A history of the influence of communication technologies on Western architectural theory. The discipline of architecture depends on the transmission in space and time of accumulated experiences, concepts, rules, and models. From the invention of the alphabet to the development of ASCII code for electronic communication, the process of recording and transmitting this body of knowledge has reflected the dominant information technologies of each period. In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking. Carpo highlights the significance of the invention of movable type and mechanically reproduced images. He argues that Renaissance architectural theory, particularly the system of the five architectural orders, was consciously developed in response to the formats and potential of the new printed media. Carpo contrasts architecture in the age of printing with what preceded it: Vitruvian theory and the manuscript format, oral transmission in the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century transition from script to print. He also suggests that the basic principles of "typographic" architecture thrived in the Western world as long as print remained our main information technology. The shift from printed to digital representations, he points out, will again alter the course of architecture.

Now almost 20 years old, the digital turn in architecture has already gone through several stages and phases. Architectural Design (AD) has captured them all – from folding to cyberspace, nonlinearity and hypersurfaces, from versioning to scripting, emergence, information modelling and parametricism. It has recorded and interpreted the spirit of the times with vivid documentary precision, fostering and often anticipating crucial architectural and theoretical developments. This anthology of AD’s most salient articles is chronologically and thematically arranged to provide a complete historical timeline of the recent rise to pre-eminence of computer-based design and production. Mario Carpo provides an astute overview of the recent history of digital design in his comprehensive introductory essay and in his leaders to each original text. A much needed pedagogical and research tool for students and scholars, this synopsis also relates the present state of digitality in architecture to the history and theory of its recent development and trends, and raises issues of crucial importance for the contemporary practice of the design professions. A comprehensive anthology on digital architecture edited by one of its most eminent scholars in this field, Mario Carpo. Includes seminal texts by Bernard Cache, Peter Eisenman, John Frazer, Charles Jencks, Greg Lynn, Achim Menges and Patrik Schumacher. Features key works by FOA, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Ali Rahim, Lars Spuybroek/NOX, Kas Oosterhuis and SHoP.

A comprehensive and up-to-date survey of 20th century architecture, this volume presents a global perspective on the significant works, architects, ideas, and directions of the past 100 years. 316 illustrations, 148 in color.

"This is a book about the things that inspire all of us, from the sacred to the profane, from everyday objects like a marble or a rubber stamp, to the more surprising such as a dirt pile or a turtle tail. Artists, writers, designers, among many others, contribute their objects and ruminations that encourage, motivate, and energize their own creativity."--Provided by publisher.

The first digital turn in architecture changed our ways of making; the second changes our ways of thinking. Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn, Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted—no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design professions were the first to intuit and interpret the new technical logic of the digital age: digital mass-customization (the use of digital tools to mass-produce variations at no extra cost) has already changed the way we produce and consume almost everything, and the same technology applied to commerce at large is now heralding a new society without scale—a flat marginal cost society where bigger markets will not make anything cheaper. But today, the unprecedented power of computation also favors a new kind of science where prediction can be based on sheer information retrieval, and form finding by simulation and optimization can replace deduction from mathematical formulas. Designers have been toying with machine thinking and machine learning for some time, and the apparently unfathomable complexity of the physical shapes they are now creating already expresses a new form of artificial intelligence, outside the tradition of modern science and alien to the organic logic of our mind.

History of buildings, groups of buildings, the styles in which they were built, and the architects responsible for them from Stonehenge to the present.

Elegantly written and filled with lush, full-color photos, this is the first in-depth portrait of H.H. Richardson, the greatest American architect of the 19th century and a man whose magnetic, colorful personality was equal to his genius. 150 photos, 100 in full color.