Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Amir H. Ameri
The ongoing debate over the place and role of the digital media in architecture is, in many respects, an extension of the debate over mechanical fabrication and reproduction that began over a century and a half ago. That debate did not end. Neither the various attempts then to deprecate and exclude mechanical reproduction, nor the various attempts to include and domesticate the media were in the end successful in warding off the ideational challenges that instigated the reactions. The potential lessons of that historic debate are what I wish to explore through a close analysis of Ruskin and Wright’s ostensibly opposite stances on mechanical fabrication and reproduction. Neither Ruskin’s rejection of the machine, nor Wright’s attempt at domestication of the machine in the end succeeded to safeguard the originality, authenticity, and immediacy they both sought in fabrication. This was not due to any fault of the machine. Rather the problem was and remains today the impossibility of the idealized concept of production predicated on an indivisible bond between an animating intention and an animated form. The mechanical then and the digital now are merely forceful reminders of this impossibility. They merely resist various inclusionary and/or exclusionary attempts at their ideological appropriation.
Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto
ISBN
0-935502-57-2
