Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway. William Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form.
Function and meaning in architecture and elsewhere, from tongue-in-cheek instructions for creating a surveillance state to reflections on the architecture of the potato chip.World's Greatest Architect: Making, Meaning, and Network Culture Artifacts (including works of architecture) play dual roles; they simultaneously perform functions and carry meaning. Columns support roofs, but while the sturdy Tuscan and Doric types traditionally signify masculinity, the slim and elegant Ionic and Corinthian kinds read as feminine. Words are often inscribed on objects. (On a door: “push” or “pull.”) Today, information is digitally encoded (dematerialized) and displayed (rematerialized) to become part of many different objects, at one moment appearing on a laptop screen and at another, perhaps, on a building facade (as in Times Square). Well-designed artifacts succeed in being both useful and meaningful. In World's Greatest Architect, William Mitchell offers a series of snapshots—short essays and analyses—that examine the systems of function and meaning currently operating in our buildings, cities, and global networks. In his writing, Mitchell makes connections that aren't necessarily obvious but are always illuminating, moving in one essay from Bush-Cheney's abuse of language to Robert Venturi's argument against rigid ideology and in favor of graceful pragmatism. He traces the evolution of Las Vegas from Sin/Sign City to family-friendly resort and residential real estate boomtown. A purchase of chips leads not only to a complementary purchase of beer but to thoughts of Eames chairs (like Pringles) and Gehry (fun to imitate with tortilla chips in refried beans). As for who the world's greatest architect might be, here's a hint: he's also the oldest.
Reflections on architecture and the exchange of information in the spaces and places of the city, from the necessity of skyscrapers in an age of Web sites to cities as talent magnets, from architectural bling to the neo-minimalism of the new MoMA. The meaning of a message, says William Mitchell, depends on the context of its reception. "Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater produces a dramatically different effect from barking the same word to a squad of soldiers with guns," he observes. In Placing Words, Mitchell looks at the ways in which urban spaces and places provide settings for communication and at how they conduct complex flows of information through the twenty-first century city. Cities participate in the production of meaning by providing places populated with objects for words to refer to. Inscriptions on these objects (labels, billboards, newspapers, graffiti) provide another layer of meaning. And today, the flow of digital information—from one device to another in the urban scene—creates a digital network that also exists in physical space. Placing Words examines this emerging system of spaces, flows, and practices in a series of short essays—snapshots of the city in the twenty-first century. Mitchell questions the necessity of flashy downtown office towers in an age of corporate Web sites. He casts the shocked-and-awed Baghdad as a contemporary Guernica. He describes architectural makeovers throughout history, listing Le Corbusier's Fab Five Points of difference between new and old architecture, and he discusses the architecture of Manolo Blahniks. He pens an open letter to the Secretary of Defense recommending architectural features to include in torture chambers. He compares Baudelaire, the Parisian flaneur, to Spiderman, the Manhattan traceur. He describes the iPod-like galleries of the renovated MoMA and he recognizes the camera phone as the latest step in a process of image mobilization that began when artists stopped painting on walls and began making pictures on small pieces of wood, canvas, or paper. The endless flow of information, he makes clear, is not only more pervasive and efficient than ever, it is also generating new cultural complexities.
Continuing William Mitchell's investigations of how we understand, reason about, and use images, The Reconfigured Eye provides the first systematic, critical analysis of the digital imaging revolution. "An intelligent and readable approach to the digitization of images.... A useful overview of a critical subject."—New York Times Book Review Enhanced? Or faked? Today the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the emerging technology of digital image manipulation and synthesis: photographs can now be altered at will in ways that are virtually undetectable, and photorealistic synthesized images are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photographs. Continuing William Mitchell's investigations of how we understand, reason about, and use images, The Reconfigured Eye provides the first systematic, critical analysis of the digital imaging revolution. It describes the technology of the digital image in detail and looks closely at how it is changing the way we explore ideas, at its aesthetic potential, and at the ethical questions it raises.
How the transformation of wireless technology and the creation of an interconnected world are changing our environment and our lives. With Me++ the author of City of Bits and e-topia completes an informal trilogy examining the ramifications of information technology in everyday life. William Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred years since Marconi—the scaling up of networks and the scaling down of the apparatus for transmission and reception. It is, he says, as if "Brobdingnag had been rebooted as Lilliput"; Marconi's massive mechanism of tower and kerosene engine has been replaced by a palm-size cellphone. If the operators of Marconi's invention can be seen as human appendages to an immobile machine, today's hand-held devices can be seen as extensions of the human body. This transformation has, in turn, changed our relationship with our surroundings and with each other. The cellphone calls from the collapsing World Trade Center towers and the hijacked jets on September 11 were testimony to the intensity of this new state of continuous electronic engagement. Thus, Mitchell proposes, the "trial separation" of bits (the elementary unit of information) and atoms (the elementary unit of matter) is over. With increasing frequency, events in physical space reflect events in cyberspace, and vice versa; digital information can, for example, direct the movement of an aircraft or a robot arm. In Me++ Mitchell examines the effects of wireless linkage, global interconnection, miniaturization, and portability on our bodies, our clothing, our architecture, our cities, and our uses of space and time. Computer viruses, cascading power outages, terrorist infiltration of transportation networks, and cellphone conversations in the streets are symptoms of a dramatic new urban condition—that of ubiquitous, inescapable network interconnectivity. He argues that a world governed less and less by boundaries and more and more by connections requires us to reimagine and reconstruct our environment and to reconsider the ethical foundations of design, engineering, and planning practice.
The Logic of Architecture is the first comprehensive, systematic, and modern treatment of the logical foundations of design thinking. It provides a detailed discussion of languages of architectural form, their specification by means of formal grammars, their interpretation, and their role in structuring design thinking. Supplemented by over 200 original illustrations, "The Logic of Architecture" reexamines central issues of design theory in the light of recent advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and the theory of computation. The richness of this approach permits sympathetic and constructive analysis of positions developed by a wide range of theorists and philosophers from Socrates to the present. Mitchell first considers how buildings may be described in words and shows how such descriptions may be formalized by the notation of first-order predicate calculus. This leads to the idea of a critical language for speaking about the qualities of buildings. Turning to the question of representation by drawings and scale models, Mitchell then develops the notion of design worlds that provide graphic tokens which can be manipulated according to certain grammatical rules. In particular, he shows how domains of graphic compositions possible in a design world may be specified by formal shape grammars. Design worlds and critical languages are connected by showing how such languages may be interpreted in design worlds. Design processes are then viewed as computations in a design world with the objective of satisfying predicates of form and function stated in a critical language. William J. Mitchell is G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture at HarvardUniversity and a founder of the Computer-Aided Design Group in Los Angeles. Among the books he has authored or coauthored are "The Poetics of Gardens, The Art of Computer Graphics Programming, and "Computer-Aided Architectural Design.
This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.
How an electronically connected world will shape cities and urban relationships of the future. The global digital network is not just a delivery system for email, Web pages, and digital television. It is a whole new urban infrastructure—one that will change the forms of our cities as dramatically as railroads, highways, electric power supply, and telephone networks did in the past. In this lucid, invigorating book, William J. Mitchell examines this new infrastructure and its implications for our future daily lives. Picking up where his best-selling City of Bits left off, Mitchell argues that we must extend the definitions of architecture and urban design to encompass virtual places as well as physical ones, and interconnection by means of telecommunication links as well as by pedestrian circulation and mechanized transportation systems. He proposes strategies for the creation of cities that not only will be sustainable but will make economic, social, and cultural sense in an electronically interconnected and global world. The new settlement patterns of the twenty-first century will be characterized by live/work dwellings, 24-hour pedestrian-scale neighborhoods rich in social relationships, and vigorous local community life, complemented by far-flung configurations of electronic meeting places and decentralized production, marketing, and distribution systems. Neither digiphile nor digiphobe, Mitchell advocates the creation of e-topias—cities that work smarter, not harder.
How the transformation of wireless technology and the creation of an interconnected world are changing our environment and our lives. With Me++ the author of City of Bits and e-topia completes an informal trilogy examining the ramifications of information technology in everyday life. William Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred years since Marconi—the scaling up of networks and the scaling down of the apparatus for transmission and reception. It is, he says, as if "Brobdingnag had been rebooted as Lilliput"; Marconi's massive mechanism of tower and kerosene engine has been replaced by a palm-size cellphone. If the operators of Marconi's invention can be seen as human appendages to an immobile machine, today's hand-held devices can be seen as extensions of the human body. This transformation has, in turn, changed our relationship with our surroundings and with each other. The cellphone calls from the collapsing World Trade Center towers and the hijacked jets on September 11 were testimony to the intensity of this new state of continuous electronic engagement. Thus, Mitchell proposes, the "trial separation" of bits (the elementary unit of information) and atoms (the elementary unit of matter) is over. With increasing frequency, events in physical space reflect events in cyberspace, and vice versa; digital information can, for example, direct the movement of an aircraft or a robot arm. In Me++ Mitchell examines the effects of wireless linkage, global interconnection, miniaturization, and portability on our bodies, our clothing, our architecture, our cities, and our uses of space and time. Computer viruses, cascading power outages, terrorist infiltration of transportation networks, and cellphone conversations in the streets are symptoms of a dramatic new urban condition—that of ubiquitous, inescapable network interconnectivity. He argues that a world governed less and less by boundaries and more and more by connections requires us to reimagine and reconstruct our environment and to reconsider the ethical foundations of design, engineering, and planning practice.
Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway. William Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form.
In this lucid, invigorating book, William J. Mitchell examines the global digital network's infrastructure and its implications for our future daily lives--showing how an electronically connected world will shape the cities and urban relationships of the future.
The author of City of Bits and e-topia finishes his trilogy with a survey of the "cybernetic" consequences of Internet and wireless technology, exploring the ways in which modern technology is extending the human body and mind. (Technology)
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