Automated Architecture: Speculative
Reason in the Age ofthe Algorithm
Luciana Parisi
Early nineties cybernetic culture did not fully anticipate the emergence of the
automated form of reason that now subtends the infrastructural architecture of
everyday life. After more than twenty years, it has become apparent that what
Sanford Kwinter calls the "age of the algorithm"' points to a new form of ratio
nality not only leading to new methods of calculating economic risk, or performing
simulations of social behavior, but also involving the computation of space and
time. T his new form of rationality, defined by the convergence of computation
and topology, or information theory and nonstandard geometry, has produced
a specific aesthetic that can be found in algorithmic architecture. In this field,
which includes the pioneering works of digital architect Greg Lynn, 2 among others,
computational design has taken inspiration from vector fields so as to model, for
example, the speed and direction of a fluid moving through space, or the strength
and direction of a magnetic or gravitational force as it changes from point to point.
Here the architectural form is the result of the computational processing of bio
physical variables (the distribution of weight, gravitational pressures, circulation
of air, intensity of traffic, frequency of movement). 3 Influenced by second-order
cybernetics of evolving feedbacks, algorithmic architecture of the 1990s started to
adopt biophysical dynamics as inputs in software programs, and biophysical data
became a new parameter for computational design.
By closing the gap between mathematical models and biophysical
contingencies, computation has entered a field of spatiotemporal connected
ness-a topology-involving a continual transformation of form without cutting
or tearing. Topology, as the geometry of place, here refers to the mathematical
2
3
Sanford Kwinter, Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
(New York: Actar, 2008).
Greg Lynn, "Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and theSupple," in
"Folding in Architecture," ed. Greg Lynn, special issue, Architectural Design 63, nos. 3/4
(March/April 1993): 22-29.
According to architect Karl Chu, algorithms have been central to the late twentieth-century
convergence of computational and biogenetic revolutions leading to the ultimate design
of biological and mathematical codes, which promise the embodiment of life, emotion,
and intelligence. See Karl Chu, "Metaphysics ofGenetic Architecture and Computation,"
in "Programming Cultures: Art and Architectures in the Age ofSoftware," ed. MikeSilver,
special issue, Architectural Design 76, no. 4 (July/August 2006): 39. This position is not too
different from debate about cybernetics in the late nineties that directly engaged the new
techno-scientific ontologies of biological bodies.
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understanding of geometrical shapes and spaces, in which connectedness and
continuity are preserved under their continuous deformations, such as stretching
and bending. lt also refers to the geometrical understanding of form in terms of
its evolution in time and thus to the genetic capacities of a form to change through
time. From this standpoint, biophysical unpredictability has become superior to
mathematical axioms, as the reality of abstraction has slipped behind the concrete
ness of matter. In other words, the materiality of data and their variations in time
have replaced mathematical models in their attempt to represent reality through
abstract rules. The digital design of space has superseded the Euclidean matrix of
extension by adding temporal evolution to fixed points, developing a topological
surface enveloping all points in space and time.
The figure of the blob or the fold corresponds to the continuous topological
surfaces now defining the dominant aesthetic of digital architecture. In partic
ular, as Patrik Schumacher has argued, parametricism now represents the new
global style for architecture and design. 4 When applied to large-scale urbanism,
for instance, parametricism is said to transform the differential distance between
points into an integral surface of continual connection. 5 From this standpoint,
parametricism implies the inclusion of contingent elements-atmospheric,
geological, biological, and physical elements-into the program in the form of
variable parameters whose temporal evolution becomes the motor for the trans
formation of the architectural whole. This means that variables are not only added
to the program (as if from the "outside"), but also partake of the software environ
ment of parametric relations. Parametric programming is not just concerned with
the computation of existing elements, but additionally, and significantly, with how
feedback relations between finite parameters can engender the infinite variations
of an architectural form.
Nevertheless, as a style of contemporary digital architecture, parametricism
has been particularly discussed as a manifestation of the "cultural logic of late neo
liberalism," whose topological operations of continual transformation, structural
coupling, and mutual correspondence between the inside and the outside define the
4
5
Schumacher recently claimed timt parametricism is the dominant style oftoday's avant-garde,
characterizing the power oflarge-scale urban schemes. See Patrik Schumacher, "Parametricism:
A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design," in Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design,
ed. Neil Leach (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 14-24.
In computer programming, a parameter is a variable: a symbolic name given to a known or
unknown quantity ofinformation, so that the name can be used independently ofthe information
it represents and can then be assigned different values in different places. A parameter, therefore,
can be used in a new way or in the same way (iteration). Parameters are used in subroutines (a
procedure, function, routine, method, and so forth) to refer to one ofthe pieces ofdata provided
as inputs to the subroutine. In contrast to standard software packages based on datum geometric
objects, within digital architecture parametric software links dimensions and parameters
to geometry, thereby allowing for impact ofthe incremental adjustment ofa part on the whole
assembly.
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choreographic arrangement ofdata. 6 Yet this critical view ofparametricism is pred
icated on the fact that parametricism promises a formally open-ended and flexible
space that does not physically match realized architectures, and that it is the direct
incarnation of the spirit of the neoliberal market. I propose that parametricism is
not abstract enough to meet the possibilities offered by a radical algorithmic for
malism. If parametricism only relies on the operative function of algorithms and
the interactive programming ofparameters without questioning what these material
forms of abstraction can do beyond the intentional design of the program, then
it remains unable to engage with the unthought-of capacities of these automated
systems to determine new spatiotemporal forms.
Without denying that parametricism is an instance of the topological aes
thetic ofgovernance, I want to problematize the rejection tout court ofthe agential
character ofcomputer programming and its real algorithmic objects.7 That is, I take
algorithmic objects to be necessarily implicated in the sociality that they invisibly
structure. The stealthy intrusion ofcomputational programming into everyday cul
ture requires a close engagement with the nuances ofthe digital apparatus as well as
the axiomatic thought-that is, with logic and the formalism that subtends it-that
indirectly shapes culture. From this standpoint, the new topological architecture
of relations expressed by parametricism is precisely what needs to be challenged in
order to reveal the irreversible transformation that algorithmic objects have brought
to digital formalism. In other words, I suggest that it is now crucial to readdress
emerging types of formalism, parametricism in this case, that characterize the aes
thetic ofneoliberal capitalism (specifically its having subsumed all culture and life
to its own interactive and changing rules). However, instead ofrejecting formalism,
I propose that one has to revisit its significance in the light ofradical changes within
its computational modus operandi, which may offer aesthetic and cultural possibil
ities inconsistent with the capitalist axiomatic ofa whole that subtends all its parts.
In particular, I argue that these computational systems are populated with what
6
7
Parametricism has been criticized for many reasons, but I will briefly mention only two here.
On the one hand, typified by Owen Hatherley's criticism, parametricism is decried as an apolitical
self-proclaimed avant-garde. Referring to Schumacher's text "A Glimpse Back into the Future,"
which accompanied the exhibition "Zaha Hadid and Suprematism" at the Galerie Gmurzynska in
Zurich, Hatherley argues tl1at parametricism strips Russian avant-garde architecture ofany social
or political dimension denuding it to its bare formal radicality. See Owen Hatherley "Zaha
Hadid Architects and the Neoliberal Avant-Garde," Mute, October 26, 2010, www.metamute.org/
editorial/articles/zaha-hadid-architects-and-neoliberal-avant-garde. On the other hand,
Schumacher's parametricism has also been accused ofdisengaging from the physical ground of
architecture and overlooking the contingencies ofurban planning through an excessive search for
formal relations. In particular, it has been argued that the excessive search for the beauty ofform
has completely derailed digital design from becoming useful for urban and infrastructural
problems. See Ingeborg M. Rocker, "Apropos Parametricism: If, In W hat Style Should We Build?"
Log 21 (March 2011).
On the problematics of nonphysical design of space associated with a Deleuzian reading of
architecture, see Douglas Spencer, "Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal Space, Control and
the 'Univer-city'," Radica/ Philosophy 168 (July/August 2011).
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Alfred North Whitehead calls "eternal objects," which I conceive as incomputable
entities that possess an infinite capacity for the eventuation of change and for rad
ical contingency. 8 My aim here is to show, via Whitehead, that parametricism, as
a particular type of formalism, may offer, despite its ostensible homologies with
neoliberal capitalism, a non-intentional degree of "interference" that breaks open
from within the axiomatic wholeness of neoliberal capital. A close analysis of this
transformation can help explain how structural changes in programming are not
only not negligible but are in fact ontological expressions of computational culture
and power. This analysis highlights the incongruence-the asymmetry and non
equivalence-between software as a totalizing system of governance and algorithms
as a series of fractal or inconsistent events.
One could argue that parametricism immediately transforms formalism
because it incorporates contingencies into its model by using real time data. Yet
introducing temporality into programming does not fully challenge the formal
nature of the enterprise; it only affords formalism the pretension of describing how
mathematics can incorporate physics by creating a totalitarian system of relations,
according to which a few mathematical mies are able to lead to the evolution of com
plex structures by establishing continual feedback with the environment. This means
that parametricism's topological qualities do not in fact challenge formalism: instead,
insofar as the computation of biophysical contingencies only serves to construct the
program as being open to change, they are but the reification of its formal logic.
The introduction of qualitative and real-time variations in algorithmic pro
gramming aims at anticipating spatiotemporal changes, which means designing the
potential transformation of scenarios. In other words, software interactions with the
real data of the environment have become constitutive of the aesthetic of topological
governance based on the effects that potential data can have in its internal architecture
of relations. Instead of simply reducing biophysical variables and contingencies to
sets of binary codes, which are unable to process the gray areas between states, digital
design now uses the topological integration of differential relations, or intensive data,
to build spatiotemporal connections and anticipate incipient changes. The use of
evolving algorithms or open-ended instructions that respond and adapt to the external
environment also reveals that governance now relies on the calculation of differentials,
or the variable qualities or infinitesimals found in the relation between states.
Speculative Computing
lt is important to specify that interactive algorithms and responsive computation
occlude, rather than reveal, the what and the how of algorithmic objects-objects
deemed to remain passive in the face of an ever changing governance of continual
8
See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 22ff.
366
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connectedness. We turn therefore to information theory to address algorithms as
sequential spatiotemporal data structures conditioned by infinite amounts of infor
mation. I believe that these data structures are actual spatiotemporalities and are
precisely the objects of algorithmic architecture. This means that an algorithmic
object is more than a temporal form or the result of interactive inputs, that it defines
spatiotemporal structures as stemming from the increasing amount of automated
data exploding in our computational culture. 9 In order to understand the status of
algorithms in digital architecture, I suggest that algorithms need to be considered
in Whitehead's terms as actualities: spatiotemporal data objects.' 0 Algorithms are
not simply instructions that have to be executed by a program, but are actualities
spatiotemporally constrained by the data of which they are composed. This spatio
temporal conception of algorithms helps us to rethink algorithmic architecture as
the performative vehicle of the spatiotemporalities of data structures constituting
algorithms. In other words, in order to define the aesthetics of algorithmic archi
tecture and the formation of new spatiotemporalities, one must first confront the
spatiotemporal matrix of algorithms.
Contrary to the view that computation is a reductive form of rationalism,
I want to rethink computation in terms of speculative reason, to borrow another term from
Whitehead." Computation as an instance of speculative reason does not correspond
to the topological order of potential connectedness between points. On the contrary,
Whitehead's understanding of speculative reason explains that the function of reason
is to add new data to the continual chain of cause and effect-here, the continual
processing of data. Similarly, a speculative view of computation implies that such pro
cessing is not a mere compression of data or a structure of relation defined by sets and
subsets. Instead, a speculative understanding of computation implies that each set and
subset of instruction is conditioned by what cannot be calculated, the incomputable
9
This is an important argument against the idea that algorithms are merely temporal forms
destined to disappear in the background ofubiquitous computation. Computational design
problematically embraces the logic ofprediction and the calculation ofprobabilities, which are
already set data and are unable to explain novelty in spatiotemporal experience. 1 argue against
this form ofmeta-computation and against rational logic that is based on few unchangeable rules,
the combination ofwhich produces all forms of complexity.
10 For Whitehead, the actual world is composed ofactual occasions, or actualities. These are
grouped in events and become the nexus ofactual entities that are "inter-related in some
determined fashion in one extensive quantum." Events therefore explain the togetherness of
actualities, which Whitehead calls the "nexus." But every nexus is a component part ofanother
nexus that emerges as an unalterable entity from the concrescence ofits component elements, and
stands as a fact, possessed ofa date and a location. See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 109, 230.
11 According to Whitehead, "the history ofmodern civilization shows that such schemes fulfil the
promise ofthe dream ofSolomon. They first amplify life by satisfying the peculiar claim ofthe
speculative Reason, which is understanding for its own sake. Secondly, they represent the capital
ofideas which each age holds in trust for its successors. The ultimate moral claim that civilization
lays upon its possessors is that they transmit, and add to, this reserve of potential development
by which it has profited." Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press,
1929), 72.
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data that disclose the holes and gaps within (and not outside) the formal order of
sequences. Algorithms are conditioned by incomputable data because that which
cannot be calculated in advance is the internal limit of any computational process,
manifested by the incapacity ofa program to include all possible answers in its premises
or by the failure offormula to determine all ofits expressions. This means that a notion
ofspeculative computing is not concerned with quantifying probabilities to predict the
future, but rather with a concrete system ofalgorithmic objects defined by randomness
or incompressible quantities ofdata. Thus, a notion ofspeculative computing is not to
be confused with the capacity ofalgorithmic architecture to create temporary forms
that simulate what spatiotemporal structures and infrastructures could become. On the
contrary, I advance the notion of speculative computing to suggest that random
data-which in information theory means non-compressible data-are the contagious
architectures ofthe present. These data architectures, far from withdrawing from the
present as temporal forms that appear and disappear, are instead actual objects that,
even when they cease to be present or function, nonetheless remain objective data to
be inherited, evaluated, and selected by subsequent algorithms. I have so far argued
that the scope of algorithmic architecture cannot be confined to the specific forms
ofbuilt or designed environments. Algorithmic architecture inevitably unleashes the
question of what and how algorithms are, thus exposing the invisible dynamics of
spatiotemporal data structures that subtend and drive the increasing use ofalgorithms
to design environments.
lt is therefore possible to suggest that algorithmic architecture reveals the imma
nent reality ofpatternless data, exposing the inconsistent unity of algorithmic objects
and thus determining a fractal and not topological arrangement ofspatiotemporalities
in our computational culture. What is most important here is that this reality cannot
be encompassed by the totalizing and invariant function of a topological model of
continuous surfaces. From this standpoint, algorithmic architecture does not just
reveal the neoliberal aesthetics of topological relationality; rather, this newly auto
mated aesthetics consists of the abstract reality ofalgorithmic events emerging from
the automated selection and production ofincomputable data: random information.
Like Whitehead, I contend that the aim ofspeculative reason is the production
of an abstract scheme, the concrete arrangement of relations. 12 In other words, for
reason to be truly speculative, the schemes that are produced and realized must be
able to encounter their finitude and limits: to account for the incomputable, the dis
crete parts that cannot be incorporated into the continual evolution ofthe whole.'3
12
13
"The true activity ofunderstanding consists in a voyage to abstraction which is in fact a voyage
to the more fully concrete: to the system in which the fact is enmeshed. The system as
conceptualized may be more abstract than the fact itselfin that it is more general, but the real
systematic context is more concrete, and its elaboration yields more about the existential
relations ofthe fact." lbid., 76.
"Abstract speculation has been the salvation ofthe world-speculations which made systems and
then transcended them, speculations which ventured to the furthest limits ofabstraction." lbid.
368
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What can be learned from understanding computation in terms of speculative
reason is that the contemporary form of governance ventures toward the actuality of
incomputable probabilities (infinite discrete unities that are bigger than the totality
of the whole sequence of algorithmic instructions) that lie behind the digital ground
of universal computation and the continual surface of topological connectedness.
The age of the algorithmic governance precisely marks the moment at which the
unintended consequences of ubiquitous computing unleash the limit of data pro
gramming (the limit of computation) into the everyday, whereby new spatiotem
poral structures that cannot be assimilated into what we know or perceive take over.
lt would be wrong, however, to view these incomputable structures of data
with naive enthusiasm and thus rest in them our hope of breaking open the topo
logical continuity of governance. Instead, it is important to address the reality of
algorithmic objects without overlooking the fact that the computation of infinity
is at the core of a new logic, rationality, and ultimately governance. This concern
with incomputable probabilities is therefore ultimately a concern with the transfor
mation of the formal logic of computation. This is not to be confused with a call
for an underpinning mathematical or digital ontology or politics. Instead, I prefer
to follow Gregory Chaitin's discovery of Omega, an incomputable probability that
shakes the mathematical or digital ground of truth by revealing that the probability
for infinity is an algorithmic affair, exposing the limit of reason and perhaps the
irreducible presence of a non-human thought.' 4 This also means that what subtends
the algorithmic architecture of contemporary culture is the computational process
of calculating that which cannot be predicted in advance, and that the computa
tional idealism of efficiency is in truth internally challenged by its limit. However,
this is not simply to say that the incomputable always already escapes computational
formalism because it remains ungraspable and fully dependent on the physicality of
experience. Instead, I suggest that the incomputable is nonetheless apprehended in
the last instance by a computational process whose internal limit has become the
condition for any form of calculation. What enters the cultural field therefore is
not the failure of computation to incorporate the incomputable, but the capacity of
the incomputable-the uncompressible and entropic expansion of data-to drive
what can be computed.
To conclude, I want to emphasize the argument that algorithms expose pre
cisely the inevitable reality of automated modes of thought through automated
spatiotemporal data structures that cannot be subsumed under a totalizing prin
ciple of computation. From this standpoint, if we want to understand algorithmic
14 T he notion ofthe incomputable is a development ofthe halting problem defined by Alan Turing
in the 1930s. Chaitin explains that the definition ofthe halting probability is based on the
existence ofprefix-free universal computable functions, defining a programming language with
the property that no valid program can be obtained as a proper extension of another valid
program. In other words, prefix-free codes are defined as random or uncompressible information.
See Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math! The Questjor Omega (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 130-31.
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architecture as an extended practice of governance, it is important to challenge the
assumption that governance, in its conjunction with computation, corresponds to
a topological form (the continual variation of a whole connecting every point).
Instead, a closer look at automated architecture suggests that algorithms, or the
stuff of computing, are parts that can be bigger than wholes, as much as wholes
can be smaller than parts. Hence, automated algorithms have the opportunity to
turn the topological aesthetics of governance into a fractal arrangement of incom
putable infinities.
37°
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