Computer Architectures

Constructing the Common Ground

Theodora Vardouli, Olga Touloumi, Theodora Vardouli, Olga Touloumi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429559334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century.

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.

Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

1 Introduction

Toward a polyglot space

Olga Touloumi and Theodora Vardouli

In the decades following the end of World War II, the fields of architecture and computing became conceptually and operationally entangled. Emerging computational concepts and practices inflected design discourse, while design methods and spatial concepts influenced theories and practices of computing. Making sense of this intimate intertwining requires a move away from narratives of unidirectional transfer between computing and architecture, and towards a systematic interrogation of their intellectual and institutional common ground.

The computer’s transformative effects upon architecture have often been addressed in recent scholarship. Perspectives on digital cultures or turns in architecture (Picon 2010; Carpo 2017) or lineages of “the digital” (Lynn 2014; Goodhouse 2017) have proliferated in the last decade and a half. These histories, however, have focused mainly upon the production of radically innovative architectural forms, the new digital instruments used to produce them, or the ways in which these instruments changed architectural production. In recent years, scholars have begun to unearth architects’ roles as co-producers of the “digital landscape” (Steenson 2017). In such histories, academic, industrial, and military research centers have formed a productive site of scrutiny because they enabled and promoted encounters between architecture, the mathematical sciences, engineering, and computers (Light 2005; Dutta 2013; Cardoso Llach 2015; Keller 2018). Architects were not passive adopters of computational techniques and computer technologies. Instead, they actively engaged in their construction—a construction that unfolded against a backdrop of large discipline-wide debates and within the constraints of specific epistemic and technical contexts.

It is also not possible to think about computers and computation without design and architecture: computing technologies acquired bodies through design choices (Harwood 2011) and presence in the world within specific architectural sites. They also transformed the production of architecture, creating new working protocols and alliances between building industries and designers, and between designers and “users.” This is too vast a history to capture in a single account or through a single lens. As a prelude to, and reflection on, the essays hosted in this volume, we use the first part of this introduction to advance a methodological intervention that reimagines scholarship on computers and architecture in terms of a “polyglot space,” a space where a multitude of methods coexist and co-produce. In the essays of Computer Architectures, this polyglot space is calibrated against four conditions: the medium, field, obsolescence, and conversation. We call for a historiographic modality that speaks many languages (is multilingual); can only exist as a multitude of voices (is polyphonic), shifts scales of examination (is scalar), and changes form (is protean).

Medium

In a 1984 article in Scientific American titled “Computer Software,” Alan Kay, the computer scientist often attributed with the invention of object-oriented programming, cast computers as meta-media:

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium.

(Kay 1984: 59)

As scholars such as Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (2017) or Casey Alt (2011) have shown among others, this media rhetoric cannot be severed from the particular technical development of object oriented programming, namely the shift from writing programs as procedures, sequences of step-by-step instructions, to building ontologies of abstract entities that exchange data. Built upon Ivan Sutherland’s landmark work on SKETCHPAD and systematized in SMALLTALK (developed by Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, and Dan Ingalls), object orientation transformed programming by centering the design of a program on relations of objects and not on processes. Object orientation made it possible to conceive of, and promote through articles such as “Computer Software,” the computer as a medium. The computer, the executor of programs, would turn from a tool for performing a rote process to something that could have an internal life and an architecture: an instrument for creating new and possibly unprecedented ontologies. Speaking about computers in terms of “media” is a historical construct (Manovich 2001; Murray 2003, 2011; Chun 2004; Hagen 2005) that could be approached both analytically and critically. The question we ask here is not whether computers are or are not “media,” but what can we learn about “digital architecture” once we consider it from a “media” perspective.

A “medium” is not a stable category with definite characteristics and predilections. A medium can be a tool, but it also can be useless. It can be an object, but also an infrastructure. What a media approach does to the study of digital architecture is to provoke a change of focus: it shifts attention from the interpretation of buildings or artifacts made using digital instruments to the study of the technics, instruments, and processes that mediated their making. Or to recall literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a media focus shifts attention away from “hegemonies of meaning” and interpretation to the “materialities of communication,” the channels, infrastructures and protocols that participate in the construction of meanings (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994). Paradoxically, although a media focus on digital architecture foregrounds materialities of computing, it can also push the computer itself off-center. In fact, expanding “the digital” “before” and “beyond” computers is the premise animating much of current literature (Goodhouse 2017; Bottazzi 2018). In accounts such as these, “the digital” is a larger category that orbits around technological applications but is seldom about them. In such accounts, the computer, the machine performing computations, often becomes the elephant in the room.

Questions about how the elephant entered the room, where it sat, how big it was, and what color it had, have proved generative for historians such as John Harwood (2011) and, in this book, AnnMarie Brennan, Rachel Plotnick, and David Theodore, who talk about the presence of these massive (or not so massive) instruments in old and new architectural types (factories, clean rooms, offices, houses, hospitals). Seeing the elephant becomes more challenging when talking about the computer as a design medium—a medium for performing the complex web of acts that count as doing architecture. Where, when, and how then is the computer: is it the algorithms? Their implications for practice and labor? Their outputs? The cultural, political, economic, discursive effects of these outputs? Does the computer dissolve under a history of cultural techniques (Siegert 2015)? Or can a history of “the digital” not include computers at all?

Field

We see digital architecture as a field of practices, operations, and techniques built around computers, broadly construed (looms and rooms, women calculators, desktops and laptops, programmable materials and synthetic bacteria and the list goes on). Talking about media necessitates consideration of the field they modulate, the infrastructure that supports them, the industries that produce them, the anthropo-technical conduits around them, the older media before them, and the techniques and theories embedded in them.

There may indeed be “eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture” (Goodhouse 2017). Yet each of these eight million stories assumes a specific vantage point toward the computer: it either fetishizes it or dissolves it. How about operationalizing this observation to willfully produce an oscillating field: one that ties the digital with the computer, in its socio-technical specificities, but allows the computer to move in and out of focus? What are the implications of a scholar adopting a mobile vantage point toward the computer: tactically centering and decentering it to illuminate negotiations between different modes of agency?

We vouch for histories that are attuned to resonances between wide-lens views of epistemic and cultural phenomena and the micro-operations of making and using technical artifacts. We argue for histories that oscillate between longue durée epistemic transformations and situated acts from designers and users. Looking at the embodied and material contingencies beyond the deliberations of auteur architect-technologists and auteur architect-users is our way of venturing to other histories of digital architecture.

Obsolescence

It is common for architects involved with digital media to return to early work on computers and design in search of unrealized potential. Common are also stories of anticipation and forecasting, where technologies tangled up in narratives of newness are confronted with their historical echoes. Yet, instead of simply saying “this is not new” one needs to look with some specificity at how these echoes operate, at the conditions by which they persist, and at the kinds of disciplinary and epistemic modes they are reflected on. Cutting against the grain of retro-techno-projections is a critical project that centers on obsolescence: on things discarded and things embedded in every shift and update.

Digital innovation comes with digital obsolescence. One device, one programming language, one software, gives way to another, slowly necessitating updates and new equipment. Obsolescence challenges archival modalities. This is not new for the library and information sciences, which often need to simulate the environments of operating systems and amass obsolete media, from slide scanners to floppy discs. Work on the preservation of digital objects, some of which has sprung out of the Archaeologies of the Digital program at the Canadian Centre of Architecture, tackles digital obsolescence: they come to terms with unreadable files, inactive versions of computer programs, and defunct hard drives.

But there is also another form of obsolescence that does not come from a condition of being defunct, but from a condition of being forgotten, sidetracked, and overthrown. It is an obsolescence of meanings, discourses, practices projected upon techniques. History writing as a construction of both memory and obsolescence plays its part here. Despite stated attempts to resist it, stories of digital architecture gravitate towards breaks, shifts, and turns of various kinds. Innovation carries cultural capital and cultural currency; narratives of innovation structure historiographical fields and their cathectic power can produce obsolescence (of makers, old media, and techniques). To grapple with obsolescence, both in history writing and digital production, we need more stories of continuity than of break. We also need to become more attentive to stories of techniques, to reveal processes of naturalization and embeddedness that render them ubiquitous and/or invisible, and to trace these techniques’ lives as they traverse intellectual, institutional, cultural, and practical settings. We need more histories of banality and failure. And we need to come to terms with delivering dry histories that do not climax or break ground, but rather shape ground.

Conversation

Can a single, all-inclusive and comprehensive historical narrative describe and explain phenomena as multivalent and complex as those surrounding the concatenation of “digital” and “architecture”? The social construction of epistemic value often demands that a scholar makes with an argument an almost territorial claim toward an entire field. Can we move beyond a competitive, “free-market” logic of argumentation and declare that history writing (as history making) occupies a conversational space?

In our book, we use the idea of a common ground as an analytic and as a program of action. The common ground pays tribute to a key-phrase that animated the intellectual landscape in which architecture was imagined as computation and computers were imagined architecturally. The “common ground” was an exciting slogan in postwar intellectual life (Spillers 1974; Galison 1998), tangled up with visions of unification of multiple modes of knowledge and action. The rhetoric of a common ground, be it a common “bedrock,” a common “language,” or a common communication channel, played a key role in challenging disciplinary boundaries and formations, and in institutionalizing unlikely collaborations.

In a spirit of sustained reflexivity, we also adopt the common ground as a methodological heuristic. Grappling with the variety of technical languages and epistemic cultures that configured relationships between architecture and computers requires active and curious listening for inflections, translations, and transmutations of words and technics. It also entails coming to terms with metaphor, evocation, and imagination as constituents of technological development. It requires a polyglot space of historical inquiry that is:

• Multilingual—this space is contingent upon multiple forms of literacy. It requires speaking, with some degree of interactional expertise, architectural, mathematical, programming, and engineering languages. It also crucially requires listening to the languages of multiple epistemic communities: technologists, architects, designers, mathematicians and paying attention to the many valencies and expressions of ideas, practices, and techniques.
• Polyphonic—it seeks and produces the conditions for a multiplicity of scholarly perspectives and methods. It is generative rather than definitive, expansive rather than convergent. It is reflexive and resonant.
• Scalar—actors, practices, discourses, institutions, and objects co-exist in a plane of interrogation and can be centered or decentered in the process of history writing. Thick descriptions and wide-lens readings alternate, and reveal new assemblages at work.
• Protean—the field itself changes shape. It is temporal. Yesteryear’s “othering” of dominant narratives and approaches to digital architecture provides the conditions for its change.

Architecture of computer architectures

These categories are an attitude rather than a framework. Readers may recognize them in the polyphony of methods and approaches reflected in the book, rather than in the structure of the chapters. The chapters are grouped according to four keywords that we gave to the authors, one of which they each tackled with their essays. The keywords came from the classic Von Neumann diagram for a computer architecture. To create resonances and productive dissonances, we grouped our essays according to its main constituents, turning program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output, and computation (arithmetic/logic unit) into props for historical inquiry. The authors’ essay-responses enacted a diversity of methods and concerns, weaving fortuitous lateral connections. Instead of a methodological proposal, this organizational move acts as a suggestion of what is possible once key-terms move beyond disciplinary definitions. In other words, using Von Neumann’s diagram as an organizational tactic provisionally shapes a field of possibility stabilized around four quasi-material objects. Positioned as both technological and cultural constructs, “program,” “storage,” “input/output,” and “computation” provide categories for parsing designers’ and technologists’ debates around the computer. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things.

Program

Peder Anker takes on a close examination of environmental design and its history, illuminating one important episode around computers entering architectural culture. He follows the émigré architect Serge Chermayeff from his conservation campaign for the Cape Cod National Seashore Park to the 1964 conference Architecture and the Computer at the Boston Architectural C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Series foreword
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction Toward a polyglot space
• PART I: Program
• PART II: Input/output
• PART III: Storage
• PART IV: Computation
• Index