Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture

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MIT Press, 09.05.2003 - 312 Seiten
A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.

According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are. In his writings, Shepheard examines old assumptions about architecture and replaces the critical theory of the academic with the active theory of the architect-citizen enamored of the world around him.

Artificial Love weaves together three stories about architecture into one. The first, about machines as architecture, leads to speculations about technology and the human condition and to the assertion that machines are the sculptures of today. The second story is about the ways that architecture reflects the tribal and personal desires of those who make it. In the West, ideas of community, multiculturalism, and globalization compete furiously, leaving architecture to exist as it always has, as the past in the present. The third story features individual people experiencing their lives in the context of architecture. Here, Shepheard borrows the rhetorical device of Shakespeare's seven ages of man to propose that each person's life imitates the accumulating history of the human species. Shepheard's version of the history of humans is a technological one, in which machines become sculpture and sculpture becomes architecture. For Shepheard, our machines do not separate us from nature. Rather, our technology is our nature, and we cannot but be in harmony with nature. The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Im Buch

Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

Jaques
1
Thanksgiving
13
RightBamNow
29
INFANT The Chimpanzees Fall from Grace
41
SCHOOLBOY 40 Words
57
What Did They Do with My Future?
71
LOVER The Lover
87
SOLDIER Ex
105
Quadrigas
123
JUSTICE Enchanted Rocks
137
PANTALOON Pardon?
151
The Fields of Vision
163
OBLIVION Me Me Me
181
A Field Guide to the Machines
189
ANNOTATED INDEX
199
Urheberrecht

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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen

Beliebte Passagen

Seite xii - And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress
Seite xiii - The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound.
Seite xii - With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances ; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and...
Seite xii - All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits, and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms...
Seite 237 - Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
Seite 182 - The earth's obscene, corrupting love. And still the ripe fruit and the branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair. O Courage, could you not as well Select a second place to dwell, Not only in that golden tree But in the frightened heart of me?
Seite 285 - ... rationality too closely (Hickman 2001). That critique continues as a response not only to pragmatism as a tradition of thought but also to the proposal for sustainable development studied here. A particularly clear example of that critique is offered by architect and theorist Paul Shepheard, who argues that [s]ustainability is usually configured as a piece of critical theory against the American way of life. I am suggesting the opposite: that it is part of the American hegemony's desire for perpetuity,...
Seite 182 - How calmly does the orange branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair.

Autoren-Profil (2003)

Paul Shepheard is an architect living in London.

Bibliografische Informationen