The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Writing Architecture)

Mario Carpo

ISBN 10: 0262515806 / ISBN 13: 9780262515801

Published by MIT Press, 2011

About this Item

This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has soft covers. Clean from markings. In good all round condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,500grams, ISBN:9780262515801.

Seller Inventory # 9949742

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Writing Architecture)
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262515806
• ISBN 13: 9780262515801
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 500 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Architecture

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Mario Carpo is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the French Schools of Architecture, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the School of Architecture of Yale University.  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.