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MARIO CARPO (architectural historian and critic): Thank you all for
coming. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for organizing this. Can
you hear me? Yes. Thank you in advance for your patience — going to be
very boring. I am very jet lagged. I may fall asleep while I speak. If that
happens, just bring me a cup of coffee. You, in compensation, in the
audience, you may fall asleep anytime.
Well, you’re a minority. What are you doing here? So that’s good. So I will
just make a short, more general introduction to bring in my topic. What do
— let me bring in my pictures, which are somewhere. Oh, yes, I see it. Oh,
yes it’s there. What do architects do? That’s a very general query. You
know since you’re an architect. Ask any architect. They will tell you we
build. We do buildings, big buildings, well, when we manage — when we
are successful. Most of the time, we do not manage, but that’s the idea.
We make buildings.
Well, that’s the idea, but it is not actually, literally, technically right,
because we, architects — we do not lay bricks. We do not cut stone. We do
not carve wood. We do not pour concrete. We do not dig foundations. We
do not any of these technical, physical, material stuff. Yes, we build
buildings, but we build buildings by making drawings of buildings. We
make drawings, not buildings. We make drawings, clean drawings. We
give them to the builders, and the builders, they, will make the buildings
we design. We do not make.
The designers do not build, and the builders, they are not allowed to
And we are, most of the time, even better paid than the actual workers
who make the actual buildings happen. That’s the advantage of being a
notational art. We build by notations — by making drawings, drawings
which eventually become buildings, but we do not actually make the
buildings. This is the advantage. A disadvantage is that, if you think of a
way a building happens, we can only build that of which we can make a
drawing.
If we cannot draw it, they, the builders, cannot build it. We are at the
mercy of the notational tools we have at our disposal to notate a building.
If we cannot draw it, they cannot build it. Now some geometrical shapes —
come on — like this one are very easy to notate. That’s a shoe box. You
make — eight points is enough to notate it — or three points and three
vectors. That’s a really very easy drawing to make, so that way, notation is
easy.
But think if what you want to build that potato. Now, since I was cooking
last night, I can actually show you. Oops! This is what I have in mind, this
awesome British potato. If you want to build that potato by notations —
plans, elevations, and sections — think of how many drawings you have to
make. Each one of these points — not one of these points is aligned. So
you have to make a huge number of sections in plans, elevation, et cetera,
et cetera, because each point has to be notated individually and
separately– millions and millions of point, which will take millions and
To build the potato, you must make thousands and thousands of drawings,
each slice, each section, being different with different points notated and
measured in, XYZ, in three dimensions, which takes a heck of a lot of time–
which is one of the reasons why potatoes were very seldom built in the
history of architecture until computers came. Because this kind of
repetitive boring operations, notating each point– xyz, three
measurements– if you have to notate 4 million points, for us, it takes a lot
of time. A computer does it in the blink of an eye. So as of the early ’90s,
when computer-aided design became to be affordable, you would expect
that architects start building potatoes like crazy, because there have been
for centuries, a pent up demand for potatoes which was never fulfilled,
because potatoes were impossible to grow and build. They are easy to
make.
I could make this potato in clay with my own hands. That’s easy. But if I
want to make plans, elevation, and section to scale– to give a blueprint to
the builders to build the potato, that takes a long time. That was
impossible until 20 years ago– not impossible, but impractical. But now it’s
possible, so you would expect but as of the early ’90s or mid-’90s to see
potatoes everywhere.
And if you google– you know what it means, right– digital architecture, or
computational architectural, or parametric architecture, you will find a
mosaic of this kind of stuff. And they are potato-esque, but they are not
real potatoes. Because they are round and smooth, but they are
streamlined, and technological, and clean, and almost mathematical. A
potato is rough and disorderly. These are not potatoes. They are
something else.
And as of the early ’90s– well, this is closer to a potato but still not– don’t
ask me which kind of a building this is, because it ain’t one. But it’s still
not a potato, because it is too smooth and too precise. You can understand
that there is mathematics in that, which isn’t in this. In the mid-’90s a
colleague of mine came out with a suitable catchy term. They decided to
call these new kind of digital shapes, blobs, taking inspiration from this
science fiction movie from the ’50s. And so, for a while, these potato-esque
digital stuff were called blobs. Today, they are called– oops– parametric or
parametric design. But in truth– and that’s the way I often tell the story to
my students. If we look at the actual timeline of how these things came to
happen, these are not potatoes. These are not blobs. These are fish.
Because it all started with this big fish, which you may have seen if you go
to Barcelona on the beach. Above the beach, not in the water– over the
beach, there is this huge metal fish floating in mid air. This was built by
Western architect Frank Gehry, and this was the first time Frank Gehry
used software for computer-aided design for which, eventually, it became
famous– a star architect which he is now, but which he wasn’t then.
And how is it that to build a fish, Frank Gehry, at that time already a well-
known architect, decided that he should use computer-aided design? And
which kind of software did he think he would need? Well, think of it. His
problem was to model the streamlined curve of the shape of a skin of a
fish. And his argument was why is the fish so streamlined and smooth?
Because it moves in water the way a boat moves in water, and the boat,
the hull of a boat, has the same streamlined lines. For a long time– this is a
17th century drawing– shipbuilders have had the technique to make these
curvy pieces of wood at the point of contact between the hull of the boat
and the water. Imagine the frame of a boat in timber is given its structure.
And then you have to nail this slat of timber to the frame of the boat. And
they have to be smooth, because that’s the point of contact of the water.
With a boat, when the boat moves in water, there is friction, or drag. And
if the slat of timber isn’t smooth, the boat will start to rock, and it will slow
down. And this timber curvy slats of the hull, they have a name in English.
Since the 17th century, they are called splines like a line but sp before sp,
splines. In the dictionary, you find this word in use as of the 17th century–
technical term used by craftsmen who were building the hull of boats by
curving with artisanal skills– and each one, they did in a different way–
these slats of timbers, so that they would connect a given number of fixed
points in the smoothest continuous way. Now the line of the stream– the
line where the hull of the boat touches the stream of the incoming water–
the line of the stream is called the streamline, so this is the principle of
streamlining. That’s where it comes from. The line of the stream, that’s the
streamline, which has to be smooth to avoid friction, or drag.
And boats were built this way for a long time, and airplanes are built this
way too. Because aerodynamic and hydrodynamic have the same
principles. This picture was made in the mechanical engineering
department of Cornell University during World War II. This is a team of
engineers designing the curve of the wing of a fighter plane. And we were
still using the same artisanal technique. They are obtaining the line of this
curve by craft. It all depends on the elasticity of the material you’re using,
so the kind of timber you are using. If you choose, I don’t know, pitch pine,
you get a certain curve. If you use fir tree or oak, a different one– if you
use as a same material and you bent rubber, you get a different color. If
you use melted mozzarella cheese, it would be a different curve still.
That’s the way it was then even during World War II when airplanes and
wings of airplanes were mass produced, but they still did it in this
artisanal way.
And so, in the ’50s and ’60s, the automobile industry kept doing it by
hand. Oops! This is probably the most famously streamlined automobile of
all times. Who knows the name of this car, just for my personal curiosity?
Perhaps your grandfather owned one. Who knows it?
AUDIENCE: A DS?
MARIO CARPO: It’s the DS, DS, which in French means the divinity. S —
designed in the early ’50s. By the way, this masterpiece of French design
was entirely designed by an Italian engineer, and it came into service in
’56 or ’57. That was the car of General de Gaulle, et cetera, et cetera. But
all this was made by hand.
And the way design was made, when this car was produced, was entirely
artisanal. The curves, the folding curves, of the body of the car were made
first in clay, and then when the final design of the car was ready, it was
made in hard wood. There was no blueprint of this car, because nobody
could have made all the drawings necessary to make all these curves– in
plans, elevation, and section was too complicated. And so, the actual
design of the camera was a model of a car in timber kept in an atomic
shelter somewhere in central Paris. So, you know, it was the Cold War, so
if something happened, the design would stay there.
And when engineers needed to drive blueprints for any practical reason,
they went to the basement into the atomic shelter, and they measured the
wooden model in scale one to one. They took the measurements out, and
they derived blueprints as needed when needed. It was laborious. It was
entirely artisanal, which is why in the late ’50s, simultaneously at Citroen
and at Renault also in Paris, the engineers, designers, and the CEO of two
companies called their top engineers and said, listen, guys; we know how
you do it, by hand. This has been done that way for centuries. Now you–
them speaking to their engineers. You are the best engineers in the world.
The French always think they are. Now shouldn’t there be a way to notate
these curves using calculus, x and y, a function– the way we learned it at
school.
We can notate parabolas, hyperboles, ellipsis, circles, you name it. Why
should we not be able to notate any curve whatsoever in 3D just using
three letters and a little bit of coefficients and parameters—mathematics.
Could you not do it mathematically, so it is more precise? And one day–
one day, who knows? We may even use computers to do that. We don’t
have them now, but one day we may. And so, two teams started to work in
complete secrecy– one at Citroen, one at Renault– with the same
assignment, find a way to notate this using mathematics.
We now know the name of the team leader at Renault– and the name of
the team leader at Citroen remained unknown for a long time. It’s a
fascinating chapter in technological history. These people evidently knew
each other. They had studied in the same schools. They probably did the
military service in Nigeria together. And their wives were probably a
member of the same rotary club in central Paris. But they had to work in
secret and in competition. And we know that the Renault team came up
with some results sooner. It was the early ’60s, when they made a famous
demonstration in front of the CEO of Renault. They took a signature on a
banknote — where it is, you know, the signature of the head cashier of the
Banque de France, a doodle full of circles.
And they showed that we have translated that random curvy doodle into
formulas, and they fed these formulas into a plotter. The plotter made the
drawing of the signatures at the different scale, and then at another scale,
and then at another scale. Because the point is a mathematical notation
has no scale, so it was the same at every scale. And it was a fantastic and
persuading demonstration. And the CEO of Renault, as to Pierre Bezier,
that was the top engineer at Renault– said good, fantastic. Great work.
How long did it take your team to translate that doodle into mathematics?
Two years. And how long would it take to notate the whole body of a car
using the same mathematics? 22 years. Well then, that’s not very
practical. But they said, no, it isn’t if you do it by hand, but one day
computers will come. And then they will do it very fast. Do we have these
computers? No. Will we have these computers? No. Are we going to buy
any computer? Has anyone have any computer in France? No. Perhaps the
Americans do, but we don’t– he says, well then, shoot yourself. That’s what
I presume the CEO told to Bezier, publish his pure mathematics, no
practical use– publish it in some wacky mathematical journals and good
luck, which they did. They published it, 1966, but only a few years later,
computers did come. And so, these mathematics was then open source, as
we would say. It had been published– scholarly journal. Anyone could use
it, and everyone started using it like crazy.
Renault, they built their own software for computer-aided design called
Uniserve. In France, an aircraft maker, Dassault, developed its own CATIA
software. In America, McDonnell Douglas, General Motors, and Boeing
started to use it. Boeing improved upon it significantly. They generalized
the mathematical notation into something called NURBS, Non-Uniform
Rational B-splines– which in school of engineering is an acronym meant to
stand for No One Understands Really B-splines– which means it’s
complicated.
recorded.
But we can imagine something like that Consider that in 1990-’91, Frank
Gehry was not yet a star architect. He was known among the architects,
but people outside the profession didn’t really know about him. So imagine
the call– office of Frank Gehry to the technological office of McDonnell
Douglas… office of architects. We have to build a big fish. Can you help?
Sorry, guys. You have the wrong numbers. We are not in the fish building
business. We do birds, big birds, airplanes. And yes, but the mathematics
is the same. And yes, sure My name is Napoleon. Good luck. But Frank
Gehry didn’t take no for an answer. He tried again– called the MIT– his
friend, Bill Mitchell, then head of architecture at the MIT– one of the
founders of computer-aided design. He said, oh, don’t try with those. You
know whom you should call– these crazy guys at Dassault in Paris. They
made these fantastic fighter jet, the Mirage, so expensive that no army can
buy it except the French. And they have this fantastic software for
designing splines, which is called CATIA– so complicated that no engineer
can use it except their own. Call them, they may have something. And he
did call them, and they said, sure, sure. A fish, seashells, the snakes,
elephant tusks, all kinds of organic cures, that’s our business. We would
be happy to help. A team of Dassault engineers went to Los Angeles.
It doesn’t look like a carp, but then immediately after he built, of course,
the Guggenheim Bilbao using the same software, CATIA, simplified for
architectural purposes. And he went on building the same kind of spliney
fishy curves all over the world. This is the Guggenheim Bilbao integrated
in ’96 or ’97, but this is the Philharmonic in Los Angeles a bit later. This is
very recent. It is in Paris. And this is now Gehry’s signature style– the style
of a fish, because of the spline modeling software he’s using.
So all these, if you look at them after the story I told you, you should not
see them as blobs, but you should see them as fish. Look at this fish. This
is fish—fish. Some of them were never built. Some of them were built. This
looked like a Photoshop, but this is a real building. This is a real building
too. This looks like a real building, but it was never built and never will be,
et cetera, et cetera– fish, fish design. Now the problem is if you go to my
school over there one mile in that direction or to a handful of other schools
which are from the avant garde of design innovation, and you look at what
our students or my colleagues have been doing for the last five or six
years– and this is a selection of what they do– they do not look like fish at
all. The style is completely different.
This is what I call, in my book, the second digital style. It’s disjointed,
disconnected, broken, fragmentary. Continuity has been replaced by
discreteness. It is not smooth. It is rough. And I was trying to explain to
my students. Well, this is what one of my colleagues has done. Since I tell
the story with metaphors or analogs– the potato, the fish– I was looking for
another animal to describe this. And they thought it would be a sheep. The
problem is with my accent– and many of my students also speak English as
a foreign language– if I say sheep, no one will ever understand if I mean
the boat or the animal.
For the last 5 or 10 years, we got so used to this wealth of data that we
even invented a new definition to define this new data rich environment.
We call it big data– to define this notion that, for a long time, data was
supposed to be rare and expensive. Now it’s ubiquitous and cheap. It’s a
big, you know, upheaval of the anthropological condition of humankind
from the beginning of time, still 10 years ago, we always needed more
data than we had. For the last few years, it is, as we always had, more
data than we need.
So we call this big data, or we have a number of other terms to define the
same machine learning, deep learning, artificial neuro– which I don’t know
what it is– blah, blah, blah. Or you can read all this. And there is a notion
that some of these may somehow be already related to an idea of artificial
intelligence, which is odd because, for people my age, we used to think
that artificial intelligence was something that would come one day in the
future. And now we are being told we have already been using it for the
last five years without even knowing, which is odd. And I don’t know what
artificial intelligence is.
Perhaps you know. You will tell me after during coffee. But I can tell you
what is starting to happen in design when we start to use some of this big
data, or deep learning, or machine learning, or even artificial intelligence
tool in the ordinary practice of our work trade. And I will show you a
couple of examples to give you an idea. Since we are talking about curves,
which is why I gave you this long introduction, this is the normal human
mathematical way to notate a curve.
And I remember making this list, when I was a high school student, to
check that the point really sat on the parabola– that you cannot notate
every point that way. The purpose of scripting the function is precisely
that you do not need to indicate each point one by one, because the script
indicates them all in a single line. But for a computer, from a computer’s
point of view, making a list of 1,000 points, or 1 million points, or 1 billion
points is not a big deal. It is for us, because we cannot work with that list.
But a computer can manipulate a list of 1 billion points in the blink of an
eye, which is indeed what is already starting to happen in architectural
design.
Because if you look at this, a famous fish, built recently by Zaha Hadid–
well, when she was still alive– one of her last buildings before she died
tragically two years ago. It’s huge. It’s the biggest fish ever built, I think.
You can see it from the moon with the naked eye. It’s enormous. But the
mathematical script is more– just two lines or three lines of script or
This is the outward and visible sign of an inward invisible logic at play, a
logic which is not the natural logic of our mind. It is the artificial logic of a
machine. A machine can do that, because the machine thinks in a way
which is different from the way we think. If we use a formula, we don’t do
that. If we use a list of points, we could do that. But how many points can
Yet the structure was calculated, but how did they do it? Not using
traditional structural formulas– using something called finite element
analysis, the computational version. I shall not go into details which, by
the way, I don’t know very well myself. But the way it works is that you
see on the screen a simulation of a structure, and you simulate in the
simulation a certain load– wind, or snow, or whatever. What you see on
the screen is that part of the structure starts to blink red– what time is it?
At what time did I– yes Well, we are on time.
It started blinking red, on the screen, the part that we break. So what you
do? You tweak it. And you change it, and you try again another load– and if
you blink red, somewhere else– and again and again. And you try and you
keep trying until you see something on the screen that doesn’t blink red.
Everything is green. That means it will not collapse, so that’s the good
one– the one you will build. The problem is you have to keep trying, and
trying, and trying. And you have no clue as to which trial will give the best
result. The trials are fast, because they are in simulation, which is why, to
make the progress even faster, we ask the machine to keep trying
automatically. And we can call that optimization.
Machine keeps trying, and trying, and trying. And the machine does, say, 1
million trials in one hour, and chances are that some of these will be good.
And the one which the machine finds will be among the best. One of them
will be built, but nobody knows which changes will give the best results.
How do you think this was calculated before it was built? It was
calculated, but it was calculated the way I told you– by simulation and trial
and error on the screen.
Why does this one structure stand up and the 9,999 just tried in
computational simulation didn’t? Nobody knows it, least of all is designers.
And yet we know– and yet we know that it will stand up, which is why we
can build it. Because in simulation, we know it did withstand. So what we
call simulation and optimization is massive computational trial and error–
try, and try, and try, and try, and keep trying. Or in another way is the art
and science of finding good solutions without knowing why they work. So
in a nutshell, it is already evident that artificial intelligence– and this is
artificial intelligence, which to some extent it is– it works. We can already
use it to solve problems we couldn’t solve in any other way. But it works in
a way which is different from the way we would work. It already shows a
logic at play, which is different from the logic of our mind, which is
probably a good reason to call it artificial. Because our organic
intelligence would not solve problems that way.
our sorting, which is indispensable for us, is unnecessary for the machine,
because the machine can search so fast that the preliminary sorting,
which we need, is not necessary for them.
And with virtual reality, we can do that as well. Think of– instead of using
a librarian– when all the books come in, you tag them with radio frequency
identification– a little chip– then you put them in a huge mountain, no
sorting whatsoever. Then you fire all your librarians, and you buy a pair of
virtual reality glasses. And when you’re looking for that book in that
mountain and saying, where is that book? And you would see blinking red
in your field of vision, so you don’t need librarians to sort, because the
machine can search. Search or sort? We sort– human intelligence.
Computers search– artificial intelligence. But that’s not my cup of tea. To
go back to my cup of tea, which is potatoes, and fish, et cetera, it is
evident that our computational design, it’s a fascinating testing ground
already for artificial intelligence, because the stuff we do is so simple and
so cheap. And the software we use is so, you know, elementary. And we do
physical stuff– the feedback loop, you know, the verification is also
immediate.
Start in the morning, and by the evening we know if it will stand up, or if it
will break down. And we know what we would look like– verification is
faster probably than in many other trades and professions, which is why
This was never our game. It was never meant to be our game, because this
is your game. You came up with it. We didn’t. So this is where I should
stop speaking and start listening. I think we have still a few minutes for
that. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: You had so many choices. Hi. You said you actually were an
expert in classical architecture. How do you see this as an evolution of
what the Greeks and Romans were trying to do? Because there’s are quite
mathematical as well, their architecture. Do you think this is just the
evolution of that, or is this something totally different?
We still use it. So all that quantification was achieved through Euclidean
geometry tools, whereas the arithmetic number-based tools we use today
didn’t yet exist. You know, the Greeks always mistrusted numbers. They
preferred geometry were all in the compass, the typical tool of the masons.
The quantification of the proportional harmony of those buildings derived
from that use of geometry, which is why neoclassical architecture as of a
17th century or 18th century– which is number-based and not geometrical
determined– from a distance, it looks the same. But if you look at it with
the eye of an expert, you can tell that it’s no longer Euclid. It is numbers.
Those numbers were pure arithmetics. The story I’ve told you is how
quantification shifted from algebra to calculus, because this is what Bezier
and the French teams did. In a sense, that was the culmination of the
dreams of Western mathematics, because with Descartes, Leibniz, and
Newton, we could not eat conics– you know, parabolas, hyperboles, et
cetera, et cetera.
AUDIENCE: Could you please put the work of Gaudi into this?
AUDIENCE: Yes, yes– into this scheme of fishes, and the dogs, et cetera?
beginning of a digital term in the ’90s, because Gaudi– who is not a dog
and not a fish. It doesn’t belong to any historical parameters, because it
was a one off. It was an isolated genius, who due to a remarkable set of
circumstances was allowed in Barcelona to make something happen,
which is a miracle– which should in theory never have existed. He wanted
to reenact the way of building of medieval master builders, so he was
building without notations. In the Middle Ages, architectural blueprints
did not exist. Craftsmen, there was no separation between the designers
and the builders. The master builders were conceiving and making at the
same time on site on the fly. And in 1890 until 1910, Antoni Gaudi in
industrial Barcelona wanted to revive due to his ideology, to his faith, to
his inspiration– wanted to revive the medieval way of building. He didn’t
want to revive a style.
So long as there is someone who is willing to build, the building will keep
growing. And as of the mid-’90s, someone I know, Mark Burry, took on
from where Gaudi stopped using computer-aided design, because he
thought with some reason that using CAD/CAM– computer-aided design
and computer-aided fabrication– it is easier to reenact the medieval way of
building. Because if you work with computers, you can design and make
almost at the same time, because you’re using the same machine. The
same tool that puts a picture on the screen can print it out, so the
separation between designer and maker is compressed by the tool you’re
using. So in a sense, this use of a computer is more medieval than modern,
which is why they are now– they are now still building the Sagrada Familia
using computers– in a sense continuing and interpreting Gaudi’s dream of
reviving the Middle Ages. It’s a fascinating story. Thanks for bringing it
up.
Diagrams, yes– sketches made after the building has been built, yes– but
blueprint, no. Because that is contrary. It goes contrary to his spirit. A
blueprint is an instruction, which a thinker gives to a maker. In the
medieval scheme of things, that separation does not exist. If you build, you
think and make. As an artisan, you don’t have a blueprint. You don’t
receive a blueprint to execute. You decide, every day in the morning, what
you will do during the day, because that’s medieval. The architectural
profession, which I described, was invented in the Renaissance when the
humanists, a bunch of snobs, decided that designers should make and that
ideas should have an intellectual value which is superior to actual craft,
but that is a modern invention.
It was invented in the 15th century with the Renaissance. In the Middle
Ages, the separation did not exist. This is what Gaudi had in mind– to
revive the Middle Ages, because he did not like modernity even though the
money used to build the Sagrada. Familia was being earned by the modern
industrial development in Barcelona, but that’s the way it works.
AUDIENCE: Thanks very much for the talk. There was a sense that maybe
in the ’80s and ’90s, maybe with CAD/CAM, other technologies, or
software, that some things started to look quite similar. Like, cars started
to resemble each other. Like, an Audi looked like a BMW or whatever. Do
you think, with AI machine learning, that there will be more of that, or it
will be that things become more differentiated in their design?
MARIO CARPO: It is true, particularly, as you rightly point out, in the case
of car design. These kind of curves, the splines, the mathematics was the
same in the software used by all car makers at the time, the software was
not. And each software has its own tweaks. So I’m not particularly an
expert, but Greg Lynn, one of the– whose work I have shown– was very
much interested in car design. He’s a real expert and connoisseur. He
tells– I have no evidence of that– but by looking at the body of a car, he
can tell which release of a given software was used to make it, and it is
true to some extent. There are tweaks of each software which leave traces.
So sometimes you can tell which release of Word was used to compose a
certain text, because, you know, cut and paste works in a different way or
something. So insofar as that was the early– you can do that because there
were probably 25 kinds of software being used in the ’90s by all
automotive industry in the world, so if you are in that field, you know them
all. Now we are probably moving to an environment where there is much
more and faster variations than adaptations, so my guess is that game of
recognizing the indexical trace of the tools we’re using is not going to be
that easy anymore. Because in the ’90s, there were probably 25 variations
of a certain software, and now there are probably 1,000. And then, that
game is– so I think that complexity, which is coming through artificial
intelligence tools, will make this kind of thing lexical transference of the
tool into the traces of its use less conspicuous.
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