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Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City

William J. Mitchell: December 6, 2005; Running Time: 1:11:55

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

The evolution of architecture resembles nothing so much as the fleshing out and refinement of an organism, in William Mitchell’s condensed account. In pre-industrial times, architecture was “fundamentally skeleton and skin—a structure that protects and keeps out the weather.” The industrial era brought an increasing awareness of the mechanical physiology of buildings: “the flows of electricity and waste removal were overlaid on the skeleton.” In our own times, buildings have acquired “artificial nervous systems” superimposed on the flow networks. Mitchell embraces new architectural forms emerging from this latest digital technology, and gestures toward entire cities connected by a mesh of intelligent buildings. He sees “more interesting urban expressions beginning to develop,” among them Chicago’s Millennium Park, where the Crown Fountain displays giant digital images of city residents through whose mouths water flows. As information becomes increasingly mobile, opportunities arise in nontraditional public spaces for digital access, and work, creativity and social clusters emerge.

Mitchell points to some of MIT’s new buildings, from dorms to the Stata Center, as examples of places that “support ad hoc interactions, spontaneous connections.” With “more fluid nomadic patterns of space occupation, this unassigned space is enormously productive,” says Mitchell. Rooms can be used at any time, for any reason—whether to work or drink coffee. But the same kind of digital access enables students in seminars “to Google topics and introduce the result of a search in real time,” Mitchell wryly notes. Ultimately, though, when “technology becomes unobtrusive” and “disappears into the woodwork,” architects will be liberated to refocus on such fundamental human requirements as light, air, and sociability.

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

“In seminars, students connect to the outside world. … Students are engaging in a different way: When I mention something, a student Googles the topic and introduces the result of the search in real time into the conversation. The same physical setting and social setting remains important -- face to face, but injection of digital information into the context in a flexible way changes the learning dynamic. I cannot compete with a dozen or so really smart MIT students with Google and the web.”

William J. Mitchell

About the Speaker

William J. Mitchell

Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences
Director, Smart Cities research group, MIT Media Lab

William J. Mitchell is the former Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Prior to coming to MIT, he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His latest book is Imagining MIT, (MIT Press, 2007). His previous books include: e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It, (MIT Press, 1999) High Technology and Low-Income Communities, with Donald A. Schön and Bish Sanyal (MIT Press, 1998) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, (MIT Press, 1995) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, (MIT Press, 1992) The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition, (MIT Press, 1990).

Mitchell holds a B.Arch. from the University of Melbourne, an M.Ed. from Yale University, and an M.A. from Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mitchell is currently chair of The National Academies Committee on Information Technology and Creativity.