The Architecture Machine and Soft Architecture Machines

Nicholas Negroponte’s books The Architecture Machine and Soft Architecture Machines are long out of print and often quite expensive. Following the links above will provide you with digital versions of the books.

7 Responses to "The Architecture Machine and Soft Architecture Machines"

Jeremy Yuille says:

9 August 2011 at 5:25 pm

Hey thanks for sharing these Molly!
The chapter on Computer Aided Participatory Design is particularly interesting. I like the comment on p101 of Soft Architecture Machines, when discussing three types of participation, Negroponte labels the first two as “timid endeavors of deprofessionalization”
Liss C. Werner says:

15 August 2011 at 10:10 am

Excellent, many thanks for sharing. I am currently writing my PhD thesis on the Relevanco of Gordon Pask for digital design strategies in architecture and was desperately looking for those books online.
Roberto says:

12 October 2011 at 4:42 am

Grazie davvero per aver condiviso i libri!
Michael Yap says:

16 November 2011 at 5:28 pm

Some background on Pask’s contributions to Soft Architecture can be found in a recent video I produced for cyberneticist and designer Paul Pangaro. Enjoy! http://vimeo.com/31987180
Lev Manovich says:

17 November 2012 at 4:01 am

Thank for making these available! Reading them makes you realize that the ideas about cultural use of computers in the 1960s are so much more interesting and progressive than all the endless information visualizations and soft architectural designs being made today. Alan Kay was right: The revolution did not happen yet – at least, not in architecture.
James Tichenor says:

28 March 2013 at 11:01 am

So amazing that you put and keep these online!!! Endless inspiration!
Rob van Nood says:

30 March 2013 at 3:49 am

Molly,

I’m taking a class at MIT and for years have been interested in the work of the Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child so it wouldn’t be strange that I would be poking around about Nicholas Negroponte a bit. What was strange was that I came to your website and saw the digital copies of his books. Ok, that’s not that strange either. What’s strange is that I thought you were bound for musical theater. You just rocked it in Guys and Dolls circa 1989. Mounds View has a long history of….sensational….theatrical…well….ok…maybe not. Its not often I stumble upon old Mustangs out in the world of the interwebs so I just wanted to say hello. If you didn’t figure it out already from my previous 2 sentences I went to MV too. You might have remembered me as gangster number 11. I had to drag out a very long 2 minute death sequence on opening night when my colleague and dear friend Erik Dyste decided to improvise beyond his one sentence line. It was in all the school papers. Fine fine acting. You were in that play right?

Sorry if my message lowered the standard set by most of the previous respondents. Well, Roberto’s was a little generic but he did spice it up with a romance language. I was going to go with Dutch but its not quite the same.

tot ziens.

Cheers and congratulations on the professorship. Madison is a good town, if you have to live in the mid-west.

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