Architects will increasingly confront practical choices between providing for bodily presence and relying on telepresence … Technoromantic theoreticians will egg them on to Gibsonian gestures of dematerialization and radical renunciation of traditional architectural means, while materiality chauvinists will provide ringing denunciations of a world that they see going to hell in a handheld device.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes: ”Architects will increasingly confront practical choices between providing for bodily presence and relying on telepresence. They will be forced to explore the proper respective roles of physically constructed hardware and symbolically encoded software, and of actual space and virtual places. And eventually they will find new ways to accommodate human needs by recombining transformed fragments of traditional building types in a matrix of digital telecommunication systems and reorganized circulation and transportation patterns. From the sidelines, no doubt, technoromantic theoreticians will egg them on to Gibsonian gestures of dematerialization and radical renunciation of traditional architectural means, while materiality chauvinists will provide ringing denunciations of a world that they see going to hell in a handheld device.”
Biography:William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Internet Appliances
Name of publication: City of Bits
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 7: Getting to the Good Bits
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney