Paul Shepheard: Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture (2003)

“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.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262692856, 9780262692854
296 pages

Keywords and phrases
Enchanted Rocks, Hi-Tek, songlines, quadriga, Michel Serres, Enewetak, geoid, dubbya, Ridge Racer, Bothy Band, Elgin marbles, Uluru, Cedric Price, Big Bang, tesseract, Alcock and Brown, Houston, Persian carpets, hegemony, chronotonic

publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-7-29)

Richard T. LeGates, Frederic Stout (eds.): The City Reader, 2nd ed (1996/2000)

“The second edition of The City Reader brings together the very best writing on the city. Fifty-five generous selections are included: thirty from the first edition and twenty-five entirely new ones. Each piece is introduced with a brief intellectual biography and a review of the authors writings and related literature, and an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city, and the major current debates concerning race and gender, global restructuring, sustainable urban development, the impact of technology and postmodernism.”

Publisher Routledge, 1996
Second edition, 2000
ISBN    0415190711, 9780415190718
660 pages

PDF (Index missing, 77 MB, updated on 2012-8-2)

Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (eds.): Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (2007)

“Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications (such as GPS cell phones, etc.) – the result is new types of cities and architecture. How do these games alter our perception of real and virtual space? What can the designers of physical and digital worlds learn from one another? Space Time Play presents the following themes: the superimposition of computer games on real spaces and convergences of real and imaginary playspaces; computer and video games as practical planning instruments.”

With articles by Espen Aarseth, Ernest Adams, Richard A. Bartle, Ian Bogost, Gerhard M. Buurman, Edward Castranova, Kees Christiaanse, Drew Davidson, James Der Derian, Noah Falstein, Stephen Graham, Ludger Hovestadt, Henry Jenkins, Heather Kelley, James Korris, Julian Kücklich, Frank Lantz, Lev Manovich, Jane McGonigal, William J. Mitchell, Kas Oosterhuis, Katie Salen, Mark Wigley, and others.

Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 376438414X, 9783764384142
495 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimCity, Pac-Man, computer games, video games, gamespace, id Software, Perplex City, locative media, game designers, first-person shooter, virtual worlds, Augmented Reality, Linden Lab, ubiquitous computing, LARP, Counter-Strike, MMORPGs, Super Mario Bros, Spacewar, Blizzard Entertainment

Publisher

PDF (11 MB, updated on 2015-7-2)