Steenson dissertation-proposal

Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence:
The Computer in Architecture, 1960–80
A dissertation proposal by Molly Wright Steenson
Dissertation committee
Prof. M. Christine Boyer (advisor)
Prof. Edward Eigen (reader)
Prof. Axel Kilian (reader)
Abstract
With the advent of the information age, architects in the 1960s and 70s found themselves
contending with more complex design problems than they had in the past. In response to
these changes, the architectural profession began to turn to computers and computer-
related sciences including cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI), and to ways to solve
and represent problems using the computer. The computational shift promoted design
process over formal object, moved the architect out of a central role in the design process,
and generated architectural solutions beyond the capabilities of machine or architect
alone. This dissertation will examine the work of three architects: Christopher Alexander
(b. 1936), Nicholas Negroponte (b. 1943) and Cedric Price (1934–2003) and the influence
of, and their collaborations with, key figures in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The
period from 1960 to 1980 is significant because it marks the introduction of computing
paradigms to architecture and the beginning of the mainstream of computers in
architectural practice. Throughout, this dissertation will develop the notion of generative
systems in architecture; that is, systems that incorporate models of intelligence, interact
with and respond to both designer and end user, and adapt and evolve over time.

Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence:
The Computer in Architecture, 1960–80
In the 1960s and 70s, architects began to face increased complexity within their
profession, raising a major issue within the architectural purview: the role of the architect in an
informationally complex world. While architecture could be defined as “the constructable end
product of the architect,” as Royston Landau wrote in 1968, “the ex-craftsman’s designer is faced
with a new, multi-variable world in which the old delineations of his activity are no longer
applicable.”1 With what Landau called the “accelerating growth of information and knowledge”
came “an increase in doubt,”2 One response to the conditions Landau described was architecture’s
turn to computation: to computers, conceptually and practically, and toward disciplines like
cybernetics3 and artificial intelligence (AI).4 This dissertation will address the computational shift
in architecture, one that privileged the design process over the final representation, altered the
centrality of the role of the architect and generated architectural solutions beyond the capabilities
of machine or architect alone. In particular, it will examine Christopher Alexander (b. 1936),
Nicholas Negroponte (b. 1943) and Cedric Price (1934–2003) and the influence of, and their
collaborations with, key figures in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Throughout, this
dissertation will develop the notion of generative systems in architecture; that is, systems that
incorporate models of intelligence, interact with and respond to both designer and end user, and
adapt and evolve over time. The period from 1960 to 1980 is significant because it marks the
introduction of computing paradigms to architecture and ends with the early mainstreaming of
computers in architectural practice.
Alexander, Negroponte and Price were similar in that they responded to a common
impetus by using computing and concepts of machine intelligence in their work. All challenged
the traditional role of the architect, with Negroponte and Price going so far as to explicitly call
themselves “anti-architect” and with Alexander railing against the “genius” role of the architect.5
1 Royston Landau, New Directions in British Architecture (New York,: G. Braziller, 1968), 11.
2 Landau cites both Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell in footnotes in this passage, underscoring the positivistic aspect of
the argument. Ibid., 12.
3 The term “cybernetics” refers to the study of communication and control within systems, a term that Norbert Wiener
(1894–1964) derived from Greek word for steersman in 1948. Cybernetics examines how actors within a system exchange
messages of information and receive feedback on the success of their transmissions. It situates the exchange of
information as the raison d'être of any organism, whether living being, built circuit or societal construct. This approach to
system dynamics influenced a wide range of fields, including engineering, computer science, biology, philosophy, and
social organization.
4 Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the study of machines that “exhibit and simulate intelligent behaviour.” O.E.D.,
“artificial intelligence.” It is the notion, wrote John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, “that
every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be
made to simulate it.” John McCarthy et al., "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial
Intelligence," (1955). AI sought to use information theory to model the brain, examining how computers could learn,
problem-solve and use natural language. Where cybernetics creates a universal system of part-to-whole interaction, AI
does not operate on so broad a scale—it is a set of models and methods on how intelligence works. While many of the ideas
that they had were not scalable or achievable until recently—and still sometimes not by today’s standards—contemporary
AI uses a framework set forth by Marvin Minsky in 1961: Search, pattern-recognition, learning, induction and planning.
Marvin Minsky, "Steps toward Artificial Intelligence," Proceedings of the I.R.E. 49, no. 1 (1961).
5 Price called himself anti-architect in regards to the Fun Palace; Negroponte referred to himself as “antiarchitect,”
distinguishing from that being an anti-architectural stance, and while Alexander did not call himself anti-architect, he

Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence: The Computer in Architecture, 1960-80 2
Molly Wright Steenson Dissertation Proposal | May 6, 2010
Although they did not collaborate with one another, they based their notions of generative
machines on work by many of the same figures in technology, including W. Ross Ashby,6 Gordon
Pask,7 Marvin Minsky,8 Douglas Engelbart9 and J.C.R. Licklider.10 However, the manner in which
Alexander, Negroponte and Price approached technology differed. Alexander sought to use
computers for data processing and problem solving in the early 1960s, only to shift the computer
to the periphery in his 1977 book A Pattern Language. Negroponte, on the other hand, only
reinforced the importance of the computer in the concept of what he called an “architecture
machine,” one that would develop a symbiotic, conversational relationship with the user and use
ever more sophisticated interfaces for input or output, and that would become so sophisticated, it
would ultimately develop a notion of agency. Unlike Negroponte and Alexander, Price did not
start with the computer as his central interest but instead turned to technology to provide
unexpected interactions that supported his interest in “indeterminacy.”12
While Alexander, Negroponte, and Price were key figures in the development of
intelligent systems for architecture, they were by no means the only architects who were active in
this regard. Throughout the 1960s, a number of conferences and publications addressed the
implications of computing and architecture, including Architecture and the Computer at the
Boston Architectural Center in 1964, Computer Graphics in Architecture and Design at the Yale
School of Art and Architecture in 1968, and the Design Quarterly double issue, “Design and the
Computer” in 1966. Such confluences brought together representatives from architecture, urban
planning, engineering and computer science. The events and publications took place within
mainstream of architectural education and knowledge and included such participants as Walter
Gropius, Charles Moore, and Louis Kahn, in addition to up and coming architects and
technologists working at the nexus of computing and architecture. Studying these events will help
to historicize the changes they reflected in the field of architecture.
In this dissertation, I will engage sources from both architectural history and the history
of technology to trace the development of the generative, intelligent systems at the center of
frequently and explicitly challenged the role of the architect, as early as in Notes on the Synthesis of Form. See Stanley
Mathews, "An Architecture for the New Britain: The Social Vision of Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt"
(Columbia University, 2003), 73., Nicholas Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines (Cambridge, Mass.,: The MIT Press,
1975), 1. Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy; toward a New Architecture of
Humanism, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday, 1963), 116.
6 W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972), British psychiatrist and cybernetician
7 Gordon Pask (1928-1996), British psychology and cybernetician, especially known for second-order cybernetics and
Conversation Theory.
8 Marvin Minsky (1927- ). Electrical engineer, cognitive psychologist and artificial intelligence pioneer. Founder of the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
9 Douglas Engelbart (1925- ). Electrical engineer, inventor of the computer mouse, former lab director at Stanford
Research Institute.
10 J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990). Computer scientist who coined the term “man-computer symbiosis” and invented time-
sharing (multiple users logging into a mainframe computer).
12 While the word “indeterminate” is used frequently to describe Price’s work, especially by Stanley Mathews and Gonçalo
Furtado, neither author provides the source for its use. The word “indeterminacy” in regard to Price is used by Royston
Landau in 1968 in New Directions in British Architecture. Gordon Pask uses it in a 1962 article. It would be possible that
Pask article introduced the notion of indeterminacy to Price, something that likely would have occurred during their
collaboration on the Fun Palace. See Gordon Pask, “Comments on an indeterminacy that characterizes a self-organising
system.” Cybernetics of Neural Processes, Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche (1965):1-30.

Alexander, Negroponte and Price’s work. My research will examine closely the technological
sources that influenced the key figures of the dissertation, the computational capabilities in use at
the key sites in the dissertation (especially MIT), and the reciprocal collaborations and influences
between the architects and the technologists. By synthesizing both architectural and technological
material, the dissertation will probe how Alexander, Negroponte and Price challenged traditional
architectural design and form-making processes, creating systems that generated architectural
solutions in a unique human-computer symbiosis. Ultimately, the dissertation will seek to draw a
clear picture of generative systems, the way they changed architectural method, knowledge and
practice in the period of study, and the implications for contemporary architecture, computing
and interactivity.
Technological backdrop
Systems of intelligence and responsiveness assume a set of technological requirements.
While it may seem obvious, architectural computing presumes something very basic: that an
architect could even use a computer at all. Computers in the 1960s were rare and expensive,
belonging mostly to major educational institutions, firms that serviced military contracts, or to
large businesses (including Skidmore Owings and Merrill). MIT proved very important in this
regard because it offered computing resources to its own students, faculty and researchers, as well
as to other universities and firms in the Boston area.19
Architects first used computers in two ways: in what I will call quantitative problem
solving and in representation. Quantitative problem solving provided the greatest return given
the expense of computing. It referred to writing functional requirements, analyzing data,
performing engineering calculations, providing metadata for projects and calculating costs.20 The
second category, representation, included the means for architects to draw and manipulate
images: computer graphics, computer-aided design and data visualization tools. For much of the
1960s, these three types of representational tools were developed in different domains, separately
from one another. Early computer graphics were developed as a static means to display an image
on a cathode ray tube, constructed from mechanical engineering data.21 Computer-aided design
referred to the manipulation and abstraction of computer images. 22 Data visualization referred to
19 This was especially the case with the 1963 invention of time-sharing, which allowed multiple people to access a
mainframe computer at the same time from separate terminals.
20 These include Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s computerized specification system, engineering calculations for the John
Hancock Tower in Chicago, and Bolt, Beranek and Newman’s programming of hospital space using a computer. This
includes the concept of “automatic data processing (ADP).” Boston Architectural Center., Architecture and the Computer,
First Boston Architectural Center Conference (Boston: Boston Architectural Center, 1964).
21 The term “computer graphics” was coined by William Fetter at Boeing in 1960.William Fetter, "Computer Graphics,"
Design Quarterly 66/67, no. Design and the Computer (1966): 15. At MIT, the Air Force funded computer graphics and
computer-aided design research. Boston Architectural Center., Architecture and the Computer, 26.
22 Notably, Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a two-dimensional computer-aided design program, as his dissertation
advised by Claude Shannon in 1962. Sketchpad's console consisted of a large number of dials, buttons, toggle switches,
knobs and a light pen for drawing and manipulating shapes on a screen. Steven Coons, director of the Computer-Aided
Design Project at MIT supervised the three-dimensional design program Sketchpad 3, developed in 1964 by Timothy
Johnson after Sutherland left MIT for ARPANET; he worked closely with architects at MIT on computer-aided design
programs for architecture. Steven A. Coons, "Computer-Aided Design," Design Quarterly 66/67(1966): 8.

the creation of visual relationships and mapping of statistical data. Developers of such systems
combined input devices like light pens, keyboards, tablets and the computer mouse, and output
devices that displayed graphic forms on screens or that drew them with plotters.
Christopher Alexander: From Problem-Solving to Pattern-Generating
An explicit and implicit computational approach to architecture underscored Christopher
Alexander’s work throughout the 1960s and 70s. He began his career wanting to use computers
for architectural purposes: indeed, he was one of the only architects in the early 1960s with the
mathematical expertise to program and use a computer.23 Over the next 15 years, however, the
computer as a processing device would cease to occupy so central a position in his work. Instead,
he applied the logic and structure of computing problems in patterns and pattern languages, a
codification of a solution for a design problem that repeats in the environment (A Pattern
Language).24
Alexander applied cybernetics and AI to architecture in an attempt to address the
growing complexity of design problems. He noted the difficulty of designing for intermeshing
systems, even when the designed object itself (whether something as big as a village or as small as
a teapot25) seemed uncomplicated. “In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems
have a background of needs and activities which is becoming too complex to grasp intuitively,” he
wrote in his dissertation, published as Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964.26 The design
process he described in Notes required a computer to analyze complex sets of data to define
“misfits”—design requirements—that the designer ameliorated by creating a form that solved the
problem.27 Notes presented a logical, quantitative model of architectural computing influenced by
such texts as Ashby’s 1952 Design for a Brain,28 Minsky’s 1961 “Steps Toward Artificial
Intelligence,” and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form.29
23 From his undergraduate studies onward, Christopher Alexander expressed an interest in both mathematical analysis
and design. He completed two bachelor’s degrees at the University of Cambridge: the first in mathematics, the second in
architecture in the program led by Leslie Martin (1908–1999). He moved to the United States and continued his studies in
the doctoral program at Harvard starting in 1958. Sean Keller, "Systems Aesthetics: Architectural Theory at the University
of Cambridge, 1960-75" (Harvard University, 2005), 64.
24 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), x.
25 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3.
26 Ibid.
27 This is a direct interpretation of Thomspon’s “diagram of forces,” in which forces within and without an organism
determines its outward form. “ The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape
while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form; anything
in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two.”
Ibid., 15, 18-19.
28 W. Ross Ashby, a cybernetician, became chair of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana Electrical Engineering
department at the request of Heinz von Foerster and Stafford Beer, both prominent cyberneticians. Heinz von Foerster
parented the notion of second-order cybernetics. Stafford Beer would work with the Allende government in Chile in the
application of cybernetics to political processes and personal control. Beer would work with Cedric Price on the Fun
Palace, serving as the lead on the cybernetics committee in the early 1960s.
29 It is similar to a set of highway design projects he conducted with Marvin Manheim in the Civil Engineering Laboratory
at MIT in 1963. See Christopher Alexander and Marvin L. Manheim, Hidecs 2: A Computer Program for the Hierarchical
Decomposition of a Set Which Has an Associated Linear Graph (Cambridge,: School of Engineering, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1962).

“Systems Generating Systems,” a 1968 article by Alexander, situated architectural
systems in more abstract terms than Notes. He wrote, “In order to speak of something as a
system, we must be able to state clearly: 1) the holistic behaviour which we are focusing on; 2) the
parts within the thing, and the interactions among these parts, which cause the holistic behaviour
we have defined 3) the way in which this interaction, among these parts, causes the holistic
behaviour defined.”30 He emphasized that systems represent a recursive, repeating set of
abstractions that give rise to—or more precisely, that generate—other systems. These conceptual
notions of system intelligence undergirded the Center for Environmental Structure (CES). The
CES developed the notion of the pattern language for seven years, publishing three books between
1975 and 1979: The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment and A Pattern Language.
A Pattern Language provided 253 plain language patterns that addressed possibilities for
building on any scale, putting a grammar into place that anybody could use to design one’s own
environments without the help of an architect. Alexander and his colleagues viewed them as
scientific hypotheses, on one hand, or even poetry, on the other, because language offered a wide
range of interpretations.31 The CES imagined that it would store patterns in a computerized
catalog and offer them to subscribers—what we would today call a digital pattern library.32
Not only did the pattern language concept enjoy success among the general public, it became a
model for system architectures, computer languages and contemporary interfaces. A Pattern
Language became a generative architectural system in Alexander’s very definition of the term.
Nicholas Negroponte: “Architecture Machines”
While Nicholas Negroponte35 is best known today as a technology guru and founder of the
MIT Media Lab, this dissertation is interested in his architectural background and the notion of
“architecture machines”— evolving systems that worked in “symbiosis” with designer and
resident that Negroponte thought would change the making of architecture. 36 As director of the
Architecture Machine Group at MIT, founded in 1968, he assembled a theory of how such systems
would work in the 1970 book The Architecture Machine (dedicated “to the first machine that can
appreciate the gesture”37) and the 1975 book Soft Architecture Machines, and a series of
computer-aided design tools and programs throughout the 1970s.
30Christopher Alexander, "Systems Generating Systems," AD 38(1968): 607. The ideas in “Systems Generating Systems”
call to mind a precedent to artificial intelligence: the self-reproducing systems that Claude Shannon predicted in
“Computers and Automata” in 1953.
31 Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein, A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction, xv, xli.
32 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, Pattern Manual, ed. Center for Environmental Structure
(Berkeley1967), 3.
35 Negroponte was first introduced to computer-aided design as a student at MIT. He joined the MIT faculty in 1966,
founded the Architecture Machine Group in 1968, and the MIT Media Lab in 1985. His later work also proved popular: his
1995 Being Digital was a bestseller for a year and was translated into 40 languages.
36 Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine (Cambridge, Mass.,: M.I.T. Press, 1970), 11-12. The term “symbiosis”
originated in J.C.R. Licklider’s 1960 article, “Man-Machine Symbiosis” but was also a favorite word of Steven Coons,
computer-aided design pioneer and mechanical engineering professor at MIT. J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer
Symbiosis," IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1, no. 1 (1960). See also Boston Architectural
Center., Architecture and the Computer, 26.
37 Negroponte, The Architecture Machine.

An architecture machine, in Negroponte’s estimation, would turn the design process into
a dialogue that would alter the traditional human-machine dynamic. He wrote, “The dialogue
would be so intimate—even exclusive—that only mutual persuasion and compromise would bring
about ideas, ideas unrealizable by either conversant alone. No doubt, in such a symbiosis it would
not be solely the human designer who would decide when the machine is relevant.”38 In order to
achieve the design goals and close relationship with the user the machine would have to
incorporate artificial intelligence, he wrote, “because any design procedure, set of rules, or truism
is tenuous, if not subversive, when used out of context or regardless of context.”39 Intelligence for
Negroponte is thus not a passive quality but an active one, expressed through behavior, and
improved over time.
However, building a successful architecture machine proved a much more difficult
concept in practice because of the quality of interaction they achieved and their designer’s overall
fascination with bells and whistles. The URBAN5 (1967) program was Negroponte’s first, major
computer-aided design program that sought to use his ideas about conversation, dialogue and
intelligence. In his own judgment, it failed because it could not adapt and its dialogue was too
primitive.40 The shortcomings of URBAN5 led the Architecture Machine Group to develop “The
Architecture Machine”—a time-sharing computer that in addition to typical peripherals, had a
camera interface on wheels (GROPE), robot arm (SEEK),41 tablet-based sketching stations and
“an assemblage of software.”42 Negroponte wrote, “ he prognostications of hardware enumerated
in wanton fantasy have been achieved and even superseded in the actual Architecture Machine of
1974. All too often we spend our time making better operating systems, fancier computer
graphics, and more reliable hardware, yet begging the major issues of understanding either the
making of architecture or the makings of intelligence.”43 “The Architecture Machine” was perhaps
a failure of its own success.
The work of the Architecture Machine Group illustrates the difficulty in building
generative systems that deliver on the promise of contextual intelligence and responsiveness. An
“architecture machine” expresses its intelligence by watching and learning from a user, and doing
the right thing at the right time. Not surprisingly, cybernetics and artificial intelligence grappled
with the same kinds of issues: the technology was simply not advanced enough to deliver on the
ideas and the models of the theorists.
38 Ibid., 11-12.
39 Ibid., 1. Here, Negroponte refers to and cites Avery Johnson, "Organizaiton, Perception and Control in Living Systems,"
Industrial Management Review 10, no. 2 (1969): 12.
40 Negroponte, The Architecture Machine, 95-6.
41 SEEK was featured in the Software show at the Jewish Museum in Boston in 1970 and Smithsonian in 1971.
42 Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines, 157-71.
43 Ibid., 1.

Cedric Price: Buildings with “Minds of their Own”
Cedric Price (1934–2003) designed architectural systems in which the act of engaging
and interacting with the architecture would change the user. He incorporated cybernetics and
communication technology in his work as a means of enabling new types of social interaction. The
result was a series of prescient architectural projects, such as the Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt
and Generator. Price's philosophy was an “enabling“ one, as Landau described it. “He [Price]
looks to technologies which can expose inadequacies in the conventional wisdom of architecture
while at the same time celebrating the possibilities of thoughtful supportive environments.”45 For
Price, technology provided a means for architecture to increase choice and flexibility. In literal
and more figurative ways, “the 'hardware' of architectural form became secondary to the 'software
of human activity,” Stanley Mathews wrote in his dissertation on Price.46 As Landau pointed out
in New Directions in British Architecture, Price’s projects had to do with “problem-
understanding and question-asking (besides being a physical or antiphysical, technological or
nontechnological, solution) is necessary if it is to be understood.”47 He noted that Price tightly
defined the context of his projects, but pursued “indeterminacy” in the hopes of enabling the
users of his projects to adapt them to their needs.48
Price designed Generator (1976-79, unbuilt) to create conditions for shifting personal
interaction in a reconfigurable and responsive environment.49 It would be “intelligent—it should
have a mind of its own,” wrote programmer-architects John and Julia Frazer, with whom Price
collaborated. 50 He developed a scheme of 150 12' by 12' mobile, recombinable cubes constructed
with off-the-shelf infill panels, glazing and sliding glass doors. To this kit of parts, he added
catwalks; screens and boardwalks, all of which could be moved by mobile crane as desired by
users to support whatever activities they had in mind. When the Frazers joined the Generator
project two years after its start, they concocted interventions for Generator that would surprise its
users. “The whole intention of the project is to create an architecture sufficiently responsive to the
making of a change of mind constructively pleasurable,” Price wrote in a letter to the Frazers.51 “If
you kick a system, the very least that you would expect it to do is kick you back,” they replied.52
The Frazers proposed four programs that would use input from sensors attached to Generator’s
components: a drawing program, an inventory program, a modeling and prototyping interface,
45 Royston Landau, "A Philosophy of Enabling," in The Square Book, ed. Cedric Price (London: Architectural Association,
1984), 11.
46 Mathews, "An Architecture for the New Britain: The Social Vision of Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt",
9.
47 Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 76.
48 Ibid.
49 It was to serve as a retreat and activity center for small groups of visitors (1 to 100) to the White Oak Plantation on the
coastal Georgia-Florida border. The client was Howard Gilman, CEO of Gilman Paper Company, a generous arts patron.
50 Ibid.
51 John Frazer, Letter to Cedric Price (January 11, 1979). Generator document folio DR1995:0280:65 5/5, Cedric Price
Archives (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture).
52 Ibid.

and the intriguingly-named boredom program.53 “In the event of the site not being re-organized
or changed for some time the computer starts generating unsolicited plans and improvements,”
the Frazers wrote.54
While Price did not have the computer programming skills that Negroponte and
Alexander did, he continually returned to the possibilities of computers and technology to enable
new interactions within his architecture. Doing so promoted indeterminacy, as Landau termed it,
without requiring a static form to represent the choice of the user. The Fun Palace, Potteries
Thinkbelt, Inter-Action Centre and Generator offer better-known examples of the interconnection
of cybernetics, communication technologies and architecture, but this dissertation also seeks to
uncover other projects of Price’s projects that incorporated technology and chance as a way of
creating different types of engagement with his work.
Archives and positioning of dissertation
Admittedly, a number of contemporary projects address architectural history and
technology in the 1960s and 70s, although none as specifically about architecture and computing
as this dissertation aims to do. The connections between cybernetics and art and architecture
have recently been documented in a number of dissertations, books and articles. These bodies of
work, however, do not elucidate the connection between artificial intelligence and architecture.
They do not consider Alexander, Negroponte and Price in comparison to one another, nor do they
provide a close reading of technological paradigms in use by architects. Several dissertations have
been completed or are in progress on the work of Cedric Price but tend toward a monographic
approach.55 Furthermore, only one architectural history dissertation exists on Christopher
Alexander (on his surprising common background with Peter Eisenman); others explore the use
of pattern languages in non-architectural fields.56 And while one dissertation provided a literature
and architectural theory review of computation in architecture from 1960–80 in support of a PhD
in design and computation in architecture, it only offers cursory detail about the parties it
traces.57 Finally, not a single dissertation has been completed that focuses on Negroponte’s
Architecture Machine Group or that uses archival material on the subject.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Dissertations completed include Mathews, "An Architecture for the New Britain: The Social Vision of Cedric Price's Fun
Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt". Gonçalo Furtado, "Envisioning an Evolving Architecture: The Encounters of Gordon
Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer" (University College London, 2008). Tanja Herdt, "The Concept of Micropolitics in the
Work of Cedric Price 1961-1984" (ETH, In progress). Articles Mary Louise Lobsigner, "Cybernetic Theory and the
Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price's Fun Palace," in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar
Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah William Goldhagen and Re! jean Legault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Stanley
Mathews, "The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture: Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy," Journal of
architectural education 59, no. 3 (2006).
56 Keller, "Systems Aesthetics: Architectural Theory at the University of Cambridge, 1960-75".
57 Altin João de Magalhães Rocha, "Architecture Theory 1960-1980. Emergence of a Computational Perspective"
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).

This dissertation will draw upon both written and design work, published and
unpublished, from Alexander, Negroponte and Price, in an analysis and close reading of their
projects. Archives to visit include:
Architecture archives:
• Nicholas Negroponte’s personal archives, Cambridge, MA
• Cedric Price Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
• Serge Chermayeff Archive (Christopher Alexander), Avery Library, New York
• Center for Environmental Structure material, University of California, Berkeley
• Archigram Archive (online)
• ICA Archive, British Center for Art, Yale University, New Haven
• Boston Architectural Center (Architecture and the Computer)
• Yale Archives (Computer Graphics in Architecture and Design)
Technology archives
• MIT Institutional Archives
• Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• Computer History Museum, San Jose, CA
• Stanford Archives (Stanford Research Institute and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab)
• Gordon Pask Archive, Vienna
Contribution
Through a close reading of architectural projects and technological influences upon them,
this dissertation seeks to understand how information technology and computing changed
architectural practice in the 1960s and 70s. By rigorously examining the terminology and
arguments that Alexander, Negroponte and Price used and tracing back their references, I hope to
derive a clearer understanding than currently exists of their systems, processes and projects. In so
doing, I seek to question the implications of intelligent systems and the agency and ethics that
they embody. Moreover, this study will analyze the effect on architectural practice of
decentralizing the role of the architect and examine the shift toward the creation of process, not
form, as the designer’s métier. Finally, by approaching architectural history through the lens of
technology, and by approaching the architectural components of human-computer interaction
and the history of computing in the 1960s and 70s, I hope to bring to light the vital importance
that intelligent, generative systems played in architectural method and knowledge of that time
and explore their contemporary legacy.

Bibliography
Architecture & technology
Primary sources
Anderson, Stanford. “Problem-Solving and Problem-Worrying.” Architectural Association,
London, March 1966; ACSA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, June 6,
1966.
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. New York,: Praeger, 1960.
———. “The History of the Immediate Future.” The Journal of the Royal Institute of British
Architects 68.7 (1961): 252–266.
———. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? New York,: Reinhold, 1966.
Colquhoun, Alan. “Frames to Frameworks.” Encounter 48 (1977): 41.
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Alexander, Christopher. HIDECS 2: A Computer Program for the Hierarchical Decomposition of
a Set Which Has an Associated Linear Graph. Cambridge, MA: School of Engineering,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1962.
———. HIDECS 3: Four Computer Programs for the Hierarchical Decomposition of Systems
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———. Houses Generated by Patterns. Berkeley: Center for Environmental Structure, 1969.
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———. The Production of Houses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language Which
Generates Multi-Service Centers. Berkeley: Center for Environmental Structure, 1968.
———. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press,
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Chermayeff, Serge, and Christopher Alexander. Community and Privacy; Toward a New
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———. “Systems Generating Systems.” AD 38 (1968): 605-10.
———. “The Question of Computers in Design.” Landscape 14, no. 3 (1965): 6-8. (Also published
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———. “The Revolution Finished Twenty Years Ago “ Architects' Year Book 9, no. 181-185 (1960).
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Negroponte, Nicholas. The Architecture Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.
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———. Soft Architecture Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975.
———. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
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———. “Recent Advances in Sketch Recognition.” AFIPS ’73, 1973.
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Cedric Price and John Frazer
Books by Cedric Price
Bron, Eleanor, and Samantha Hardingham, eds. Cedric Price Retriever. London:
inIVAnnotations, 2006.
Price, Cedric. The Square Book. London: Architectural Association, 1984.
Price, Cedric, Samantha Hardingham, and Robin Middleton. Cedric Price, Opera. Chichester,
West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.
Price, Cedric, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Arata Isozaki, Patrick Keiller, and Rem Koolhaas. Re-CP. Basel;
Boston: Birkhäuser, 2003.
Articles by Cedric Price
Landau, Royston and Cedric Price. “Evolutionary Housing: Notes on the Context and the
Problem.” Architectural Design 41 (1971): 567-9.
Price, Cedric. “Activity and Change.” Archigram 2 (1962).
———. “Potteries Thinkbelt.” In Essays in Local Government. Vol.3, London: Merlin Press, 1965:
133-40.
———. “Discussion.” Datum (1966).
———. “Ptb: Life-Conditioning.” Architectural Design 36 (1966): 482-94.
———. “Fun Palace for Camden Town.” Architectural Design 37 (1967): 522.
———. “Learning.” Architectural Design 38 (1968): 208.
———. “Expediency.” Architectural Design 39 (1969): 493.
———. “Non-Plan.” Architectural Design 39 (1969): 269-73.
———. “Cedric Price Supplement 1.” Architectural Design 40 (1970).
———. “Cedric Price Supplement 2.” Architectural Design 41 (1971).
———. “An Architecture of Approximation.” Architectural Design 42 (1972): 647.
———. “On Safety Pins and Other Magnificent Designs.” Pegasus (1972).
———. “Protest: Future of Planning.” Architectural Design 45 (1974): 202.
———. “Recherche sur des équipements de loisirs: from Fun Palace to Generator.” Techniques et
architecture 333 (1980): 108-11.
———. “Anticipating the Future.” RIBA Journal (1981).
———. “Cedric Price Talks at the AA.” AA Files 19 (1990): 27-34.
———. “Magnet: The Architecture of Anticipation.” Architecture and Ideas 2 (1998): 6–13.

John Frazer
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———. An Evolutionary Architecture.. London: Architectural Association, 1995.
———. “The Continuing Relevance of Generator.” In Cedric Price, Opera, edited by Cedric Price,
Samantha Hardingham, Robin Middleton and Cedric Price. Chichester, West Sussex:
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Price and John Frazer.” PhD diss., University College London, 2008.
Herdt, Tanja. “The Concept of Micropolitics in the Work of Cedric Price 1961-1984.” PhD diss.
ETH, In progress.
Hughes, Jonathan, and Simon Sadler. Non-Plan : Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in
Modern Architecture and Urbanism. Oxford ; Boston: Architectural Press, 2000.
Landau, Royston. “A Philosophy of Enabling.” In The Square Book, edited by Cedric Price.
London: Architectural Association, 1984.
Littlewood, Joan. Joan's Book: Joan Littlewood's Peculiar History as She Tells It. London:
Methuen, 1994.
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Press, 2000.
Mathews, Stanley. “An Architecture for the New Britain: The Social Vision of Cedric Price's Fun
Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003.From Agit-Prop
to Free Space : The Architecture of Cedric Price. London: Black Dog Pub. Ltd., 2007.
———. “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture: Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy.”
Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (2006): 39-48.
Mullin, Steve. “Cedric Price or Still Keeps Going When Everything Else Has Stopped.”
Architectural Design 46 (1976): 281-7.
Steenson, Molly Wright. “The Architect, The Sketch and the Response: Construing and
Constructing Cedric Price’s Generator.” Master’s thesis, Yale School of Architecture,
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Johnston, John. The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI.
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———. “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan.” In Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, edited by Jasia
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Computer graphics and computer-aided design
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MIT context and culture
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Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. The Social Construction of Technological
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———. Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures
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