Vernacular Architecture

and the 21st Century

Written by Sarah Edwards

Vernacular architecture, the simplest

form of addressing human needs, is
seemingly forgotten in modern
architecture. However, due to recent
rises in energy costs, the trend has
sensibly swung the other way.
Architects are embracing regionalism
and cultural building traditions, given
that these structures have proven to be
energy efficient and altogether
sustainable. In this time of rapid
technological advancement and
urbanization, there is still much to be
learned from the traditional knowledge
of vernacular construction. These low-
tech methods of creating housing
which is perfectly adapted to its locale
are brilliant, for the reason that these
are the principles which are more often
ignored by prevailing architects.
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 Inertia of an Automated Utopia
Design Commodities and
Authorial Agency 40 Years after
“The Architecture Machine”

written by Daniel Cardoso Llach

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. 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. 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. The terms of this redefinition
continue to influence and limit our expectations
about design, architecture, and technology. 6

Human collaborators installing timber elements guided by the cable robot
pointer, resulting in a variable density triangulated structure.
’Data-Space’ – field of nodes containing infra-red sensors and LEDs, tracking
human activities and communicating intelligent signals
The Architecture Machine
Revisited: Experiments exploring
Computational Design-and- Build
Strategies based on Participation
written by Jeroen van Ameijde
This article summarises a series of experiments
at the Architectural Association between 2011 and
2017, which explore the intellectual notion of ‘the
architecture machine’ as introduced by Nicholas
Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group
at MIT in 1967. The group explored automated
computational processes that could assist the
process of generating architectural solutions by
incorporating much greater levels of complexity
at both large and small scales. A central idea to
the mission of the Architecture Machine Group
was to enable the future inhabitants to participate
in the decision-making process on the spatial
configurations. The group aimed to define
architecture as a spatial system that could
directly correlate with human social activities
through the application of new computer
technologies.
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