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Yet attending to these projects’ techniques and methods reveals contradictions and complications within that broader narrative. In some ways, these projects support the notion that 1960s design was increasingly technological and rational in character: they exemplify a key moment when data-oriented, computer-inspired approaches were integrated into urban and environmental design, and demonstrate designers’ interests in developing more scientific, comprehensive and measurable approaches. This paper examines the specific techniques and methods used in two such experiments: a 1962 highway location study by architect Christopher Alexander and engineer Marvin Manheim, and a 1966 highway re-routing proposal by landscape architect and urban planner Ian McHarg. The terms of this redefinition continue to influence and limit our expectations about design, architecture, and technology.Īmidst broad disciplinary, political and technological shifts in the 1960s, a handful of US urban designers experimented with highway design, thereby reconfiguring how human/nature relationships were enacted in the studio. I show that by swapping the social roles of architects and dwellers through intelligent machines, Negroponte sought to de-stabilize traditional conceptions of architectural authorship and that, by construing computers as social subjects, he aimed at redefining a contemporary debate about human-machine interaction. While an array of fields celebrates The Architecture Machine’s pioneering enunciation of key computational paradigms, including gestural and windows-based interfaces, in this article I focus on aspects of The Architecture Machine’s cultural and institutional context to unfold its dimension as a social-not to mention architectural-critique.

Nicholas Negroponte’s influential book The Architecture Machine, published in 1970 by the MIT Press, synthesized this provocative view of CAD in a collection of speculative scenarios and technological artifacts that projected design as an amiable conversation between humans and computers. They envisioned computers as “liberators” of design expertise, allowing people to bypass traditional architects and planners-professionals they saw as elitist middlemen-and the generalizing assumptions about dwellers that, in their view, drove the contemporary housing market.

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Whereas SOM pioneered the development of software tools to automate aspects of the design of high-rise buildings, such as cost/area calculation for maximized revenue, Negroponte and Friedman developed socio-technical utopias where computers become partners of people in the design of a “more humane” environment. In a concise history of architects’ embrace of computer-aid¬ed design (CAD) Robert Bruegmann notes that in the early days of CAD two camps-Nicholas Negroponte and Yona Friedman in one, and SOM in another-exemplified diverging conceptions of the role of computers in architecture.

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