Browse

This book examines architecture’s fascination with autonomic design methods during the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by broader postwar developments—the expansion of science, the emergence of structuralism, the development of serial music and art, and, most importantly, the appearance of electronic computing—the architects considered here proposed radical reformulations of design methods. Condemning both intuition and historical precedent as inadequate to the postwar condition, automatic architecture argued for design processes that were rational, systematic, and transparent. Through these methods architecture would be connected to mathematics and science. This book provides an account of the development of such automatic design processes, a historical shift that both extended selective principals of modernism and presaged the expanding role of computational methods in contemporary architecture. It concludes by expanding our understanding of the automatic through Stanley Cavell’s concept of “automatism,” which recommends the motivated deployment of the automatic as a technique of cultural production. The core of the book offers intensive treatment of three cases. First, the mathematically-grounded “design methods” research initiated by Christopher Alexander and extended by Lionel March at Cambridge University’s Centre for Land Use and Built Form Study. Second, the early work of Peter Eisenman, who posited a neo-Platonic logic of form, with ties to the contemporaneous work of the linguist Noam Chomsky and to Conceptual and Minimal art. Third, Frei Otto’s research into form finding and natural models for design, with a particular focus on the West German Pavilion for Expo 67 and the 1975 Multihalle in Mannheim.

This book explores the theory of “non-design,” posited as the rejection of conscious design and the embrace of various phenomena that emerge without intention or “deliberate human design.” It provides a history of the ways in which non-design, as a critique of central design, operated in British and American design discourse from the 1940s to the 1970s. The author argues that parallel to the revival of liberalism in the 1940s, centralized control versus spontaneous order were issues that not only dominated economic and political debates, but those of the design disciplines as well. In contrast to views espoused by Lewis Mumford, Nikolaus Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and other modern design critics, this book demonstrates that the attempt to purge central design from architecture and urban planning, which emerged following World War II, took place for many of the same reasons that Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and other liberal thinkers gave with respect to their critique of collectivist economic planning. The postwar period witnessed the rise of a non-design paradigm, characterized by spontaneous order and the free market. By the 1960s the urban theories of Jane Jacobs, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Alexander, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and others shared many of the concerns of the liberal critique of central design and planning. While rarely made explicit, this book argues that non-design played an important role in design and urban planning debates of the postwar period.