Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture [Hardcover]

Paul Shepheard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0262194856 | ISBN-13: 978-0262194853

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aphoristic, caffeinated observations on machines as architecture; personal meditations on the birth of a son and the senescence of a father; and an annotated index that reads almost like an oddball poem make up the three parts of this "club sandwich" of a book by British architect Shepheard (The Cultivated Wilderness). His points here are relatively simple-e.g., "architecture is rearranging material for human purposes," and therefore sculptures, jets, cars and landscapes are also architecture-but his presentation is a wild hodgepodge of theory, memoir and fact. It's human destiny to be technological, Shepheard argues; what we make reflects our desires, and "the change that humans have wrought in the world is a wonderful thing." This may sound a bit optimistic for some, but Shepheard's ideas are compelling, and the playfulness of their presentation may charm.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"As if Plato and Kerouac had written an encyclopedia of technology, Shepheard's bristling hypertext intellect conjures a magical world of machinic monsters -- effortless, insightful and consistently inspiring. A spectacular collage of autobiography, technical manual, philosophical dialogue and literary anthology."--Jonathan Hale, Institute of Architecture, Nottingham University

"A book that challenges the reader to reconsider deeply his relationship to the built world." Azure

"A book that challenges the reader to reconsider deeply his relationship to the built world." Azure

"A whopper, hash browns, and a chocolate shake" (slogan of defiance).... If you loved S, M, L, XL, you"ll want this club sandwich of a book, in which Shepheard follows Rem Kolhaas and Reyner Banham where even they have not dared to go. Paul Shepheard is once again hard at work defining architecture and the built, or functioning, environment, all sodium-lit with blotches of turquoise-ridden Texas sunsets!" David B. Stewart, Tokyo Institute of Technology

"'A whopper, hash browns, and a chocolate shake' (slogan of defiance).... If you loved S, M, L, XL, you'll want this club sandwich of a book, in which Shepheard follows Rem Kolhaas and Reyner Banham where even they have not dared to go. Paul Shepheard is once again hard at work defining architecture and the built, or functioning, environment, all sodium-lit with blotches of turquoise-ridden Texas sunsets!"—David B. Stewart, Tokyo Institute of Technology

"Shepheard is that very rare thing - an architect who can write, beautifully." Tom Dyckhoff London Times

"Shepheard seamlessly meshes Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the tale of the origins of Islam and stories from his own life." Liz Bailey The Architects' Journal

"Unlike many such books on design, Shepheard's is accessible and entertaining." Will Yandik Architectural Record

"'A whopper, hash browns, and a chocolate shake' (slogan of defiance)....If you loved *S,M,L,XL*, you'll want this club sandwich of a book, in which Shepheard follows Rem Kolhaas and Reyner Banham where even they have not dared to go. Paul Shepheard is once again hard at work defining architecture and the built, or functioning, environment, all sodium-lit with blotches of turquoise-ridden Texas sunsets!"--David B. Stewart, Tokyo Institute of Technology

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 310 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (May 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262194856
• ISBN-13: 978-0262194853
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,447,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roll over Nietzsche!, March 30, 2004

By 

Saul Boulschett "Anyway" (Dry land) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture (Paperback)

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 that delights,informs, teaches, and shocks. No small feat, mate.
And he pulls this off by writing in a style that is nonexistent in the field. The book reads like a diary--of the kind 19th century biologists and anthropolgists used to keep: accurate, subjective, poetic when wrong, speculative, eloquent, filled with arcane data, and connected to LIVED LIFE.
And to tell his story, he brings in his family, his students, his house, his travels, ants in his backyard, etc --whatever he's got at his fingertips.

For Paul there is no past: No dinosaurs, no pyramids in the past for him because they are all right here right now--as they cannot but be otherwise. (His brand of "optimism" about machines and technology cannot even be called optimism--since optimism is an attitude that comes from acknowledging that cause for pessimism does exist but would rather not focus on it.) In Pauls's view, there is also no future but only NOW. A rather Zen attitude, ain't it.

In this book, Paul makes no attempt to restrain his joy and wonderment at the sheer fact of existence of EVERYTHING including us and our irrepressible urge to tinker to make ourselves in different material other than flesh and blood only.

The title of the book, ARTIFICIAL LOVE comes from a conversation in which his friends, Maria and Jaques are debating whether machines are indeed alive: Maria says machines are 'artifical life.' Jaques wonder if all this time what he felt for them was, then, 'artificial love.'

Written like a novel, this book is weird in that it contains REAL architecture talk that ACTUALLY takes place between real smart and fun architects when they are just shootin' the breeze.
If you think about all the pretentious archi-babble that fills the pages of so many "high-theory" architecture books today, it kinda makes you go, "wassupwitdat?"

Highly recommended for all smart people but especially for small-minded as well as big-minded architects--but for totally different reasons.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Field Guide to the Machines, July 7, 2003

By 

Frederick R. Steiner (Austin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture (Hardcover)

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.