A beautifully written study of three pioneering artists, entwining their work and our understanding of creativity Bringing the creative process of three contemporary artists into conversation, Architectures of the Unforeseen stages an encounter between philosophy and art and design. Its gorgeous prose invites the reader to think along with Brian Massumi as he thoroughly embodies the work of these artists, walking the line that separates theory from art and providing equally nurturing sustenance for practicing artists and working philosophers. Based on Massumi’s lengthy—and in two cases decades-long—relationships with digital architect Greg Lynn, interactive media artist Rafael-Lozano Hemmer, and mixed-media installation creator Simryn Gill, Architectures of the Unforeseen delves into their processes of creating art. The book’s primary interest is in what motivates each artist’s practice—the generative knots that inspire creativity—and in how their pieces work to give off their unique effects. More than a series of profiles or critical pieces, Massumi’s essays are creative, developing new philosophical concepts and offering rigorous sentiments about art and creativity. Asking fundamental questions about nature, culture, and the emergence of the new, Architectures of the Unforeseen is important original research on artists that are pioneers in their field. Equally valuable to the everyday reader and those engaged in scholarly work, it is destined to become an important book not only for the fields of digital architecture, interactive media, and installation art, but also more basically for our knowledge of art and creativity.

A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, this volume brings into focus the discourse around proportion with current problems of post-humanism in architecture alongside the new possibilities made available through digital technologies. The book examines how the body and its ordering has served as a central site of architectural discourse in recent decades, especially in attempts to reformulate architecture’s relationship to humanism, modernism and technology. Challenging some concepts and categories of architectural history and situates current debates within a broader cultural and technological context, Hight makes complex ideas easily accessible. Extensively illustrated and written without academic jargon for an informed but non-specialized architectural audience, this book elucidates the often obscure debates of avant-garde architectural discourse and design, while demonstrating how these debates have affected everyday places and concepts of architecture. As a result, it will appeal to professional architects, academics and students, combining as it does an insightful introduction to the fundamental issues of architectural history and theory over the past fifty years with entirely new formulations of what that history is and means.

The rise and fall of identical copies: digital technologies and form-making from mass customization to mass collaboration. Digital technologies have changed architecture—the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a “paradigm shift” for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti's invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect's design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds. The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, came to an end with the rise of digital technologies. Everything digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of notational limitations, of mechanical standardization, and of the Albertian, authorial way of building by design. Charting the rise and fall of the paradigm of identicality, Carpo compares new forms of postindustrial digital craftsmanship to hand-making and the cultures and technologies of variations that existed before the coming of machine-made, identical copies. Carpo reviews the unfolding of digitally based design and construction from the early 1990s to the present, and suggests a new agenda for architecture in an age of variable objects and of generic and participatory authorship.

This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930 - 1992), most famous for their collabarative works Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

This follow-up to Kate Nesbitt's best-selling anthology Theorizing a New Agenda collects twenty-eight essays that address architecture theory from the mid-1990s, where Nesbitt left off, through the present. Kristin Sykes offers an overview of the myriad approaches and attitudes adopted by architects and architectural theorists during this era. Multiple themes—including the impact of digital technologies on processes of architectural design, production, materiality, and representation; the implications of globalization and networks of information; the growing emphasis on sustainable and green architecture; and the phenomenon of the 'starchitect' and iconic architecture—appear against a background colored by architectural theory, as it existed from the 1960s on, in a period of transition (if not crisis) that centers around the perceived abyss between theory and practice. Theory's transitional state persists today, rendering its immediate history particularly relevant to contemporary thought and practice. While other collections of recent theoretical writings exist none attempt to address the situation as a whole, providing in one place key theoretical texts of the past decade and a half. This book provides a foundation for ongoing discussions surrounding contemporary architectural thought and practice, with iconic essays by Greg Lynn, Deborah Berke, Sanford Kwinter, Samuel Mockbee, Stan Allen, Rem Koolhaas, William Mitchell, Anthony Vidler, Micahel Hays, Reinhold Martin, Reiser + Umemoto, Glenn Murcutt, William McDonough, Micahael Braungart, Michael Speaks, and many more.