
The Alphabet and the Algorithm
Mario Carpo(Author)
MIT Press
Published on 4. February 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
184 pages
978-0-262-51580-1 (ISBN)
Description
The rise and fall of identical copies: digital technologies and form-making from mass customization to mass collaboration.Digital technologies have changed architecture-the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a "paradigm shift" for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti's invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect's design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds. The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, came to an end with the rise of digital technologies. Everything digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of notational limitations, of mechanical standardization, and of the Albertian, authorial way of building by design. Charting the rise and fall of the paradigm of identicality, Carpo compares new forms of postindustrial digital craftsmanship to hand-making and the cultures and technologies of variations that existed before the coming of machine-made, identical copies. Carpo reviews the unfolding of digitally based design and construction from the early 1990s to the present, and suggests a new agenda for architecture in an age of variable objects and of generic and participatory authorship.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
13 s/w Abbildungen
13 b&w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
295 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-51580-1 (9780262515801)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Mario Carpo is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Paris, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History at Yale University's School of Architecture. He is the author of Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (MIT Press, 2001) and other books.