Digitally Intelligent Architecture Has Little to Do with Computers (and Even Less with Their Intelligence)

Digitally intelligent architecture has little to do with computers (and even less with their intelligence) Myths--classical myths--are a complicated matter.As the great classicist Paul Veyne famously asked long ago, did the Greek themselves really believe in their myths? 1 Would Euclid, or Aristotle, for example--for what we know of them, not the kind of guys likely to abet improbable architecture is what happens when architecture meets one of such mythical, almost magical protagonists: after all, not long ago computers were still called, in most languages, "electronic brains," and to this day some see them as endowed with supernatural (or "singular") powers. 3 Yet the first encounters between designers and electronic computers in the years of post-war reconstruction were frustrating, and unfruitful.A low added-value professional service dealing with complex problems and data-heavy images and drawings, architecture did not 3 As a reviewer pertinently noted, by debunking this myth in this article I shall more or less inadvertently construe another one--that of a crucial "digital turn" in architecture that would have occurred in the early 1990s, brought about by the conflation of Deleuzian and deconstructivist theories in architecture, affordable computation and the rise of spline-modeling software.But I have a vested interest in that historiographical construction: I first suggested it in 2004, when, together with its guest editor, Greg Lynn, I republished the seminal AD 63 (1993), Folding in Architecture, with new prefaces by Greg and me; this republication was celebrated by a memorable conference at the MAK in Vienna in the spring of 2005 (Twelve Years of Folding.Deleuze and the IT Revolution in Architecture, Vienna, MAK, Museum fr Angewandte Kunst, and the Kiesler Foundation, 20-21 May 2005).I reiterated the notion of a crucial watershed in digital design theory around 1993 in all my subsequent publications and in my teaching; the same historiographical timeline has been adopted by other historians and critics (see in particular the series of events and publications organized by the CCA in Montral under the title Archeology of the Digital), and it is now often taken for granted.Therefore, I may be forgiven for being more partial to this myth than to others I did not personally nurture; and I would suggests that myths we like, or myths that serve us well, may be seen as simple instruments or devices we sometimes use to compress a variety of diverse and often unrelated events into simplified, streamlined, and memorable narrations-which is, after all, a form of inductive generalization inherent in all cognitive processes.In that, as already noted by Walter Benjamin (Erzhler, 1936) storytelling, historiography, classical myths and Christian parables all serve similar purposes: by picking a few accidental events out of many unrelated ones, and putting them in some rational sequence, they make order out of chaos, and they present a causal interpretation of the unintelligible in a user-friendly format, which can be easily conveyed and remembered--together with the more or less esoteric meanings that each story may conceal.