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Alphabet and the Algorithm

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ISBN-10: 0262515806

ISBN-13: 9780262515801

Edition: 2011

Authors: Mario Carpo, Cynthia Davidson

List price: $26.95
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Description:

Digital technologies have changed architecture-the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a "paradigm shift" for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti's invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect's design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models,…    
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Book details

List price: $26.95
Copyright year: 2011
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 2/4/2011
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 184
Size: 5.44" wide x 8.00" long x 0.42" tall
Weight: 0.616
Language: English

Mario Carpo is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the French Schools of Architecture and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the School of Architecture of Yale University. He is the author of Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (MIT Press, 2001) and other books.

Preface
Variable, Identical, Differential
Architecture and the Identical Copy: Timelines
Allography and Notations
Authorship
The Early Modern Pursuit of Identical Reproduction
Geometry, Algorism, and the Notational Bottleneck
The Fall of the Identicals
The Reversal of the Albertian Paradigm
The Rise
Alberti and Identical Copies
Going Digital
Windows
ID Pictures and the Power of Facsimiles
Alberti's Imitation Game and Its Technological Failure
The Invention of the Albertian Paradigm
The Fall
Form
Standard
Agency
Epilogue: Split Agency
Notes
Index