The New Technological Condition: Architecture and Technical Thinking in the Age of Cybernetics

Book info: The New Technological Condition: Architecture and Technical Thinking in the Age of Cybernetics (Perfect Paperback, 272 pages) – Birkhäuser, 2022. Language: English.

Electric brain or creativity?

In the era of cybernetics, architects suddenly encountered entirely new ways of operating technical systems: buildings could be calculated using circuit diagrams, creativity and imagination were confronted with the technical intelligence of thinking machines. Architects found themselves in the crosshairs of cybernetics. At stake was nothing less than the continued existence of the architect’s inventive intelligence in a techno-scientific world.

Today, we see computing machines, once so heavy, losing weight while gaining power. Computers are fully colonizing the human environment, creating their own digital ecosystems, and giving rise to forms of society and ways of being that cannot even be explained without big data. Available for the first time in English as a new edition.

• Cybernetics—a hitherto neglected chapter in the history of architecture
• A critical look at the relationship between architecture and information technology
• A new chapter on the issue of Big Data and architecture

Georg Vrachliotis, Prof. for Architectural Theory and Digital Culture, TU Delft