce at large is now heralding a new society without scale—a flat marginal cost society where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. But today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind. 

Genres: Architecture, Design, Art, Nonfiction

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 13, 2017

Reviews

[Alessio Erioli · Rating 1 out of 5]

Definitely one of the most disappointing books I’ve read recently. Carpo is an historian, and although genuinely interested in a non-nostalgic future, he’s no futurist. If in “The alphabet and the algorithm” this inclination led to brilliant insights and traced interesting lineages across history providing interesting reflections on authoriality, design, and technology, in this book it overwhelms the reader with unnecessarily extended historical and personal anecdotes before getting to the point. A point which shows how little confidence he has with the current state of affairs (especially about technology and its potential philosophical implications), something that makes most of his analysis and discourse overly simplistic (when not self-contradicting or incorrect) when he strays out of the history path attempting to project towards the future.
Without going into further detail, two of the most disappointing traits pervading the book are outdated assumptions like linear asymptotic thinking (extending a trend linearly) and substitutive logic (quoting his way of putting it: “ceci tu era cela” this will kill that), both profusely disproven by the basics of complexity and systems thinking.

[Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This I found a bit lacking in detail. I might need to have some fundamental grasp of civil engineering, to understand the context. So the fault is probably mine. It includes some material concerning the history of 3D CAD/CAM in old manuscripts. This linkage, I haven't seen before.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learn a lot from Carpo books because he can effectively takes both the perspective of those in power and those honorable mentions whose ideas have been exploited towards ambiguous ends. Only reason I have this one rated lower than the others is that I found the concept of "order" to have been convoluted.

He makes it seem like it's all one way or the other. Like he's trying to reassure a paranoid consumer that the ordering of information is not as bad as it seems. That search engines don't even work that way phonetically. And for him to even bring that up when it was written is quick and progressive. I like that he has a strong sense of the future like that.

However, I have to disagree these years later. Temporal ordering by algorithms is just one of many uses, architectural or otherwise, to control information and the biopolitics associated with it. To be more specific, as I recall, I felt that I was dodging bad guys like Batman in "Gotham", and lured by a certain "Karp" right around this exact temporal location. But I speak out of turn. I digress.