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Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 720.105
EAN: 9780262692854
ISBN: 0262692856
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 310
Publication Date: June 08, 2003
Publisher: The MIT Press
Studio: The MIT Press
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Editorial Review:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Roll over Nietzsche!
Paul is everything Nietzsche screamed about being without necessarily proving that he was himself what he would enjoin others to become: Genuinely cheerful, high-thinking, irreverent about the past, just big, and "Greek." Paul has written a wonderful book--seemingly all the more wonderful for confirming so many of my own observations about the subject.
Here in this book he expands on the ideas he presented in his earlier book "What is Architecture?" and he does so in a way ... Read More
Rating: - A Field Guide to the Machines
Paul Shepheard's wonderful, witty new book is about architecture and machines in the broadest sense. "Artificial Love" provides a biting, brilliant commentary on our times. It's not only the best architecture book, it's the best book that I've read this year.
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