THE FUTURE IS HERE

Molly Wright Steenson: "Architectural Intelligence: How Designers […]" | Talks at Google

Molly Wright Steenson is the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University & Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts. A designer, writer, and international speaker, she is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which traces the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the co-editor of the forthcoming book Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019). Molly cut her teeth on the Web in 1994 and has worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and a master’s in architectural history from the Yale School of Architecture.

In this talk, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies—including cybernetics and artificial intelligence—into their work and influenced digital design practices from the late 1980s to the present day.