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Inertia of an Automated Utopia

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Inertia of an Automated Utopia machines, Negroponte sought to de-stabilize traditional conceptions of architectural authorship and that, by con- Inertia of an struing computers as social subjects, he aimed at redefin- ing a contemporary debate about human-machine interac- tion. The terms of this redefinition continue to influence Automated and limit our expectations about design, architecture, and technology. Utopia From “perfect slaves” to “mechanical partners” Design Commodities and Let us build machines that can learn, can grope, Authorial Agency 40 Years after and can fumble, machines that will be architec- 2 “The Architecture Machine” tural partners, architecture machines. When The Architecture Machine was published, computers were unique, expensive devices that only an academic and government elite had access to. However, the notion Daniel Cardoso Llach of widespread personal computing was already part of the American popular imagination, fueled in part by the In a concise history of architects’ embrace of computer-aid- awe-inspiring wartime advances in electronics and by the ed design (CAD) Robert Bruegmann notes that in the early contemporary promotion of technology and automation days of CAD two camps—Nicholas Negroponte and Yona as patriotic endeavors.3 The MIT School of Architecture, Friedman in one, and SOM in another—exemplified diverg- where Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group was ing conceptions of the role of computers in architecture.1 housed, was literally (and physically) immersed in an Whereas SOM pioneered the development of software intense climate of technoscientific advancement. MIT—the tools to automate aspects of the design of high-rise build- recipient of the largest sums of federal research funds ings, such as cost/area calculation for maximized revenue, during the Cold War—was the epicenter of research on me- Negroponte and Friedman developed socio-technical chanical sensors and actuators, cathode-ray tube monitors utopias where computers become partners of people in the and computer graphics.4 The work of Steven Coons, one of design of a “more humane” environment. They envisioned computers as “liberators” of design expertise, allowing people to bypass traditional architects and planners—pro- fessionals they saw as elitist middlemen—and the general- izing assumptions about dwellers that, in their view, drove the contemporary housing market. Nicholas Negroponte’s influential book The Architecture Machine, published in 1970 by the MIT Press, synthesized this provocative view of CAD in a collection of speculative scenarios and technological artifacts that projected design as an amiable conversation between humans and computers. While an array of fields celebrates The Architecture Machine’s pioneering enunciation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 55. Courtesy of MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Cambridge, MIT Press, of 1971), 55. Courtesy MIT Press, (Cambridge: of key computational paradigms, including gestural and windows-based interfaces, in this article I focus on aspects of The Architecture Machine’s cultural and institutional context to unfold its dimension as a social—not to men- tion architectural—critique. I show that by swapping the Figure 1. Photograph of an early CAD system altered by the author. Original from Nicholas Negroponte, Nicholas Negroponte, Original from by the author. altered an early CAD system 1. Photograph of Figure Machine The Architecture social roles of architects and dwellers through intelligent 39 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00158 by guest on 01 October 2021 Negroponte’s academic advisors, had a strong influence on However, the means and methods to achieve adaptability the ideas of The Architecture Machine. As a professor of me- were never discussed, and thus the concept remains as a chanical engineering, Coons led important developments suggestive device, a black box enclosing a computer’s po- in computer graphics and computer-aided manufacturing tential to revert the perverse effects of industrial standard- and was an enthusiastic advocate for the use of computers ization and of the notion of l’homme type on architectural in art, architecture and design.5 Coons conceived design as and urban spaces.12 an iterative process of representation and analysis where a “creative stage,” in which a design representation is cre- Clashing with the World or, “Ted, many conflicts are occurring” ated, was followed by a “mechanical stage,” in which the Instead of presenting a single artifact, as its title suggests, representation is tested against different metrics—such The Architecture Machine developed a collection of scenarios as mechanical stress and overall structural performance. and themes, the majority of which fell into one of two cat- Coons believed that the “creative stage” was better suited egories. In the first, computers were regarded as artificial for human designers while the “mechanical stage” could experts that guide the dweller through design choices until be successfully automated.6 In The Architecture Machine, a unique and optimal residential solution is reached—a Negroponte would adopt the technologies that Coons sort of architectural “expert system.”13 In the second, a helped develop as the constitutive elements of his vision, computer network was offered as a communication plat- but not without rejecting the dualism between creativ- form between a community and a human designer. The ity and analysis that rendered computers as the “perfect network’s central processor would interpret the communi- slaves” of a design process.7 Negroponte instead used a lan- ty’s preferences into clear spatial guidelines to be followed guage that endowed computers with human-like attributes by a human architect, thus penetrating what Negroponte such as curiosity and judgment, and construed human- considered “the designer-dweller dissonance that exists machine interaction as the “cohabitation of two intelligent in today’s housing problem.”14 As a proof of concept for 8 species,” as a symbiotic relationship that gave origin to an the first, “expert system” category, Negroponte presented Mass. Cambridge, MIT Press, of 85. Courtesy “extended designer,” and as an “ecology of mutual design URBAN5, a computer-aided design system comprising a complementation, augmentations, and substitution.”9 cathode-ray tube monitor, a keyboard, an optic pen, and Despite this key rhetorical difference, Coons’ themes are a small console with several controls—including a notori- noticeable throughout The Architecture Machine. Among ous “PANIC” button. Described as an experiment to test these the notion of adaptability deserves special analysis. the desirability of natural language as a communication Machine, The Architecture Coons distinguished between two different CAD philoso- medium between humans and machines, URBAN5 received phies: one that relied on a large set of specialized proce- text commands from the user and interpreted them as dures and another that relied on a single one that adapted geometric and spatial constraints [Figure 3]. The program to its context.10 In The Architecture Machine, Negroponte would then calculate a response based on user inputs, a echoed the contrast between these two philosophies by sort of architectural version of the early language-process- opposing the notion of flexibility—the capacity of a system ing program Eliza.15 URBAN5’s responses were displayed on to be extended within a fixed set of constraints—to the the cathode-ray tube monitor as compositions of three- notion of adaptability—the ability of a single computational procedure to find solutions to different problems. In Coons’ and Negroponte’s view, user interfaces and programming languages could provide flexibility, but not “true” adapt- ability: We have a condition where each designer is creat- ing his own library of services out of the problem- oriented [programming] language. Once created, note that these operations are no less rigid than the predefined package of design commodities.11 Figure 2. Early CAD system URBAN5 alerts the user “Ted” of design conflicts. From Negroponte, From Negroponte, design conflicts. of alerts the user “Ted” URBAN5 2. Early CAD system Figure 40 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00158 by guest on 01 October 2021 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00158 byguest on 01 October 2021 Figure 3. URBAN5 system. From Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 80. Courtesy of MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 41 dimensional cubes.16 In case of ambiguity in the inputs, URBAN5 would request further specification from the user; in case of conflicting constraints, URBAN5 would present gentle alerts on the screen [Figure 2]. However, URBAN5 did not fulfill Negroponte's expectations because it was unable to enact what were thought to be the attributes of a truly adaptable architecture machine. Playing is learning, but URBAN5 has not been sufficiently sophisticated actually to frolic; instead it has inexhaustibly printed garbage…. URBAN5 suggests true dialogue, suggests an evolutionary system, suggests an intelligent system—but, in itself, is none of these.17 An example of the second, “participatory” category is the “Hessdorfer Experiment,” in which three African-American men from “Boston’s ghetto area” were asked to interact with a machine—comprising a keyboard and a printer head remotely operated by one of the researchers—that interrogated them about their “urban needs” [Figure 4]. Mass. Cambridge, MIT Press, of 56. Courtesy
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