ARQ Docs Mario Carpo
(November 2020)
Mario Carpo; Francisco Díaz, Stephannie Fell (eds.) Paperback; exposed binding with dust jacket
12 x 17 cm | 128 pp.
Spanish + English
ISBN: 978-956-9571-84-8
Paradigm shifts offer a space to track and understand our current position, to have some hint about the ‘future’. Mario Carpo, who is already an inescapable reference in the history of cultural technologies and of the digital age, offers us a reflective and critical look that updates problems of the past to better comprehend the origin of the ideas and prerogatives of the present. In the two essays gathered in this book, the concern to get a hold of the impact of technological changes and of the shifts of prevailing philosophical-historical arguments weaves a relationship with contemporary architectural expressions. “The Rise,” a chapter reproduced from the book The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), returns to the figure of Leon Battista Alberti to show us the first forms of recorded digitization, and to describe how the obsession with “identical reproducibility” was one of the main motivators for digitizing information with alphanumeric codes. Meanwhile, the essay “The Postmodern Cult of Monuments” deals with how Postmodern architectural thought gave way to two forms of understanding memorial architecture: the memorial, which is not proposed as a historical inspiration, and the Romantic, whose rebirth suggests—premonitorily—the dangerous reappearance of the prevailing ideologies from the beginning of the twentieth century.
Side A: “The Rise”Side B: “The Postmodern Cult of Monuments”
Mario Carpo is an architectural historian of cultural technologies. He holds a Dr.Arch from the University of Florence and a PhD from the European University Institute. He has taught at the University of Geneva; École d’Architecture de Saint-Étienne; École d’Architecture Paris-La Villette; Georgia Tech; served as Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture (2010–2014); is Reyner Banham Professor at The Bartlett, UCL (2014–); and directed the Centre for Studies at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal (2002–2005). His research focuses on architectural theory, history, and cultural technologies, with emphasis on classical tradition and digital design theory. Key publications include Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001), The Alphabet and the Algorithm (MIT Press, 2011), and The Second Digital Turn (MIT Press, 2017), along with numerous articles in Log, Grey Room, E-flux Journal, Perspecta, Domus, Artforum, Abitare, Arquitectura Viva, AD, and Harvard Design Magazine.