Customer Reviews

Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture

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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.

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.