Book Launch: Beyond Digital

Join us for the London launch of Beyond Digital by Professor Mario Carpo, The Bartlett School of Architecture. 

The technical logic of electronic computation offers a radical alternative to the mode of mass production we have inherited from the Industrial Revolution, based on economies of scale and standardisation. Can robotic automation and distributed fabrication help us envisage a new way of making that would avoid the exploitative logic of industrial modernity, and combine social justice and environmental sustainability? The building site is notoriously a socio-technical laggard, yet the design professions have been in the past, and still are, uniquely positioned to conceptualise technical visions that go beyond the ambit and immediate constraints of project delivery.

Professor Carpo will present his findings from Beyond Digital as he offers a new modern agenda for our post-industrial future. Followed by a response from Daniel Cardoso Llach, Carnegie Mellon University and an audience discussion. 

This talk will last approximately 90 minutes and will be followed by a drinks reception. Copies of Beyond Digital will be available to purchase on the night via our bookselling partner, The Gilded Acorn. 

Speaker Biographies:

Author: Professor Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Mario Carpo also held teaching positions in France, the United States, Austria, and the PRC. He was the Head of the Study Centre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, Senior Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and Guggenheim Fellow for architecture in 2022-23.   

His research and publications focus on history of early modern architecture and on the theory and criticism of contemporary design and technology. His award-winning Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001) has been translated into several languages. He is the author of The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017), and other books. His latest monograph, Beyond Digital. Design and Automation at the End of Modernity was published last spring by the MIT Press.

Respondent: Daniel Cardoso Llach is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the graduate program in Computational Design and directs CodeLab. He is the author of publications, exhibitions, and technologies critically exploring the nexus of design and computation, including the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, a history of computer-aided design (CAD) that identifies and documents technological theories of design emerging from postwar government-funded research projects at MIT, and reflects critically on their architectural repercussions. His new book, Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, co-edited with Theodora Vardouli, draws from historical and contemporary materials to visually trace the emergence of computational design ideas and practices across a broader landscape of institutions in the US, the UK, and Canada.

Chair: Megha Chand Inglis is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture and currently Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellow. She is interested in the life-worlds and imaginaries of architects located outside institutional definitions of the architect. She has published on digital cultures of making; the craft-capital nexus; the translation of colonial histories, in the practice of Indian ‘temple architects’. Megha co-curated a special issue of ARQ in 2022 on temple building and political modernity. Between 2021-24, she was research affiliate on the UK-Brazil Translating Ferro/Translating Knowledges project and is currently completing a book project for the ‘Design, Technology, Society’ series.

More Information

Image: Agrivoltaic Pavilion by Sabin Design Lab at Cornell University in collaboration with the DEfECT lab at Arizona State University, from Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity (MIT Press)

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