Michael Noll & Kenneth Knowlton — Bell Telephone Laboratories and Early Computer Graphics During the 1960s, creative research was conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories, with a significant number of contributions in the area of computer graphics. Revisiting these early achievements is informative not only regarding the origins of current forms of digital image formats but also…

Architecture Machine Group MIT — Architecture by Yourself: An Experiment with Computer Graphics for House Design Between 1975 and 1977, the Architecture Machine Group(AMG) at MIT, was conducting a research project called “Architecture by Yourself: An Experiment with Computer Graphics for House Design”, headed by Nicholas Negroponte and Guy Weinzapfel. The research was in close…

Cedric Price & John Frazer — The Generator Project The Generator Project, conceived and designed by Cedric Price in 1976 and John Frazer as computational consultant, is mentioned in the bibliography as the first “intelligent” building that “ knew itself”…

Max Bense & Abraham Moles — Information Aesthetics Information Aesthetics was a short-lived but influential attempt to establish a mathematically rigorous aesthetic theory that is based on objectification of perception and effort to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, sciences, and art theory. Influenced by Wiener’s cybernetics, Shannon’s information and Communication theory and Birkoff’s semiotics, its main instigators…

Christopher Alexander — Diagrams as Information Structures Background and Influences: Christopher Alexander, educated both as an architect and mathematician, was widely influential during 60’s -and still is- on discussions around design methodology and the use of computers in design, architecture and urbanism. Despite being a quite controversial and “lone” scholar, he was engaged…

Nicholas Negroponte and Architecture Machine Group MIT — Urban 5 Nicholas Negroponte (1943) founded in 1967, together with Leon Groisser, the Architecture Machine Group (Arch Mac) at MIT, which later in 1985 transformed to MIT Media Lab. Negroponte’s vision was an architecture machine that would turn the design process into a dialogue, altering the traditional human-machine dynamics. His…

Gordon Pask “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics” Cybernetics emerged in early 1940, during World War II, after a long prehistory spanning in many fields, and influenced new paradigms in design, architecture and arts. Cybernetics, officially named in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener is a term difficult to articulate in a…