Mario Carpo

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.

The Alphabet and the Algorithm

In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new logic of digital design and fabrication. 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. In this book, Mario Carpo suggests that the same technical logic, now applied to all kinds of immaterial objects and to commerce at large, is heralding a new society without scale, where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. he early tools for digital design and production spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and marked architectural design for the last twenty years. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new generation of digital tools they have adopted -- no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. Today's computation is so powerful and cheap that many data-compression technologies that humanity has carefully developed, nurtured, and honed over time may soon be abandoned.0.

Design Beyond Intelligence

The Second Digital Turn

Recasting computational design: a new modern agenda for a post-industrial, post-pandemic world. Mass production was the core technical logic of industrial modernity: for the last hundred years, architects and designers have tried to industrialize construction and standardize building materials and processes in the pursuit of economies of scale. But this epochal march of modernity is now over. In Beyond Digital, Mario Carpo reviews the long history of the computational mode of production, showing how the merger of robotic automation and artificial intelligence will stop and reverse the modernist quest for scale. Today’s technologies already allow us to use nonstandard building materials as found, or as made, and assemble them in as many nonstandard, intelligent, adaptive ways as needed: the microfactories of our imminent future will be automated artisan shops. The post-industrial logic of computational manufacturing has been known and theorized for some time. By tracing its theoretical and technical sources, and reviewing the design theories that accompanied its rise, Carpo shows how the computational project, long under the sway of powerful antimodern ideologies, is now being recast by the urgency of the climate crisis, which has vindicated its premises—and by the global pandemic, which has tragically proven its viability. Looking at the work of a new generation of designers, technologists, and producers, Beyond Digital offers a new modern agenda for our post-industrial future.

Design and Automation at the End of Modernity

Beyond Digital

Metodo ed ordini nella teoria architettonica dei primi moderni : Alberti, Raffaello, Serlio e Camillo

Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory Mario Carpo

In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking.".

Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory

Architecture in the Age of Printing

Now almost 20 years old, the digital turn in architecture has already gone through several stages and phases. Architectural Design (AD) has captured them all – from folding to cyberspace, nonlinearity and hypersurfaces, from versioning to scripting, emergence, information modelling and parametricism. It has recorded and interpreted the spirit of the times with vivid documentary precision, fostering and often anticipating crucial architectural and theoretical developments. This anthology of AD’s most salient articles is chronologically and thematically arranged to provide a complete historical timeline of the recent rise to pre-eminence of computer-based design and production. Mario Carpo provides an astute overview of the recent history of digital design in his comprehensive introductory essay and in his leaders to each original text. A much needed pedagogical and research tool for students and scholars, this synopsis also relates the present state of digitality in architecture to the history and theory of its recent development and trends, and raises issues of crucial importance for the contemporary practice of the design professions. A comprehensive anthology on digital architecture edited by one of its most eminent scholars in this field, Mario Carpo. Includes seminal texts by Bernard Cache, Peter Eisenman, John Frazer, Charles Jencks, Greg Lynn, Achim Menges and Patrik Schumacher. Features key works by FOA, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Ali Rahim, Lars Spuybroek/NOX, Kas Oosterhuis and SHoP.

Mario Carpo

About

Books

Join the club