Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works that unearth 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 collectively paint 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), acting as quasi-material categories 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.
Actively 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.
Author(s): Theodora Vardouli; Olga Touloumi
Series: Routledge Research in Design, Technology and Society
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xviii+226
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
Medium
Field
Obsolescence
Conversation
Architecture of computer architectures
Program
Input/output
Storage
Computation
Bibliography
PART I: Program
2. Computing environmental design
Environmental conservation at Cape Cod
Environmental design
Environmental privacy in a community
The architecture and computer conference
Note
Bibliography
3. The work of design and the design of work: Olivetti and the political economy of its early computers
Olivetti and computing
New forms: the Olivetti Elea 9003 mainframe computer
New theories: Ulm School of Design
Metadesign and machine tools
“New forces”
The potentially subversive “technician”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
4. Bewildered, the form-maker stands alone: computer architecture and the quest for design rationality
The need for choice
A
cooperative game
A
logical structure
The image of rationality
Computer architecture
Conclusion
Bibliography
PART II: Input/output
5. Augmentation and interface: tracing a spectrum
The augmented human
Enhancement through dialogue
Architecture machines
“The fabric of everyday life”
Conclusions
Bibliography
6. The first failure of man-computer symbiosis: the hospital computer project, 1960–1968
The postwar research hospital
Four partners
Technological development of man-computer symbiosis
The failure of man-computer symbiosis
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
7. The unclean human-machine interface
Part I: clean enough for a
computer
Part II: grappling with the messiness of everyday life
Part III: cleanliness as a
persistent virtue
Notes
Bibliography
PART III: Storage
8. Architectures of information: a comparison of Wiener’s and Shannon’s theories of information
Information theories and their sources
Diverging theories of information
Wiener and Shannon on information and purpose
Information and entropy
Architectures of information
Wiener’s entropic universe
Shannon’s industrial information
Meaning for the profession
The socialization of information
Acknowledgment
Notes
Bibliography
9. Bureaucracy’s playthings
Toys for serious business
Bureaucratic puzzle pieces
Notes
Bibliography
PART IV: Computation
10. Imagining architecture as a form of concrete poetry
Structuralist activity in Form
Form and algorithmic architecture
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
11. The axiomatic aesthetic
Structure
Creativity
Aesthetics
CODA
Notes
Bibliography
Index
