The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

by Mario Carpo
The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence

by Mario Carpo

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Overview

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 age: 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. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262534024
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 10/20/2017
Series: Writing Architecture
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 998,226
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Mario Carpo is Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory, the Bartlett, University College London. He is the author of Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory and The Alphabet and the Algorithm (both published by the MIT Press) and other books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction 1

2 The Second Digital Turn 9

2.1 Data-Compression Technologies We Don't Need Anymore 19

2.2 Don't Sort: Search 23

2.3 The End of Modern Science 33

2.4 The New Science of Form-Searching 40

2.5 Spline Making, or the Conquest of Free Form 55

2.6 From Calculus to Computation: The Rise and Fall of the Curve 65

2.7 Excessive Resolution 70

2.8 The New Frontier of Alienation, and Beyond 79

3 The End of the Projected Image 99

3.1 Verbal to Visual 102

3.2 Visual to Spatial 104

3.3 The Technical and Cognitive Primacy of Flatness in Early Modern Art and Science 111

3.4 The Underdogs: Early Alternatives to Perspectival Projections 115

3.5 The Digital Renaissance of the Third Dimension 120

4 The Participatory Turn that Never Was 131

4.1 The New Digital Science of the Many 132

4.2 The Style of Many Hands 135

4.3 Building: Digital Agencies and Their Styles 140

5 Economies Without Scale: Toward a Nonstandard Society 145

5.1 Mass Production, Economies of Scale, Standardization 147

5.2 The Rise and Fall of Standard Prices 149

5.3 The Digital Mass-Customization of Social Practices 153

6 Postface: 2016 159

Notes 165

Index 217

What People are Saying About This

Nicholas Negroponte

Carpo takes the reader on a critically considered and well-informed expedition beyond the horizon of materiality, to a land ruled from the bottom up—a place without any need for scale or standards as we have known them. The book is beyond Cartesian and beyond digital.

Endorsement

Carpo takes the reader on a critically considered and well-informed expedition beyond the horizon of materiality, to a land ruled from the bottom up—a place without any need for scale or standards as we have known them. The book is beyond Cartesian and beyond digital.

Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab; author of Being Digital

From the Publisher

Carpo takes the reader on a critically considered and well-informed expedition beyond the horizon of materiality, to a land ruled from the bottom up—a place without any need for scale or standards as we have known them. The book is beyond Cartesian and beyond digital.

Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab; author of Being Digital

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