Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture

by Paul Shepheard

A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species. According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are. In his writings, Shepheard examines old assumptions about architecture and replaces the critical theory of the academic with the active theory of the architect-citizen enamored of the world around him. Artificial Love weaves together three stories about architecture into one. The first, about machines as architecture, leads to speculations about technology and the human condition and to the assertion that machines are the sculptures of today. The second story is about the ways that architecture reflects the tribal and personal desires of those who make it. In the West, ideas of community, multiculturalism, and globalization compete furiously, leaving architecture to exist as it always has, as the past in the present. The third story features individual people experiencing their lives in the context of architecture. Here, Shepheard borrows the rhetorical device of Shakespeare's seven ages of man to propose that each person's life imitates the accumulating history of the human species. Shepheard's version of the history of humans is a technological one, in which machines become sculpture and sculpture becomes architecture. For Shepheard, our machines do not separate us from nature. Rather, our technology is our nature, and we cannot but be in harmony with nature. The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Genres: Architecture, Design, Philosophy

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Timmytoothless · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shepheard’s style is still enjoyable, as in the previous two books in this series, but this installment reads more as an academic’s slice-of-life musings than a slowly emerging outline of a theory of architecture’s place in a world of machines. The book starts to take some shape in its final quarter around some piercingly funny chapters, but it never manages to fully coalesce into a coherent whole.

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's official. I gave up on this one. I made it about half way through and just couldn't find a compelling reason to continue reading it. I'm certain that the author had a point - he just never seemed to get to anything resembling a way to get there.

There are some amusing short glimpses into the author's life - but the more I read the more he sounded a bit obsessive.

I think this would probably have worked out better if I had taken part in the lecture series this seems to be a collection of notes about.

[dersteppenwolf · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ojalá el libro fuera tan interesante como el título.

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really understand everything I just read, but I think I loved it. Would be good to read again and dissect in greater detail.