The Architecture Machine by Nicholas Negreponte, and

380 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The areas in which the author’s “technological society” has precisely developed new approaches—as in mass communications, in which tech­ nological innovation (e.g., in electronics) unites populations of un­ precedented mass and diversity—are not dealt with in this study. For balance, the reader may himself wish to complete the picture by giving these a moment of thought. Where the medium is new, historical com­ parisons are of course awkward to set up. But when we can make a comparison—as, say, between a Merovingian coin and a Roosevelt dime—the poverty of our present level in visual communication puts us to shame. It is worth considering just what the demands made by a 20th-cen­ tury citizen on art could be. Coutts-Smith, in his gallery of headless store dummies, foetuses cast in bronze, and other samples of cleverness, has not offered us anything “beautiful.” So far, he is right. Anyone who has handled a propeller blade or watched the Lissajous patterns on the face of an oscilloscope has experienced beauty he does not expect to see surpassed. He can still hope, however, for the silent witness of a great seated figure by Henry Moore, whose presence bears human values that a Lissajous figure does not pretend to touch. But Moore, whom Coutts-Smith dismisses briefly, is presumably part of that “ac­ ceptable mainstream” that is “related to the bourgeois and capitalist system of ethics and values of western society at large.” The author is of course free to narrow his field of vision to those developments that are congenial to him—but what he then produces is not the study, announced in the opening pages of his text, of “the relationship between art and society.” Jean Le Corbeiller* The Architecture Machine. By Nicholas Negreponte. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970. Pp. 153; illustrations. $5.95. Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations between Painting and the Natural Sciences in This Century. By C. H. Waddington. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970. Pp. 256; illustrations. $25.00. Though relatively few people have ever seen a computer and fewer still have actually used one, hardly anyone denies that computers have changed our way of life, making the social history of the past thirty years radically different than it would have been without computers. The organization of government, business, industry, science, and so on, can no longer be imagined without the aid of these communication devices. Since the arts are considered to be primary means of communication, it was inevitable that computers, despite their arithmetical rigidity, * Mr. Le Corbeiller, who for several years taught the history of science course at the Juilliard School of Music, is a science editor in New York City. He has recently been at work on a history of the American Museum of Natural History. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 3 81 would be set to composing music, drawing pictures, and writing poetry. The results have been surprisingly interesting, and the possibility of parallels between science and art has intensified attempts to define crea­ tivity. Debate has been vigorous over an imagined computer that will make use of its input in ways for which it was not programmed, that is, a computer that will be creative. However, the more seriously pro­ grammers have tried to simulate human cognition, the more bleakly the lifelessness of computer hardware has been exposed. Nevertheless, the possibility of connections between art and science has become an important subject for speculation. It may be significant that those who speculate have scientific backgrounds while nonscientific art critics, on the whole, reject the possibility, even though the major innovations in art during this century have been launched by artists who have eulogized the “scientific” and “technological” verities of their time. In any case, a comparison can be drawn between the attempt by technologists to create a creative computer and the attempt by artists to create aesthetic metaphors out of scientific dogma. The two books under review are concerned with these attempts. Nicholas Negreponte’s book is dedicated “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture.” The author believes that an intelligent robot can

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Mass society · Natural (archaeology) · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Architecture, Modernity, and Design · Art History and Market Analysis · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · History · Law