Recasting computational design: a new modern agenda for a post-industrial, post-pandemic world.
Mass production was the core technical logic of industrial modernity: for the last hundred years, architects and designers have tried to industrialize construction and standardize building materials and processes in the pursuit of economies of scale. But this epochal march of modernity is now over. In “Beyond Digital”, Mario Carpo reviews the long history of the computational mode of production, showing how the merger of robotic automation and artificial intelligence will stop and reverse the modernist quest for scale. Today's technologies already allow us to use nonstandard building materials as found, or as made, and assemble them in as many nonstandard, intelligent, adaptive ways as needed: the microfactories of our imminent future will be automated artisan shops.
The post-industrial logic of computational manufacturing has been known and theorized for some time. By tracing its theoretical and technical sources, and reviewing the design theories that accompanied its rise, Carpo shows how the computational project, long under the sway of powerful antimodern ideologies, is now being recast by the urgency of the climate crisis, which has vindicated its premises-and by the global pandemic, which has tragically proven its viability. Looking at the work of a new generation of designers, technologists, and producers, “Beyond Digital” offers a new modern agenda for our post-industrial future.
1 Ways of Making
1.1 Hand-Making
1.2 Mechanical Machine-Making
1.3 Digital Making
1.4 Beyond the Anthropocene: A New Economy without Scale
1.5 The Collapse of the Modern Way of Making
1.6 The Teachings of the Pandemic
2 The Future of Automation: Designers Redesign Robotics
2.1 Florence, 1450: The Invention of Notational Work
2.2 America, 1909-1913: Notational Work Goes Mainstream
2.3 Taylor's Reinforced Concrete as a Social Project
2.4 The Automation of Notational Work
2.5 First Steps toward Post-Notational Automation
3 A Tale of Two Sciences, or The Rise of the Anti-Modern Science of Computation
3.1 The Two Sciences
3.2 Modern Architecture and Postmodern Complexity
3.3 Architects, Computers, and Computer Science
3.4 Degenerate Complexism and the Second Coming of AI
3.5 The Limits of AI 2.0
3.6 Machine Learning and the Automation of Imitation
3.7 Sorry: There Won't Be a Third Digital Turn Driven by AI
4 The Post-Human Chunkiness of Computational Automation
4.1 Mechanical Assembly as the Style of Dissent
4.2 Modernist Modularity, Postmodernist Collage, and Deconstructivist Aggregation
Epilogue: Being Post-Digital
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
