"Architects Are the Pioneers, Innovators, and Trendsetters of the Digital,"
Theorist Mario Carpo is working to write the history of architecture’s recent past. Focusing on what he calls the "digital turn,” Carpo has written extensively on the contemporary revolution in technology that is affecting all areas of life, but especially architecture. His research encompasses the history of the architectural profession as told through its technological advancements, from Alberti’s invention of architectural notation to today’s rapid-prototyping machines.
Now, Carpo, who recently took up a professorship at The Bartlett, UCL, hopes to widen the "digital turn" as a field of study with a new Masters of Architecture and Digital Theory program he has developed with architectural curator and Bartlett Chair Frédéric Migayrou. We talked with Carpo to discuss the new program, the revolutionary architecture of the 1990s, and what’s next in digital design.
A.J. Artemel: What makes the present moment unique, as relates to the digital turn and contemporary developments in digital culture?
Mario Carpo: The digital era is a great time for architecture, and architects are interpreting digital technologies better than anyone else. Throughout history, architects have always been late in adapting to, and embracing, new technologies. For instance, though we don’t tend to think of it in those terms, Modernism—architectural Modernism, the most glorious period in the history of recent architecture—was a very retardataire phenomenon. After all, Modernism was a way to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution half a century, or in some countries, one century behind schedule.
Taylorism and Fordism had been around since the early 20th century, but the Industrial Revolution had been changing the way we lived in the West since the early 19th century, and at first, architects stubbornly resisted that change. In a sense, Modernism is significant in architecture only because one should ask why architects were so late in becoming modern! It is true that in the 1920s, when Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, among others, finally began to cope with industrial technologies and with the machine-made environment, they did a good job. But they were still late. Taylorism and Fordism were not invented by architects, they were invented by the automobile industry. At some point, we understood that there was something we could borrow from them, that we should incorporate those ideas and those technologies into the making of the built environment. But we were still late.
So historically speaking, the digital is the first time in the history of humankind where we architects are not late—this time around, we are not playing technological catch-up. Quite to the contrary, we are the pioneers, innovators, and trendsetters. We invented the digital turn before it happened in any other field. Most of the ideas and principles that still define the digital turn have been invented or probed in schools of architecture first. Think of digital mass customization, non-standard seriality, variability of market prices, the production of non-standard items, you name it—where do all these ideas come from? Who first started to formulate these ideas and to investigate them? It was a bunch of young architects in the early 1990s in a handful of architectural schools.
AJA: Which architects do you have in mind?
MC: Think of all the names we know, Bernard Cache, Greg Lynn, and a few others—at the time, they were little more than students, just out of school or, sometimes, still at school! Yet, the ideas they came up with now are everywhere. Architects invented these ideas that are now discussed by decision makers, political leaders, industrialists, and bankers around the world. U.S. President Barack Obama included a small passage in his annual State of the Union Address two years ago, in which he said that the technology of 3D printing “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” That was exactly 20 years after a few young architects started to conceive and nurture those ideas. ....