In this interview, Mario Carpo recalled his early skepticism toward computers. Influenced by Pasolini and communist politics, he initially rejected computing because he saw art as more political than science. Yet his architectural education in Florence fostered an interest in rules-based logic through semiotics. He analyzed architectural grammar and designed with variable arrangements of modular parts before turning to history. His research on images in architectural treatises led to a doctoral argument that reproducibility helped make architecture a modern profession. William Ivins’s ideas about images and modernity later informed Carpo’s Architecture in the Age of Printing.
While completing the book, Carpo encountered William Mitchell’s City of Bits, prompting him to consider how the internet might reverse reproducibility. During a 2001 fellowship at the Getty in Los Angeles, he met Greg Lynn, learned about mass customization, and began researching the history of digital tools in architecture. He also expressed concern about their use by large technology corporations and the long-term political implications of unreliable images and computation.