According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world                  for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every                  bit as much as buildings are. In his writings, Shepheard examines old assumptions                  about architecture and replaces the critical theory of the academic with the active                  theory of the architect-citizen enamored of the world around him.Artificial Love                  weaves together three stories about architecture into one. The first, about machines                  as architecture, leads to speculations about technology and the human condition and                  to the assertion that machines are the sculptures of today. The second story is                  about the ways that architecture reflects the tribal and personal desires of those                  who make it. In the West, ideas of community, multiculturalism, and globalization                  compete furiously, leaving architecture to exist as it always has, as the past in                  the present. The third story features individual people experiencing their lives in                  the context of architecture. Here, Shepheard borrows the rhetorical device of                  Shakespeare's seven ages of man to propose that each person's life imitates the                  accumulating history of the human species. Shepheard's version of the history of                  humans is a technological one, in which machines become sculpture and sculpture                  becomes architecture. For Shepheard, our machines do not separate us from nature.                  Rather, our technology is our nature, and we cannot but be in harmony with nature.                  The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a wonderful and powerful                  thing.

Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture PDF

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