The Alphabet and the Algorithm

by Mario Carpo

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262515801
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/04/2011
Series:	Writing Architecture
Pages:	184
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

Preface IX

1 Variable, Identical, Differential 1

1.1 Architecture and the Identical Copy: Timelines 12

1.2 Allography and Notations 15

1.3 Authorship 20

1.4 The Early Modern Pursuit of Identical Reproduction 26

1.5 Geometry, Algorism, and the Notational Bottleneck 28

1.6 The Fall of the Identicals 35

1.7 The Reversal of the Albertian Paradigm 44

2 The Rise 51

2.1 Alberti and Identical Copies 53

2.2 Going Digital 54

2.3 Windows 58

2.4 ID Pictures and the Power of Facsimiles 62

2.5 Alberti's Imitation Game and Its Technological Failure 68

2.6 The Invention of the Albertian Paradigm 71

3 The Fall 81

3.1 Form 83

3.2 Standard 93

3.3 Agency 106

4 Epilogue: Split Agency 123

Notes 129

Index 165

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

Ever wondered what became of architecture in its digital reincarnation? Mario Carpo vaults from Renaissance aspirations to current conditions at the pace of a breathless fable. Where will it lead us?

—Kurt W. Forster, Yale School of Architecture

From the Publisher

Ever wondered what became of architecture in its digital reincarnation? Mario Carpo vaults from Renaissance aspirations to current conditions at the pace of a breathless fable. Where will it lead us?

—Kurt W. Forster, Yale School of Architecture

Kurt W. Forster

Ever wondered what became of architecture in its digital reincarnation? Mario Carpo vaults from Renaissance aspirations to current conditions at the pace of a breathless fable. Where will it lead us?

Editorial Reviews

"On page after page, Carpo engages a difficult set of issues, some of which strike chords that are still resonating." — Flutur Troshani,Leonardo

From the Publisher