“Automatic Architecture is an original, engaging historical account of several canonical figures in postwar architecture—including Frei Otto, Christopher Alexander, and Peter Eisenman—here linked together by the idea of the automatic: design emptied of subjectivity, intuition, and choice.  Simultaneously, the book addresses contemporary architecture's fixation on computational design, raising readers' self-awareness of today's foundations and limits.  With important things to say about both mid-twentieth-century architecture and our present moment, Automatic Architecture is smart, readable, and relevant.”

Daniel M. Abramson, Boston University

“Keller’s work provides a much-needed historical backdrop against which much of today’s interest in algorithmic, parametric, computer-aided architectural design can be understood more deeply. For the first time, Automatic Architecture offers a synthetic account of systems-oriented ‘design methods’ and other approaches to designing the ‘process’ of architectural design. Importantly, for Keller, this converges with a crisis of authorship that threatened the foundations of architectural modernism, especially in its ‘heroic’ variants. This book will be of interest both to scholars of modernism and postmodernism, and to architects, teachers of architecture, and students concerned with the ongoing debates regarding digitally-guided design processes.”

Reinhold Martin, Columbia University

“What is most original about Automatic Architecture is that Sean Keller has called attention to a moment in the history of architecture that was paramount for subsequent developments but that, until this book and some of Keller’s own earlier work, could be said to have been hiding in plain sight. The key figures—Christopher Alexander, Lionel March, Peter Eisenman, and Frei Otto—had vastly different careers, incommensurate bodies of work, and have been viewed differently by historians over the years. Regardless, this book shows that, taken as a whole, their work was the ground from which sprang decades of experimentation and dozens of practices, and continues to have far-reaching influence today on our attitudes regarding architectural form and the nature of design.”

Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware