In 1970, Nicholas Negroponte dedicated his book about computer- and robot-aided design “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture” (The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973, front matter). The book, a seminal collection of experiments and observations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is a primary document in the history of the digitalization of architecture from a moment when clear distinctions between hardware and software had yet to be established. The role of “machines” (including computer programs, projective screens, and mechanical arms) in architectural culture was urgently felt, but only haltingly and heuristically applied. Soon enough, the imaging capabilities of computers would dominate architectural applications and usher in an era of complex form and parametric design. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, advancing technology offers another occasion for productive confusion in the design professions. Hardware seems to be catching up with the complexity of software, or, at a minimum, new ways of interfacing the two are becoming apparent.

Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler’s The Robotic Touch: How Robots Change Architecture is a substantial and provocative document of this moment of productive confusion. The book is a catalogue of research projects carried out from 2005 to 2013 in the design studios of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and includes a number of thematic operative essays. All the showcased projects explore the use of robots in architectural construction and design. This very premise invites initial reflections in two extreme theoretical directions: on the one hand, a utopian (or dystopian) science fiction that figures the robot as its desideratum, and, on the other, a dry, hyperefficient Taylorism that uses the precision of the machine to push architecture toward a calculated perfection. Luckily, neither of these extremes prevails in this sophisticated account of the ways in which relatively simple robotics technologies can push the boundaries of both current digital design discourse and the material and aesthetic reality of architectural products.

The surprisingly pragmatic ethos of The Robotic Touch is partly the result of Gramazio and Kohler’s (and no doubt the dozens of student researchers credited on individual projects) conceptualization and implementation of the robots as an intermediary between the designer, the computer, and the building material. The robot in question is not the pinnacle of technological sophistication that one might expect from a progressive research program. It does not talk, dance, or attempt to mimic organic life in other uncanny ways. It is, rather, a “generic” robotic arm, much like the millions found in factories around the globe. The generic quality of the robot, along with the rudimentary nature of the building materials used (there are a lot of bricks involved), gives the projects in this book a fresh feeling, as though the most fundamental ontological questions are being asked of architecture. Gramazio and Kohler leave open questions about the exact nature of the implementation of these techniques in the “real world,” as well as other questions regarding the changing status of the subject vis-à-vis its robot collaborator(s).

Indeed, the most pointed argument of the text, repeated in different forms in the critical essays, goes well beyond a self-evident ontology of architecture and instead gestures toward a metaphysics of architectural synthesis. According to Gramazio and Kohler, the robot becomes an ideal mediator, the use of which might “inaugurate . . . an entirely new architectural approach which allows for bringing the discipline’s fundamental material capacities into equilibrium” (16). The resulting “digital materiality” is the hybrid framework that might align the somewhat alienated steps in the building process: design, implementation, and construction. The robot is instrumental here as the apparatus capable of importing the incomprehensible complexity of parametric design directly into the construction process (previously, it was invariably corrupted by human hands). “It is now possible,” state the authors, “to regard computer programming and architectural construction as conditional upon each other, and to see their reciprocity as fundamental to architecture in the digital age” (9). An interesting dialectic is implied in these passages wherein the ethereal nuances of computer-aided design are brought to the obstinate substance of the building while simultaneously gaining a veritable embodiment thanks to the undeniable presence of the robot and the building materials. It is as though a yearning digital heart was awaiting the arrival of an empty tin man all along.

The breadth of these claims is belied somewhat by the modesty of the projects included in the collection. No complete building ever resulted from the experiments in these studios; rather the projects involved structural, morphological, and material studies of which architectural applications can be easily extrapolated. The most compelling of these studies were several projects involving the construction of brick walls. Standard bricks were used in conjunction with special adhesives, and their placement was determined by a sine function precisely executed by the robotic arm. Instead of a flat grid, tiny shifts in the placement of each brick cumulatively generate a gently curving, topologically complex wall full of small gaps that allow light to pass through. The result is visually striking and a bit uncanny. Surely, the decision to use architecture’s most ancient and archetypal building block was not accidental. But each brick also becomes a metaphor for a pixel, and, accordingly, the wall becomes a metaphoric screen. This strange combination of physicality and virtuality lends these walls their poetic and disturbing properties, which are apparent even in photographs.

To create the brick walls, the robot arm was outfitted with a grasping claw, which picked up the bricks and placed them according to the assigned algorithms. The arm, however, is a much more flexible device than this limited application would suggest, and, over time, various studios experimented with different attachments such as drills, blades, and liquid extruders. The adaptability of the simple, generic robot arm becomes apparent in these different applications; its tirelessness and precision of movement is transformed by each accentuator. The results are astonishingly varied. After the brick screens, the studios employed foam blocks, wood planks, cast concrete elements, piled sand, crimped aluminum, and even a liquid foam extruded in informe piles and rings. Although varied, each project carries with it that strange synthesis of the actual and virtual, the accidental and the programmed. “These effects,” the authors explain, “stand in (sublime) contrast to the solid physicality of the materials used. In their intricate material articulation, such structures create an intense, essentially virtual ‘event.’” This event, in turn, might have the salutary function of a “sensory intensification, allowing for novel perceptual experiences” (21) on the part of the subject or user.

The intersecting concerns of the physical, virtual, aesthetic, and technical situate The Robotic Touch among a number of recent discursive developments, both in and outside of the realm of architecture proper. Clearly, Gramazio and Kohler see these experiments as a way out of the paradoxes of a parametric ethos in which the inherent complexity of the algorithmic form can only be realized by craft techniques. As such, the use of robots signals another step toward the ideal of a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) model and the perennial dream of “mass customization” (182). By the same token, the emphasis on the physical properties of the materials aligns Gramazio and Kohler’s observations with an emerging materialism in academia, so-called speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. These models privilege the power of non-human “actors” in hybrid networks comprising both material and immaterial, natural and social components. But if these accounts describe a compromised or displaced (or, at any rate, transformed) human agency, the authors of The Robotic Touch deploy a thinly veiled Hegelianism to sweep the more disturbing ramifications of such propositions away. Instead of being displaced or adversely affected by increasing automation, the human subject will be assimilated into a larger “complex ecosystem” of organic and synthetic assemblages, one that will enable new (post-Taylorist) models of production and authorial, well, authority (113–14).

These considerations lead Gramazio and Kohler to describe an architectural “paradigm shift” that could usher in a “newly won autonomy of architecture” (382). In deciding how to treat such claims, it is opportune to return to the heady moment of 1970 and a genealogy of the machine in architecture that is markedly different than the one proposed by Gramazio and Kohler. Instead of looking back and constructing a narrative premised upon a “history of failure” (105) in the use of robots as building tools, we might think of early experiments—not only by Negroponte, but by Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Frei Otto, Konrad Wachsmann, and Wolf Hilbertz, all of whom imagined new configurations of software and hardware—and the profound impact these could have on architecture and, significantly, planning (a term that is never systematically addressed in the present volume). Despite their marked differences, all of these earlier examples shared the assumption that “machines” would not only change the nature of architecture but also social relations within the built environment; they would empower some actors (users, usually) while obsolescing others (architects, usually).

With some exceptions (Voxels (2008), for instance) the projects and arguments set forth in The Robotic Touch are more politically modest than those of the past. Nonetheless, their immediacy and demonstrability lend them a disciplinary impact that goes beyond the utopian claims and technical shortcomings of preceding generations. Even if Gramazio and Kohler circumscribe the ramifications of a new conception of construction hardware with “internal” disciplinary concerns, it is easy for the reader to imagine these robots in other situations, producing interesting aesthetic and social effects unaccounted for by initial intentions. This aspect makes the book both a valuable document of past research and a text that projects itself into a seemingly ineluctable future.