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Post-Hype Digital Architecture: From Irrational Exuberance to Irrational Despondency Author(s): Mario Carpo Source: Grey Room, No. 14 (Winter, 2004), pp. 102-115 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262652 . Accessed: 15/05/2011 00:14
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MARIOCARPO

Early in the last decade of the last century, professor William Mitchell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became increasingly curious about a mushrooming horde of uniformed technicians that appeared to be taking over the city, busily emerging from manholes and mysteriously disappearing into them. He does not say where or when precisely this puzzling epiphany materialized, but this is the story as told at the beginning of his best-selling book City of Bits, first published in 1995. What were these men doing? "'Pulling glass' was the usual reply. They were stringing together some local, fiber-optic fragments of what was fast becoming a worldwide, broadband, digital telecommunications network ..., thus reconfiguring space and time relationships in a way that promised to change our lives forever."1 As the millennium came to a close, many agreed that a technical revolution was in the making, and that architecture and urbanism would be prominently affected by it. According to the common lore of that distant time, which was approximately three to five years ago, the information technology (IT) revolution would lead to a new way of building and to a new way of using space and territories: digital technologies would provide new tools for design and manufacturing, hence transforming the making of objects, as well as their form. At the same time digital technologies would change the way information is recorded and transmitted, hence transforming social interaction in physical space. These are in fact two different arguments, which must be dealt with separately. First, tectonics. Computer-aided design (CAD)brought to the computer screen families of forms that could hardly have been drawn and measured with ruler and compasses. Owing to a bizarre series of events that is still to be reconstructed, Deleuze's pli, when exported to America, morphed into the Deleuzian Fold and merged with the visualization of Leibniz's differential calculus that computers now made available to most architects, regardless of their mathematical talents. As a result, algorithmically generated continuous functions soon became an almost ubiquitous component of architectural design.2 At the same time and for the same reason, topology, a very abstract branch of high geometry that had until then seldom
Grey Room 14, Winter2004, pp. 102-115. t 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 103

"The Infobahn Goes In" Originally published in William J. Mitchell, City of Bits. Space, Place, and the Infobahn (1995). 102

crossed paths with the mostly Euclidian labors of building, became a staple of architectural discourse. Additionally, technologists soon realized that file-to-factory software and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) could lead to a new mode of mechanical production: digital technologies would enable the mass production of series of objects that could all be visually different from one another, so long as they shared a common algorithm. Mass production could hence be decoupled from product standardization: economies of scale no longer required the replication of identical objects. Greg Lynn and BernardCache have been the most alert interpreters of this technical change,3 and it is William Mitchell who, in an essay published in 1998, might have first introduced the term "mass customization."4 As for the latter argument, which regards the use of space, it was a truism of the IT revolution that new technologies of electronic transmission could replace many former technologies of mechanical transportation. For example, it was assumed that "enhanced" teleconferencing would soon offer a viable alternative to traveling. Likewise, it was argued that many activities dealing with data-such as most financial transactions-could move out of physical space and would in any case need, use, and consume much less space in the IT age than they did in the mechanical age. In spite of the boom and bust of fin-de-millennium e-commerce, some of this is in fact already happening, and it is now generally acknowledged that the electronic transmission of data might bring the raw material for many human endeavors directly to the end user, regardless of his or her location, reducing the need for persons and goods to move or be moved in order to be in the same place at the same time. When applied to the city and to its territories, as indeed to regional and global planning, this technical and economic paradigm has enormous consequences, which are in many ways a complete reversal of the patterns of spatial dislocation and generalized mobility that accompanied the growth of the industrial city during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 It follows from the above that the main architectural and urban tenets of the IT revolution are entirely and exactly equal and opposite to those advocated by classic modernism. As in the twenties, so in the nineties many architects, engineers, designers, and planners thought that a technological revolution was in the making and that it was their duty-in a sense, their moral obligation-to come to terms with a new technology and to make the most of it in order to produce better goods for more people. Cities and buildings were an integral part of this social and technical program. The new technologies of the twenties were mechanical: mass production demanded standardization, the reproduction of identical parts, and, at least according to Le Corbusier, a certain family of geometrical forms; mechanical transportation required the separation of traffics and the concentration of functions. The new technologies of the nineties were electronic: mass production no longer required standardization, and new engineering tools promoted a new geometry
104 Grey Room 14

of forms; electronic communications fostered the decentralization and the reintegration of many of those functions that modernist theory had set apart. In both cases, designers were reacting to technological change; in both cases, technology was driving architectural theory, and technology inspired and justified a program for architectural and urban change; and in both cases, the call for action was motivated by a similar notion of social responsibility-although in the nineties less vocally than in the twenties, probably because in the nineties modernist morality was still so much a part of our heritage that it was often unconsciously taken for granted. But the architectural and urban change that was advocated in the nineties was modernism with a minus sign. And rightly so, as the logic of the machines at work in the nineties was the opposite of the logic of the machines at work in the twenties. As in the nineties, so in the twenties the myth of the machine started, at least in architectural theory, with an urban illumination of sorts. We have a time, a place, and a date for that. It was the 1st of October 1924. It was late afternoon on the Champs Elysees in Paris. Le Corbusier was strolling in a mostly empty city, apparently loafing around and jaywalking in a somewhat untechnological, Benjaminische way, when all of a sudden, at 6 P.M. sharp, a tidal wave of automobiles surged from all sides converging toward the frightened Swiss flaneur, who saved his life by the skin of his teeth, retreated to the safety of the treelined sidewalks, and began to think. He thought and thought, and after much pondering and musing this is what he famously concluded: "The automobile has uprooted the centuries-old basis of urbanism. Hence I went to see the heads of Peugeot, Citroen, and Voisin [prominent car-makers of the time; two of them merged and are still in business] and I told them: The automobile has killed the big city. The automobile must save the big city. My purpose is to create a new urban structure made to measure for the new conditions of life, so deeply modified by the machine-age. Sirs: Is any of you going to sponsor my new, automobile-based plan for Paris?"6 The rest of the story is known. Le Corbusier's plan was indeed sponsored by one of the three car manufacturers-the one that went out of business. To further the point and to reinforce the analogy between the techno-hype of the twenties and the technological exuberance of the nineties, it is worth noting that if the footnote just paraphrased from Le Corbusier's Urbanisme (1924-25) were to be slightly edited and some terms and names related to car manufacturing replaced by equivalent terms and names belonging to the computer age, we would read the following (the changes are in italics); "The new IT has uprooted the centuries-old basis of urbanism. Hence I went to see Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Jeff Bezos and I told them: IT is killing the big city. IT must save the big city. My purpose is to create a new urban structure made to measure for the new conditions of life, so deeply modified by the computer-age.Dear Chairpersons: any of you going Are
Carpo I Post-Hype Digital Architecture 105

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106

to sponsor my new, IT-based plan for Singapore?" Five years ago any well-known or ambitious architect with some talent for self-promotion might have done just that. Yet it appears that no one did-no Microsoft Plan for Singapore has been exhibited to date-and now it's too late. "Irrational Exuberance" is an expression invented on December 5, 1996, by an eminent banker,7 who earlier in his life was a saxophone player and a close friend and associate of Ayn Rand (of Fountainhead fame).8 But on that occasion he was speaking as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and warning of the risk of a financial overvaluation of what was then known as the New Economy. In that capacity the same Alan Greenspan stated on March 6, 2000, that "it is the growing use of IT throughout the economy that makes the current period unique."9 It was unpopular in the late nineties to compare the irrational exuberance of the time with that of the late twenties, just as it is unpopular now to compare the two crashes. Yet, the financial numbers, three years after the burst of the IT boom, are eerily similar. Between September 3, 1929, and July 8, 1932, the Times Industrial Index lost 87 percent of its value. Between March 10, 2000, and October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ Composite Index lost 78 percent of its value (5048 to 1114).Between September 1929 and July 1932 the market capitalization of General Motors lost 89 percent of its value ($73 to $8). Between October 1999 and July 2002 the market capitalization of Amazon.com lost 88 percent of its value ($106.69 to $12.93). One would say that some degree of irrational exuberance must have been in the air in the late twenties, and it can be well remembered how much of it was in the air in the late nineties. In both cases exuberance was fed by the persuasion that an epoch-making economic change was being fostered by revolutionary new technologies. The automobile was a protagonist in Le Corbusier's writings of the early and mid-twenties. And this for two unrelated reasons. First, as an industrially produced object, the car was the outward and visible form of all that was good in the invisible logic at work in the processes of mass-production and standardization. It was an ongoing economic and technological success story. Its machine-made forms were technically defendable (on the basis of performance); morally justified (on the basis of production costs); and, last but not least, and most likely utterly unrelated to all the above, Le Corbusier just loved them. Le Corbusier famously called one of his first experiments in industrialized building "la maison en serie Citrohan"(as he explained, "pour ne pas dire Citroen"); in his words, a house as practical as a typewriter.l0 Second, when seen from the point of view of the user, as a tool for transportation, the automobile is the pivotal technology upon which most of Le Corbusier's urban theories of the twenties were predicated. Hence the Plan Voisin mentioned above. To corroborate his theories, Le Corbusier crammed his articles and his essays on urbanism of the twenties with a wealth of statistical data meant to prove the irresistible rise of automobility and the urgent need to intervene to make
Carpo P Post-Hype Digital Architecture 107

the city car-compatible. Among a number of similar illustrations, Le Corbusier's graphics of automobile production in the United States between 1912 and 1923 warrant closer scrutiny.11The last data he used refer to year 1921, which he extrapolated to 1923. But, as sometimes happened when Le Corbusier had recourse to facts and figures to validate his theories, it appears that in this case, too, he might have been marginally cooking the books. Contrary to what Le Corbusier's original caption says, this diagram does not refer to car production but the overall number of motor vehicles circulating in the United States, as registered by the U.S. Census Bureau.12As for car production, which was less than half a million in 1914, it rose to around 4 million in 1925, peaked at 5.3 million in 1929, and then of course crashed, as did all other economic indicators. By 1933 production had fallen to 1.9 million.13 As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith points out in his classic study on the Great Crash of 1929, a figure comparable with pre-Depression levels for the production of private automobiles in the United States was attained again only in
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1953.14 In his characteristic prose, conspicuously averse to the use of verbs, Le Corbusier's commentary on the increments in his diagram sounds definitive: "Diagonale imperieuse allant se redressant toujours davantage" ("Amajestic diagonal rising and rising and rising for ever").15 Only-it didn't. In 1929 it fell, and after that it kept falling for years. The same applies to the production of all the new materials that had inspired the new way of building. Between 1929 and 1933 the productionof steel in the United States declined by 60 percent; the production of Portland cement by 63 percent; and the production of glass by 51 percent.16In July 1932 a magazine significantly called Iron Age announced that steel operations in the United States had reached 12 percent of capacity.17 1929 is the date of the first, and to date the only, translation into English of Le Corbusier's Urbanisme (published in English as The City of Tomorrow).The official consecration in America of modern architecture, exhibited as such but also on that occasion famously renamed "International Style," came three years later, in 1932, and it coincided with the worst year of the Great Depression.18Bearing this chronology in mind, the early thirties
108

Left:Annual Increase in the Production of Motor-Cars, 1922. Originally published in "Urbanisme. Statistique,' L'Esprit Nouveau 24 (1924). The original text refers to car production, whereas the caption refers both to car registration and to car circulation. Right: Le Corbusier. Figures for car production, 1912-1923. Originally published in L'EspritNouveau 24 (1924). Compared against the actual figures for car production, 1914-1964, as reported by the U.S. Census bureau.

would appear to have been the worst possible time to celebrate the happy reunification of architecture and technology and to proclaim the rise of a new style made to measure for a new machine age that, as it happened, had just crashed-and killed and maimed and starved many in the process. Indeed, in the early thirties many must have felt betrayed, not only by their stock-exchange brokers but also and more generally by the bright prospects of what in the twenties had been called the New Era.19The new technology that had promised wealth had delivered disaster. The prophets of modern architecture, which had been predicated upon the same technological, social, and economic anticipations, must have felt equally uncomfortable. Given the catastrophic collapse of all they had been building upon, it might have occurred to them, with some reason, that they might have been wrong. What was their mood in the aftermath of the 1929 crash? Were they contrite or repentant of their juvenile excesses? Did they feel an urge to apologize and to confess their sins of machinocentric idolatry? Resentment against modernism (including, most conspicuously, new rural ideologies that reacted against the modernist excitement for the big city) was certainly in the air in the early thirties. Yet antitechnological revisionism soon took on different forms on the two sides of the Atlantic. The crash and the depression were exported from America to Europe, but with the exception of Germany the shock wave came later and in weaker form. It hit the economies of Britain, France,and Germany erratically, at different times and in different ways. The rebound was also asynchronous. Moreover, the awareness of a technological breakdown was often hidden in Europe by the political and national crises that followed. In America, on the contrary, the implosion of the first machine age was self-evident. So evident in fact that many started to argue that a new deal with technology was necessary. In 1929 FrankLloyd Wrightwas close to building what would have been his first residential skyscraper, or high-rise, the Saint Mark's Tower in New York City-oddly, a commission from a congregation of the Unitarian Church. The project was ready shortly before the crash of October 1929 and was not surprisingly canceled shortly thereafter.20In 1931, in his correspondence with Lewis Mumford, Wright gloated over the demise of the skyscraper business in New York City; in fact, he had missed that business by sheer ill-timing and by a handful of days.21 Wright's response to the International Style celebrations of 1932 was his own booklet The Disappearing City, where he advocated an alternative, anti-European approach to the use of technology in building. Yet his new vision was by no means antitechnological. On the contrary, it asked for even more technology-including technology still to come. In his plan for the disappeared city, Broadacre, Wright ranks the importance of the electromagnetic technologies of communication ahead of the technologies of mechanical transportation.22 Of course Broadacrerequiredhighways and cars and more cars ad infinitum,
parpo Post-Hype Digital Architecture 109

but Wright also insisted that the industrialization of building does not and should not generate any standardization of form: all buildings should be machine-made, but no two homes need be alike.23 In this, Wright was probably running ahead of the technology of his time. The Disappearing City should be read as a chapter-in a sense, the missing chapter-in the far more monumental work by Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, first published in 1934. In that often messianic manifesto for social renewal, Mumford disparaged all that had gone wrong with the machine age that had just crashed, which he characterized as "paleotechnic," and heralded an imminent golden age of new machines, the "neotechnic" age, where the evil machines of old would be replaced by new and better ones, not hard but soft machines-organic instruments of a new biotechnic economy, where humanity would no longer be obliged to adapt itself to the mechanical rhythm of the machine, but where machines would learn to adapt themselves to the dynamic flow of organic life.24 Mumford's discourse is tantalizingly self-contradictory, and it does include streaks of viscerally antimodern propaganda-at times Mumford suggests that all machines are inherently bad, all mercantile economy is inherently malicious, and the only salvation is in the Soviet Union.25 But Mumford was a preacher, not a philosopher, and preachers might at times be allowed to contradict themselves. When Mumford speaks for an age of new machines, "smaller, faster, brainer [sic], and more adaptable"26 than those of the earlier mechanical age, he seems even more than a preacher: he sounds prophetic. In fact, in spite of a perceivable antitechnological undercurrent, it appears that even the most outspoken antimodernists of the thirties were still looking for a new alliance between man and the machine-a new alliance that would be embodied in a new machine-made environment.27 Even at a time when machines were actively destroying wealth and not creating it-and soon machines would be mass-destroying lives, and in this also Mumford had been prophetic-the myth of the machine was not over. It kept simmering throughout the years of the depression, it underpinned the war economy, and when the war was over, it restarted for good. Modernism then became what it had been designed to be from the start: a mass-marketed retail product. The postwar rise to universal preeminence of what had been called-somewhat prematurely in 1932-the International Style vindicated the visions of the twenties: most of what the technologists of the twenties had predicted came somehow true, but at that point the battle for modernism-or, at least, for that specific avatar of modernist principles-stopped being of interest for architectural theory. In most industrialized countries that battle was won. Hegel is said to have remarked that all great world-historic facts repeat themselves at least twice. KarlMarx famously added: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce. But the peculiar recurrence of events that we have been tracking so far invites a less cynical reading.28 Here we have two periods, or cycles,
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when ideas for architectural and urban renewal were primarily motivated and inspired by technology. This is not an invariant of architectural history. Sometimes architects care for technology; sometimes they don't. With some logic they tend to do so at times of fast technological change. They certainly did so in the twenties and again in the nineties. In both cases we observe an initial phase of hype, when bold and sometimes ridiculous experiments are made and new theories balloon. Then comes the crash: October 1929; March 2000. In the aftermath of the crash a more sobering mood prevails. When the dust settles, theories are streamlined and revised and they tend to crystallize as they aim at an easier target-a target that does not move anymore. This is where we stand now, and this is where this historical parallel should stop. We have already seen three years of depression. When this paper was first read in public, at a conference in Germany in the spring of 2003, we were actually seeing the war. Hopefully, wars (that one, or the next) will soon be over, and the global economy will start growing again at some point. When this happens, whether it be in the year 200X, or perhaps 20XX, it might be expected that we shall have to deal with economic, technological, and cultural forces similar to, but stronger than, those that shaped the nineties. As it happened after the second world war, the experiments of the roaring decade that preceded the crash, cleansed, fine-tuned, and sharpened by some years of thinking in forced isolation, will most likely cross paths with a new cycle of economic expansion, this time massively, and not marginally sustained by the technologies that inspired and deluded us in the nineties. But by this time, obviously, the new technologies will not be new any longer. They will be mature, mainstream, banal, and as universally accepted as the new architectural and urban commodities that they will crank outor, more likely, stream out. In the twenties, the prototypes of machine-made architecture were built by hand. They were meant to show what machines would one day do. Likewise, as shown by the recent exhibition at the Deutsche Architektur Museum in Frankfurt on the first built projects of the Blobmeister,29 in the late nineties many prototypes of the new digitally manufactured architecture were built using mostly traditional mechanical technologies. All the blobs we see now, if they are bigger than approximately four square meters in plan, have been assembled by engineers obliged to work at the scale of a building with the minute precision of a traditional watchmaker. And rightly so, as these buildings, realized by the machines of today, are only meant to show what machines will be capable of doing one day in the future. But as I suggested, when this happens, the same old pattern will most likely repeat itself again. When the battle is won, as Lewis Mumford confidently predicted in 1934, "the necessity for forcefully extirpating the dangerous troglodytes of the earlier mechanical era" will be over. "The old machines will in part die out, as the great saurians died out";30and as the new,
Carpo P Post-Hype Digital Architecture 111

"neotechnic" machines will quietly hum their way all over the place, and when we have learned to use them aptly, soberly, and advisedly-then, inevitably, the emergency and the excitement of technological challenge and change will also be over. At some point in time this latest episode to date in the recurrent history of technological fascinations will in its own turn be written down as a chapter of history. And just as it happened half a century ago, at the climax of the first, paleotechnic cycle, innovative architects will by then have moved on to other novel alliances between societal desires and technologies, leaving the formerly new machines and their architectural makings to a few old masters who will immortalize them; to the philistines who will exploit and vulgarize them; and to the academics, who for three generations to come, will keep telling the story of digitization taking command.

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Notes
An earlier version of this essay was read at the conference "Medium Architecture, Transition in Architectural Discourse," at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, April 24-27, 2003. Some economic data cited in this essay, while correct at the time of writing, will have already changed by the time of publication, without any detriment to the argument presented here. I would like to thank Hubert Damisch, Phyllis Lambert, Nicholas Olsberg, and Joseph Rykwert for their suggestions during the preparation of this paper. I would also like to thank Aliki Economides, Clare Backhouse, and B. Alex Miller for their generous assistance. 1. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 3. 2. Gilles Deleuze's Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988) was first translated into English in 1993 as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). The conflation of Leibniz's calculus, computer-aided design, and the Deleuzian theory of the "fold" was initiated by some seminal publications in 1992-1993. See in particular Peter Eisenman, "Unfolding Events: Frankfurt Rebstock and the Possibility of a New Urbanism," in Eisenman Architects et al., Unfolding Frankfurt (Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 1991), 8-18; Peter Eisenman, "Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media," Domus 734 (January 1992): 17-24; and Greg Lynn, ed., AD Profile 102: Folding in Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1993). The notion that current software for computer-based design has transformed differential calculus into a tool for the generation of architectural forms has been advocated in particular by Greg Lynn-see, for example, his Animate Form, (New York:Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 16-20-and by Bernard Cache-see, among others, his essay "Objectile: The Pursuit of Philosophy by Other Means," in AD Architectural Design, Profile 141, Hypersurface Architecture II, in AD Profile 141: Hypersurface Architecture II, ed. Stephen Perrella (London: Academy Editions, 1999): 67-71. In this work, Cache states that "mathematics [meaning, in the context, Leibniz's differential calculus] has effectively become an object of manufacture" (67). 3. Lynn, 1999; and Cache, "Objectile," 1999. 4. William J. Mitchell, "Antitectonics: The Poetics of Virtuality," in The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representations, and Crash Culture, ed. John Beckmann, 205-217 (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), esp. 210-212 ("Craft/Cad/Cam") and notes; and William J. Mitchell, E-topia: Urban Life, Jim, but Not as We Know It (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 150-152 ("Mass Customization") and notes. 5. Mitchell, City of Bits, 98-100 ("at home/@ home"). Later developed in Mitchell, E-topia, esp. ch. 9 ("The Economy of Presence," 128-144). Although similar urban or, rather, antiurban trends have been extensively theorized with regard to earlier mechanical or electronic technologies (automobility, for example, or television), the emphasis on immaterial transference and "despatialization," as it was then called, was characteristic of the IT discourse of the late nineties. Martin Pawley's definition of "sand-heap urbanism"-in his Terminal Architecture (London: Reaktion Books, 1998)-was predicated upon the nontopicality of electronic technologies, but the same figure might as well describe the terminally modern phenomenon of "the sprawl," a commonplace of contemporary popular culture in the United States and generally associated with the freeway system rather than with the "information superhighway" (as the IT digital network was often called in the early nineties, apparently d'apres an article by Al Gore in The Washington Post, 15 July 1990, B3). 6. What I have given is a paraphrase of Le Corbusier's text. The complete passage reads: Carpo I Post-Hype Digital Architecture 113

As it is the motor-car which has completely overturned all our old ideas of town planning, I thought of interesting the manufacturers of cars in the construction of the Esprit Nouveau Pavillon at the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, since this Pavillion was planned as a dwelling and as a unit of modern town planning. I saw the heads of the Peugeot, Citroen, and Voisin Companies and said to them: 'The motor has killed the great city.' 'The motor must save the great city.' 'Will you endow Paris with a Peugeot, Citroen, or Voisin scheme of rebuilding; a scheme whose sole object would be to concentrate public notice on the true architectural problem of this era, a problem not of decoration but of architecture and town planning; a sane reconstruction of the dwelling unit and the creation of urban organs which would answer to our conditions of living so profoundly affected by machinery?' Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: Architectural Press and J. Rodker, 1929), 275-276 n. 1. The translation is of the eighth edition of Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: G. Cres et Cie, 1925), 263-264 n. 1. 7. John Cassidy, Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 133. 8. Cassidy, 161-162. 9. Cassidy, 277. 10. Le Corbusier-Saugnier, Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Crbs et Cie, 1923), 200-201; first published in Le Corbusier-Saugnier, "Esth6tique de l'ing6nieur. Maisons en serie," L'Esprit nouveau 13 (1921): 1525-1542, 1538. 11. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow, 118, fig. 12. The caption reads "Annual increase in the production of motor-cars as shown by figures published in 1922," which is a literal translation of the original text in French. ("Et voici, pour 1912-21 (fig. 12) la courbe d'accroissement de la production automobile aux 6tats-Unis." Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 108, fig. 12.) The original caption in French, however, reprinted identically in the English version of 1929, refers both to "l'enregistrement de voitures automobiles" and to "l'augmentation annuelle de la circulation," which is particularly confusing, as the production, the registration, the overall circulation, and the rise in the circulation of motor vehicles are different statistical figures. 12. U.S. Census Bureau, "No. 1439: Transportation Indicators for Motor Vehicles and Airlines: 1900 to 1998," in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999, 885 (Washington: GPO, 1999). Available from: http://www.census.gov/ prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf. 13. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), "U.S. Automobile Production, Passenger Cars 01/1913-03/1942," in NBERMacrohistory Database: 1. Production of Commodities, ser. 01107a. Available from: http://www.nber.org/ NBER, "U.S. Automobile databases/macrohistory/data/01/m01107a.db; Production, Passenger Cars 01/1946-12/1963," in NBERMacrohistory Database: 1. Production of Commodities, ser. 01107b. Available from: http://www.nber.org/ NBER, "U.S. Automobile databases/macrohistory/data/01/m01107b.db; in NBER Macrohistory Database: 1. Production, Trucks 01/1913-03/1942," Production of Commodities, ser. 01144a. Available from: http://www.nber.org/ databases/macrohistory/data/01/m01144a.db; and NBER, "U.S. Automobile Production, Trucks 01/1940-12/1941; 01/1946-11/1964," NBER Macrohistory Database: 1. Production of Commodities, ser. 01144c. Available from: http://www.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/data/01/m01144c.db. 14. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (1955; reprinted with a new introduction by the author, Boston and New York: The Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 2. 15. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 108. 16. Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas
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1750-1993 (London: Macmillan Reference, 1998), 362, tab. D9 ("steel"); and Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington: Bureau of Statistics, 1939), table 817 ("Portland Cement"), tables 749, 797, 819 ("glass"). 17. Galbraith, 142. 18. Modern Architecture, exh. cat., International Exhibition, New York from 10 February to 23 March 1932 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1932); and Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1932). 19. See Galbraith, 74, passim. 20. H. Defries, "Neue Plane von Frank Lloyd Wright," Die Form 5, no. 13 (1 July 1930): 342-354, 349; "St Mark's Tower," Architectural Record 67 (January-July 1930): 1-4; and Michael Mostoller, "The Towers of Frank Lloyd Wright,"Journal of Architectural Education 38, no. 2 (1985): 13-17, with further bibliography. 21. Lewis Mumford to Frank Lloyd Wright, 27 June 1931, quoted by Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Utopian Themes for Architecture and Urban Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83, 178 n. 44. 22. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York:William Farquhar Payson, 1932), 27. 23. Wright, 34, 45. 24. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: George Routledge and Sons; and New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934). In particular, see chs. VIII, 1-2, 364-372, "The Dissolution of 'The Machine"' and "Toward an Organic Ideology." 25. Mumford, 389,413. 26. Mumford, 428. 27. Likewise, the crisis does not seem to have abated the endeavors of the most convinced technologists. Buckminster Fuller's high-tech experiments originated in the years preceding the Crash, and a model of the Dymaxion House was displayed in Chicago in 1929, although, significantly, a real prototype was built only in 1945. Richard Buckminster Fuller and Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Anchor Press and Doubleday, 1973), 90-91,132. 28. Karl Marx, "Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon," in Die Revolution, Eine Zeitschrift in zwanglosen Heften, ed. J. Weydemeyer, vol. 1 (New York: 1852), 3. 29. Digital Real-Blobmeister: Erste gebaute Projecte, exh. cat., Deutsche Architektur Museum, Frankfurt, ed. Peter Cachola Schmal (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001). 30."In the very act of enlarging its dominion over human thought and practice, the machine [Mumford here means the earlier, 'paleotechnic' machine] has proven to a great degree self-eliminating ... This fact is fortunate for the race. It will do away with the necessity, which Samuel Butler satirically pictured in Erewhon, for forcefully extirpating the dangerous troglodytes of the earlier mechanical age. The old machines will in part die out, as the great saurians died out, to be replaced by smaller, faster, brainer [sic], and more adaptable organisms, adapted not to the mine, the battlefield and the factory, but to the positive environment of life." Mumford, 428.

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