AUTOMATION TAKES COMMAND 103

Automation Takes Command KIEL MOE Syracuse University

INTRODUCTION

This paper departs from a few assumptions about in architecture that derive from the history and philosophy of technology. The first is that every technology is social before it is technical or physical.' Technical development is first an expression of an immaterial need or desire, and only later becomes material and technical. Secondly, when a technology does become physical, it is not a benign reserve of technical solutions to social, ecological, or fabrication problems but rather produces its own risks and problems as a constitutive fact of that technology. All contain some form of risk.2 Third, any technology is not new. If we will understand technology at all, we will begin to see it as an uninterrupted and ubiquitous practi~e.~All technologies have a long period of social, cultural, technical, and practical preparation. In our mythical paradigm of progress and technical mastery, terms such as Figure 1. Fire "new" are merely rhetorical escalations. Finally, every technology is principally NUMERICAL CONTROL undetermined until it situated within the broader economic, social, and cultural When you examine the infrastructure and assembly that presupposes and engenders of the most common digital fabrication that te~hnology.~We will know very little appliances, you quickly realize that most of its about the capabilities and culpabilities of apparatus is familiar if not archaic. Take for technology if we only study a technology in instance, the two most common cutting terms of its technical performance in building mechanisms in CAD/CAM technologies: the production. These four principles orient an rapidly rotating bit and the laser. The approach to technology that aims at a broader router bit is merely a refined application of the understanding of technical effects, as archaic partial rotary motion tools such as the evidenced in the case of digital fabrication fire-drill, bow-drill, and pump-drill used techniques in architecture. throughout archaic world as boring and cutting tools.5 (figure 1) For the part of the laser, the application of concentrated energy to cut by heating and thereby severing molecular bonds is but a refined form of the and that cut with similar but less concentrated applications of heat and 104 GEnING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW

fri~tion.~Now these technologies obviously the west that Numerical Control explicitly and have undergone massive refinement officially emerged as a consistent technique of especially through the mechanical and regularization and routini~ation.~ The electronic paradigms of the lgth and 20~ Benedictine monasteries at the beginning of centuries, but their operative principles the last millennium synchronized the liturgical remain in tact. hours with a bell tower mechanism, creating a mechanized machine of time. The monastery What is 'new,' and thus the source of our regularized the spatial and temporal behavior extravagant expectations for digital of the monks but in doing so also fabrication, is the control of a cutting bit along fundamentally transformed our experience of a path, no longer controlled by the extremely duration. Our physiological systems were no sensitive neurological-muscular apparatus of a longer synchronized to the rhythms of the technician but now by a computer. sun, seasons, and free morphogenesis but Numerical Control is the technique that would rather be mechanized by numbers. enables CNC operations, parametric design These clocks changed everything in the west techniques, and the management of design by initiating an endless succession of information as in the case of BIM's and "mass quantitative methods whose fundamental customization." Numerical Control is the ambition was to coordinate human production primary technique in digital fabrication of all sorts, a constant theme of Numerical technologies. Numerical Control was the term ~ontrol." developed by the Air Force after World War I1 in their search for an elaborate manufacturing Numerical Control migrated from the system capable of producing primarily Benedictine monastery clock and bell repetitive and occasionally complex mechanism into the market centers of components for warplanes and weapons European towns to regularize and control system^.^ While this history of military trade. As the emerging capital model of trade enterprise in the 1950's is important, it is physically shaped Europe, the incorporation of important to establish first the cultural double entry book keeping was the next preparation of Numerical Control in significant application of Numerical Control at architecture and our adjacent disciplines. A this time. Double entry bookkeeping brief history of Numerical Control will establish regularized the financial transactions and where, when and how the concept and standardized a system for controlling the implementation of Numerical Control derives. numbers involved in monetary transactions. It is not new. It is in fact a deep and Soon after this, the laws of perspective, pervasive impulse in all that we call modern. cartography, and the mathematics of planetary motion, would do for space what the What was the effect of the introduction of clock had done for time in terms of Numerical Control into Western technics? regularization and quantification. In architecture, the laws of perspective, the The history of Numerical Control is a history of quantification of the orders, and the a technique that is used most effectively to deployment of grids and regulating lines each regularize, routinize, and quantify that which relate to this history of Numerical Control. is otherwise is qualitative. There is no better term to describe impetus behind the As our infatuation in the west with Numerical development of western technics, western Control proceeded into the industrial capitalism, the bureaucratic command and revolution, the famous Jacquard loom with its control apparatus, and our current paradigm punched card programs for the warp and weft as a risk society than the term Numerical is emblematic of an era of proto-cybernetic control.' To be sure, Numerical Control is a machines. In addition to such machines, the technical concept that extends beyond development of Numerical Control for material our nascent digital fabrication practices in science was equally important. The early architecture. efforts to quantify materials into a science were not of civilian origin but rather the While there were many notable Numerical product of military enterprise. In the 19'" Control devices throughout the prelapsarian century US Army Ordnance Department our world that dampened an erratic and harsh understanding of matter itself slowly becomes prehistoric life, it was in the monasteries of AUTOMATION TAKES COMMAND 105

increasingly engineered, that is controlled by permanent war for permanent peace numbers. dominated the production of new knowledge and technology throughout the twentieth Following the narrow victory of the War of century in the United States and ultimately 1812, The US Army Ordnance Department engendered digital fabrication. The notion of redirected its efforts from merely storing permanent war for permanent peace involves munitions to developing completely consistent a massive defense expenditure and, as was fabrication processes and materials that would demonstrated in WWII, battles were won and produce interchangeable components for their lost as much in offices and the factories as firearms. The Ordnance Department produced much as the theater of battle.'' What is more master jigs that could control the production interesting to note is that these advancements of weaponry in their factories throughout the from the Ordnance department were produced United States. This approach regularized the in and designed for an economic context that materials and methods of geographically is unrelated to the market economy in which distinct production through an elaborate architects practice. If we are to understand command and control style bureaucracy. the technologies and techniques that emerged from the lgth century at all as preparation for The Ordnance Department production digital fabrication, we must acknowledge this methods prepared the post World War I1 economic condition and its implications. The development of Computer Numerical Control US Army Ordnance department in the 19~ (CNC) in a variety of important ways. First, century was a mechanical rehearsal for the the Ordnance Department was the original development of electronic Numerical Control production system regularized by a broad techniques and technologies in material bureaucratic organization controlled by a production that occurred in the 1950's in the network of unified materials, patterns (jigs), United States. and communication (telegraph and railroad).'' Consequently, by the turn of the century, in In the escalating the arms race of the cold was these lgth century arms dealers that War, The Air Force developed a set of would go on to develop and perfect what is specifications for a manufacturing process that known as 'American System of Management required the consistent production of and Manufacture' or more commonly as machined components for use in fighter scientific management-the most common planes and other weapon systems.16 Lucrative application being the familiar Taylorized Department of Defense contracts sponsored assembly line.'* Second, the of the the research and development program. cannon, the rifle, and the conoidal bullet Initially the MIT Servomechanism Lab, along systematized material science in the United with a commercial helicopter rotary States. As such, the Ordnance department manufacturer, developed the Numerical initiated much of engineering design and Control System that is the basis for training in the United States as we now contemporary CAD and CAM systems." This practice it.13 This engineering research in part hardware and software system had the engendered the innovative metallurgical following notable developments: the use of architectural practices of James Bogardus and the first computer aided drafting program, the William Le Baron Jenney. Many of the first intercontinental-networked design and interesting architectural developments that production practice, and of course the first shaped the later 19" and early twentieth numerically controlled machines. centuries relate to the material research in Ordnance department. Third, the switch to The primary objective of this Air Force standardized production in the Ordnance initiative was to automate the production factories resulted in significant labor disputes process. The system was perfectly rational to that resulted in abandoning the standardized the Air Force. Interchangeable modules production in its Maryland facility. Finally, the designed in one location and then data tapes funding structure of the Ordnance Department sent to another or any other for production, was the first expression of a permanent war an electronic application of the mechanical jig- economy. In this unique economy, research, based system of the Ordnance Department a development, and trade are not related to the century before. This system with its top-only market but rather to massive defense hierarchy was specified rather than other contracts.14 The military enterprise concept of Numerical Control systems that still relied 106 GElTING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW

upon the intelligence of the technician while and capabilities of digital fabrication and automating certain aspects of a task.'' As a numeric control while grossly underestimating dream of the fully automated factory, the the confluence of the social and the technical whole system aimed only at the perfect in forces that shape the . uniformity and repetition of machined parts. However, to do so, the production process One such confluence is the repeated historical eliminated all variables, from the material to relationship between Numerical Control the human. Numerically controlled machines implementation and urbanism. Alongside this replaced human machinists. The Air Force history of digital fabrication runs a parallel dreamt of fully automated factory floors, history of labor and production. In the period producing perfect, complex components sketched out above, you can see labor change around the clock. This system famously from human production to production and claimed to have shortened the loop between then from the tool to the program, a process design and production. Management which aims to automate machine production communicated directly with and therefore with minimal human interaction. Directly commanded the machine. This conception of associated with this technical progression is a the technology-a neutral reserve of technical digression in the required knowledge, skill and capabilities and no conception of technical practice required by human labor. Most often, culpabilities remains in active the paradigm of this diminishes the value and the wage of digital fabrication in architecture today. labor itself. Numerical Control routinely devalues human judgment, skill, self-reliance, Euphoric pronouncements of the capabilities initiative, and creativityS2O The literature of and the unspoken culpabilities of Numerical digital fabrication will no doubt familiarize you Control characterized the Air Force's with the capabilities of digital fabrication Numerical Control program. Similar techno~ogies.~' Rarely, if ever, do they pronouncements are the source for our familiarize you with the culpabilities of digital extravagant and hubristic expectations for the fabrication technologies. They make no building . Numerical Control is just mention of the atrophy and depletion of that: it is merely a set of techniques for human skill in digital design and fabri~ation.~~ controlling numbers. However, Numerical Nor do they make no any plan for the Control does not control the tyrannical and dislocation and displacement of work that oppressive cruelty that uncritical practices results in structural unemployment, an effect engender in the numerically controlled modes clearly felt in the late seventies and early of advanced capitalism.lg Numerical Control eighties when factory production in the does not manage its own social effects as it automotive industry transferred to automated automates production. In this way, if any production that sunk much of the upper technology is social before it is technical, this Midwest into deep economic and skill brief history of Numerical Control is depression. simultaneously a history of social relations and social construction. The technology In the case of the automotive industry's transfer concept, in which military switch to digital fabrication-as in the case of technologies such as the computer, radar, the the US Navy's mandate of containerization in jet engine, the transistor, and the federal the fifties that sacked the labor of American highway system, transfer from military harbors and the US Army's Ordnance enterprise into more or less benign and Department's mandate for mass- beneficial civilian usage, is now a well- interchangeable production in the lgth documented process. However, in all these century-the promoters of these technologies cases, military technologies are not the only promise that these new practices will in effects transferred in the process. Numerical balance produce more jobs than they Control is no exception. Technology transfer eliminate. Yet in every case, labor suffers and also transfers a set of inseparable social we continue choose the economics and effects. These effects are as real as any CNC urbanism of structural unemployment when milled object. Therefore, an enormous yet we choose an enthusiastic yet unstudied unspoken social project is implicit in the application of Numerical Control. Why is this arguments for digital fabrication and type of structural unemployment implicit in Numerical Control. The current literature on the arguments for Numerical Control in the digital fabrication exaggerates the possibilities building industry, not of interest to architects AUTOMATION TAKES COMMAND 107

and urbanists? Why design systems of the US Government, thereby placing it outside production that waste, eliminate, and the market economy in which architects annihilate knowledge and skill as much as typically practice.26 Numerical Control was they promise to produce? developed, and will be optimized, in contexts of massive capital investment. Such One repeated answer that with digital investment is not commonly possible within fabrication one can shorten the process, or our market economy but rather only possible even close the loop of design and production. with heavy government subsidies as in the To do so, such positions recycle the image of case of our military industrial complex. It is the master builder.23 It is perhaps tempting to unlikely that architecture will see the scale of restore to the architect the romantic image of funding required to broadly transform its the master builder as practice becomes production techniques. increasingly abstract and removed. However, architects do not build buildings and are not There is another fundamental difference master builders. They rely heavily upon the between the buildings, boats and airplanes trades to advance knowledge about the that is hard to ignore when you think about appropriate products, materials, techniques, the logistics of automated production. The and detailing that guide decisions about designs and production methods of the design. Architects need the accumulated aerospace and ship building industry rely upon intelligence inherent in the physical side of the a simple and very elegant principle: despite building industry. Further, the misplaced their great weight, planes and boats . If concreteness of romantic master builder their design and production is successful, their distracts the architect as they ignore other, products simply float away from the factory. actual effects of digital fabrication. Nearly all buildings have a radically different operating principle: to sit on specific sites for The system of Numerically Controlled specific durations. fabrication specified by the Air Force and subsequently transferred to civilian use As opposed to the inevitable architectural depends upon an unreal uniformity of specificity due to building codes, unknown site conditions for it to work at all. Even when it constraints and climate factors, these has worked, it raised as many social and industries direct their federal subsidies to the economic problems as it solved. When it did capital-intensive infrastructure that is required not work, the effects of Numerical Control to produce dozens or hundreds of the same were devastating on all fronts.24 Yet there is whereas architects inevitably aim to no account of these problems in the digital make customized solutions for distinct sites. It fabrication literature in architecture. seems that the repetitive effects of the Numerical Control procedures will come to A recurrent fallacy in the history of Numerical characterize digital fabrication in general Control is that digital fabrication will improve because the historical assemblage of the very production of architecture and the regularization techniques that presupposes it building ind~stry.~'Such arguments point to is infinitely stronger than the fragile versions developments in other industries such the of a few boutique architects attempting to tap aerospace or ship building industries, and ask into this assemblage, especially because they why architecture has not developed so little effort to understand it. Those who production techniques in parallel progressions. derive the most benefit from the effects of The primary answer is simple and powerful: routinization and management of numbers will architecture engages a vastly different market most effectively employ digital fabrication. structure. In every instance since the Numerical Control is not about customization industrial revolution, the techniques that have or mass customization but thoroughly about altered these other forms of Numerical Control regularity and uniformity-which are far more fabrication have done so outside the market powerful and profitable techniques than economy in which architects practice. The customization. The only thing that looks more Army Ordnance Department, the US Navy's like a mass-customized, prefabricated house attempt at assembly line production during is another mass-customized, prefabricated WWI with Henry Ford, the US Air force CNC house. There is a reason for this repetition: program, and the NASA space exploration efficiency. However, why will these efficiencies program each relied on immense funding from promoted in the digital fabrication literature 108 GElTING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW

not in turn have the effect of broadly lowering exhausted tectonics. What is unique to this yet again the economic expectations of project is the particular way in which digital architectural production? Will qualities not fabrication intersects a low-tech building once again slip away to quantities? Do we material and relatively low tech building crew really want to argue for less yet again as a to yield an advanced project. Here the profession? Numerical Control infrastructure was deployed in a minor way to cut templates that Despite the unstudied appropriation of facilitated the raking and corbelling of the Numerical Control in architecture, there are masonry to fit particular curves. exceptions that strategically use Numerical Control techniques in a minor way to achieve large-scale effects. These practices are not dominated by Numerical Control and the ambition to 'revolutionize' the building industry but rather use it for their own productive ends.

Two practices and projects illustrate a deeper engagement with minor applications of digital fabrication.

Figure 3. Office DA templates.

The templates and the resultant curves are mildly interesting, but the fact that the designers were engaged with and thinking through the implications of the particular building crew (their abilities and liabilities) while generating and modifying the form of this project is very interesting. The labor condition in this project directs the use of digital fabrication rather than aiming to eliminate that labor condition. This project also demonstrates for this crew that other possibilities and techniques exist for masonry assembly, thereby expanding the crew's repertoire and abilities. It is the knowledge expanding role digital fabrication plays in this project's dialectic of architectural intelligence Figure 2. Office DA. Raking masonry wall. and labor intelligence that the truly novel aspect of this project. The first project that comes to mind is the Tonxgxian Gatehouse in Beijing by Office DA. The second practice is a series of projects that (figure 2) The project is familiar amongst the Gilles Perraudin has completed in Southern architects' work in its preoccupation with France. (figure 3) In this practice, Perraudin unlikely forms derived from basic but AUTOMATION TAKES COMMAND 109

also deploys digital fabrication in a minor role. generates. CNC is not a benign solution to a Instead of forging radical shapes with technical problem but in this case carries deep traditional labor, he forges a complex social effects and potentials. In order to relationship between energy, material, and project effective theories, techniques and climate with a very simple shape. In a series technologies in architecture, it is vital to of related projects, Perraudin extracts stone substantiate the deep influences that shape blocks from an adjacent and otherwise technical practices. In architecture, we need inactive stone quarry. He then water jet cuts to think and act more rationally about this the stone to precise repetitive blocks. The presumably most rational of our endeavors. blocks' great weight and ultra-flat surfaces An expanded view of technology that includes allow mortar free assembly. The whole wall its full assembly of social, economic, assembly is up in a few days. The minimal ecological, political, and technical forces would doors, glazing and roof are installed shortly advance or conception and practice of thereafter. The block's thermal mass technology in architecture. modulates interior comfort with no other mechanical devices. In the case of this project, digital fabrication engenders a type of ''Tools always presuppose a machine, and the construction that deploys archaic but machine is always social before it is technical. There intelligent material knowledge. In these is always a social machine which selects or assigns projects, digital fabrication is minor but the technical elements used.' Deleuze, Gilles and essential because it is what allows the dry construction of an extremely durable and thus Claire Parnet. Dialogues 11. Columbia University embodied-energy building. Press, New York. 1987. p. 70. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a new Modernity. SAGE Publications, London. 1992.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York, 1963.

Deleuze, Gilles. 'Treatise on Nomadology.' A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1987.

Childe, V. Gordon. "Rotary Motion." p. 187-215 of Singer, Charles, E.J. Holland, and A.R. Hall, eds. A Figure 4. Perraudin stone assembly. History of Technology. Vol. 1: From Early Times to Fall ofAncient Empires. Oxford University Press: New York, 1955. In this volume, Harrison and Childe provide an excellent account of the partial rotary and full rotary motion tools for drilling and in the archaic world.

Harrison, H.S. "Fire-Making, and Lighting." p. 220-230 of Singer, Charles, E.J. Holland, and A.R. Hall, eds. A History of Technology. Vol. 1: From Early Times to Fall of Ancient Empires. Oxford Universih Press: New York, 1955.

Reintjes, 3. Francis. Numerical Control: Making a Figure 5. Winery, Gilles Perraudin. New Technology. Oxford University Press: New York, 1991. In both of these projects and practices, the Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. architects use digital fabrication in minor ways Harcourt Brace & Company: New York, 1963. The that effect meaningful changes. It is topic of regularization that 'left no aspect of life impossible to dissociate digital fabrication untouched' is a pervasive theme of Technics and from the conditions that prepared and Civilization. developed it, nor from all the effects it 110 GEITING REAL: DESIGN ETHOS NOW

Ibid. p 9-59. The Chapter on "Cultural and European counterparts and demonstrates how Preparation" focuses on this series of developments the alternatives provide a more supple system of production with fewer economical and social in these adjacent practices. challenges. lo Ibid. Mumford concisely tracks the development l9 Kwinter, Sanford. 'The Cruelty of Numbers.' ANY of quantitative developments throughout Technics 10. p. 60-62. and Civilization. 20 Noble. p. 265-323. the chapter "Who's Running "Smith, Merrit Roe. "Army Ordnance and the the Shop" focuses on the designed utopia and 'American system' of Manufacturing." in Military actual conditions of fully automated production and Enterprise and technological Change: Perspective on the increase of labor rather than decrease in labor, the American Experience. MIT Press: Cambridge, a theme throughout the book. MA. 1985. p 39-86. 2' Kieran, Stephan and James Timberlake. l2 Ibid. "Introduction." in Military Enterprise and Refabricating Architecture. McGraw-Hill: New York, technological Change: Perspective on the American Experience. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1985. p 13- 2004. SHOP: Sharples Holden Pasquarelli, eds. 15. Versioning: Evolutionary Techniques in Architecture. l3 Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Architectural Design. Vol 72, no 5. Sept/Oct 2002. Technology, and the Rise of Capitalism. Oxford From the avant-garde to the rear guard, the University Press: Oxford. 1977. literature of new production techniques ignores the social and technical histories of the very industries l4 Melman, Seymour. The Permanent War Economy: they aim to emulate. American Capitalism in Decline. Simon and Schuster: New York. 1974. "Some authors have contempt for the labor force in the building industry. See, for one example, l5 Osborn, Alex F. The Optimism Book for Ofices: Wachsrnann, Konrad. The Turning Point of Building: How to Standardize and Systematize to Meet War- Structure and Design. Rheinhold Publishing Corp, Created Business Problems. Art metal Construction New York. 1961. p 104, 116-7. Co, Jamestown NY. 1918. This book provides an excellent period source for the mental habits of the 23 Kieran, p XII. From the very beginning of this relationship between war and industry at the end of book, the authors stir up the romantic image of the World War I. master builder. l6 Retijles, 3. Francis. Numerical Control: making a 24 Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social New Technology. Oxford University Press, New History of industrial Automation. P.276-80. York. p 134-140. 25 Kieran, p XI. l7 Ibid. p. 141-163. 26 Noble, David F. "Command and Performance: A l8 Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social Perspective on Military Enterprise and Technological History of industrial Automation. Alfred A. Knopf: Change." in Military Enterprise and technological New York, 1984. p. 145-192. This chapter, "The Change: Perspective on the American Experience. Road not Taken," focuses on the alternatives to fully automated production methods. He shows that MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1985. p. 329-346. some these alternatives were adapted by Japanese