Architectural Intelligence

About this book

In 'Architectural Intelligence', Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies -- including cybernetics and artificial intelligence -- into their work and influenced digital design practices from the late 1980s to the present day. Alexander, long before his famous 1977 book 'A Pattern Language', used computation and structure to visualize design problems; Wurman popularized the notion of "information architecture"; Price designed some of the first intelligent buildings; and Negroponte experimented with the ways people experience artificial intelligence, even at architectural scale. Steenson investigates how these architects pushed the boundaries of architecture -- and how their technological experiments pushed the boundaries of technology. What did computational, cybernetic, and artificial intelligence researchers have to gain by engaging with architects and architectural problems?0.