Digitally Intelligent Architecture Has Little to Do With Computers (and Even Less with their Intelligence)

Harking back to the age of early electronic computers, Mario Carpo recounts the history of cybernetics, and how enthusiasm for a new technology drove experiments in forms of responsive architecture, often overlooking the distance between imagination and actual computational capacities. The moral of this story is all the more poignant in the current frenzy over tools like AI or ChatGPT: change in architecture doesn’t always come in the form we expect or is underpinned by the technologies we expect it to be driven by.