SUMMARY

In this interview, Mario Carpo discussed his early skepticism toward computers, recounting that he had voted against his high school acquiring an Olivetti computer at the age of seventeen. Influenced by Pasolini and communist politics, he initially rejected computing because he believed art was more political than science.

Despite this, Carpo maintained a strong interest in rules-based logic through the semiotics central to his architectural education in Florence. He conducted formal analyses of architectural grammar and designed buildings involving the variable organization of modular parts. Choosing to specialize in history, he completed a thesis that examined the role of images in architectural treatises, which set him on the path to doctoral research. His PhD argued that architecture became a modern profession through the reproducibility of images in treatises. He later found synergy with the work of art historian William Ivins, whose ideas about the reproducibility of images enabling modernity informed Carpo’s book Architecture in the Age of Printing.

While finishing that book, Carpo encountered William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which prompted him to consider how the internet might reverse the process of reproducibility. This led him to pursue a year-long fellowship at the Getty in Los Angeles in 2001, where he met Greg Lynn, learned about mass customization, and began a twenty-five-year research project on the history of digital tools in architecture.

Carpo reflected on the current state of digital tools, particularly their use by large technology corporations, and expressed concern about the long-term political implications of the unreliability of images and the history of computation in architecture.