*He's been at it quite a while. So much so that people are rediscovering his early Space Age work with a sense of wonder.
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/digital-x/260419/terms-and-conditions/
Nicholas Negroponte
Terms and Conditions
Nick Axel You founded the Architecture Machine Group (AMG) with Leon Grossier in 1967 at MIT to investigate and speculate upon the emerging relationship between computation and architecture. It started with the urgency of creating flexible, reconfigurable, personalized architectural systems, and designed the interface with which to interact with and redesign it. You took housing as the site to experiment with new systems and interfaces for participation, and perhaps even vice versa. This was over fifty years ago, but how do you see these questions of participation, of flexibility with regards to the built environment today?
Nicholas Negroponte I did not continue working with those specific concepts very much thereafter. Flexibility and participatory architecture had become something that many people were pursuing at the time. I was influenced by Yona Friedman, who had a particular way of going from a graph to a floor plan. We saw his ideas of flexible space as a great way to experiment with and develop what we were trying to do: make computers easier to use. Participatory architecture occupied our attention for a couple of years, but ultimately did not capture our long-term attention. Ease of use did.
NA This idea of flexibility and participation is very often just an idea. That was made very clear by the way your work progressed after the AMG and with the MIT Media Lab: that it’s not just about the idea, but about actually being able to do it. You are famous for championing the phrase “demo or die.”
NN Somebody else actually coined the term “demo or die” and I am not sure who. It might’ve been Muriel Cooper, because I arrived one day at her lab and saw it written on a wall clock where all the numbers had been taken out and were replaced with the letters, “demo or die.” I thought it was pretty good.
NA Your early URBAN experiments into human-computer interaction are exemplary in this regard. In particular, your URBAN 5: SEEK experiment, which was exhibited at the Jewish Museum’s Software exhibition in 1970, can perhaps be seen as a precursor to the contemporary ethos of tech innovation to “move fast and break things.” According to one description of the project, it “featured a Plexiglas pen filled with four hundred silvered wooden blocks, a robotic arm that tried to stack and order the blocks, and a horde of gerbils that inhabited the pen. The gerbils made chaos out of the blocks and SEEK tried to keep track of them.” But the “deeply personal dialogue” you envisioned that would emerge from the animal-computer interaction failed, and instead, SEEK “tended to kill the gerbils.”
NN I just saw The Architecture Machine, my book from 1973, for the first time in a very long while. I really don’t see or hear people speaking about these topics very often.
NA I feel like the history of the early entanglement between computer science and architecture is just now being written, and practitioners such as yourself and Christopher Alexander are at its core. It’s part of the process of waking up from the distracting allure of new technologies and the image of the new. Historians and practitioners, not just from architecture but from all sorts of fields, are starting look back and search for the origins of the digital present, because we can see the same questions that we are facing today arising and being dealt with back then. So on the one hand, it provides a sense of historical continuity, to calm the nerves that the present tries to shock. But on the other, maybe it’s all done with the hope that if we understand the conditions which first brought the questions about, we can find answers to them that are more effective than the one’s we have today. Like those ideas that you started with, of participation and flexibility. Back then it was so often tied to the idea of democratization, but since then it’s become commodified as “personalization” and “customization,” and in a way that privileges convenience and ease at the expense of accessibility and knowledge. Much of your work, from the AMG to One Laptop per Child, seems to use technology as a tool for democratization, while at the same time democratizing technology.
NN “Democratize” is a funny word. A synonym for it is “vulgarize.” But if you look up the meaning of vulgar, it’s actually a rather good word. Albeit a bit dated as a definition, something vulgar is “characteristic of or belonging to the masses.” In some sense it means to popularize, or to make something common. My work has always been less about democracy and more about making common.
Continue reading. (((good idea)))
