Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture

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