Robots and Architecture: Experiments, Fiction, Epistemology

Abstract

Abstract How ready are we to receive robots on our building sites? Antoine Picon , G Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), highlights the mixed cultural reception that robotics in architecture has received, veering from techno‐utopianism to techno‐pessimism. Is the greatest value in robotics for architecture in fact contained within the discipline, residing in the way that it forces architects to think differently, shifting their mental landscape and making them design truly three‐dimensional space? Are we, though, in danger of neglecting to explore and re‐imagine the fundamental relationships between men, designers and workers, and machines, computers and robots?