Architecture as Information Machine
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.15.1.4984Abstract
Architecture has always been dealing with machines. Differently but constantly. At the middle of the last century, new kind of machine and its science have emerged: Cybernetics and Information Machine. Architectural theory and practice displayed great interest in these new paradigms and produced some design experimentations and essays but it seems like these scientific and technological results call for recasting the architectural foundations. Not only to figure out how to design new or complex architectural forms but to attempt replaying to the question, “what is form?” then to contribute to the understandability of all kinds of forms —not only architectural or urban forms, but all the forms involved in the built environment— and to link or “translate” one form into another. Such transversal view might renew not only our reading of the past and current built environment but also our manner to interact and to shape it. What if, in contrary to the other former machines, the Information Machine is neither to be represented, nor to be imitated but to be actualized, or better to be modeled?
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