The Automatic Promise: Architecture’s Computer Dismembered

Graduate / Professional

Indiscreet Histories of the Architect’s Universal Discrete Machine: As architecture slips (wittingly or unwittingly) into the embrace of AI, this seminar posits that well before the “arrival” of the modern computer, the ideations of architecture and computation were already long entangled, if not coconstitutive. By way of a set of recursive histoires longues durées , these sessions consider the constituent duties, devices and desires the project of computation has always shared with architecture: memory storage and retrieval architectures; the “taming” of chance by prediction and the algorithm; the gun, the pen and the window; code and compression in a reductive system that harbors synthetic ambitions and guarantees “true” products; the imprinting of (and by) the body in reproduction. All are inseparable, unthinkable even, without architectural imagination. If we are to rethink architecture now, as we must, we will need also to rethink its relations to computation. Reimagining the future of their mutuality requires reimagining their mutual pasts. In order to construct an alternative historiography of architecture’s relations to computation that is recursive, not unlike its subject, and always promiscuously indiscreet in its reconfiguring of the discrete, the presentations, readings and discussions compose a strategic dismembering of their entanglements. Once dismembered, like Humpty Dumpty, the parts will not go back together again and thus complicate beyond retrieval the already waning platitudes of optimisation and digital solutionism and the construed inevitability of our present digital “shortcuts.” Instead, they suggest potential new categories with which to mutually reconstitute architecture’s past and future relations to computation: the cutter, the alienated, the appetite, the mediocre, the sacrifice, the duped, and the promise of the automatic. 3 Course cr F 9:20am-11:15am