Software as Narrative, City as Syntax

• In Event: If...Elif...Else

Abstract

As STS scholars have shown, software systems are cultural artifacts that enact theoretical commitments about the practices they are meant to support. We may also see them as narrative structures which reposition actors and redefine their social roles by conditioning —rhetorically and otherwise— their material and immaterial labors. Software systems are thus constitutive of (and enmeshed in) discursive fabrics of social and political significance. Accordingly, examining software as discourse may help us highlight the work these systems perform in the service of intellectual propositions, disciplinary realignments, political visions, and shifts both socio-material and epistemic. In this paper I offer an example of such analysis through a close reading of CISP, a software system for computer-aided urban design developed in 1972 by architect and computer scientist Christos Yessios. Exploring its institutional context, and examining its operative logic through a software reconstruction, I will show CISP as a narrative countering then-dominant conceptions of architectural and urban design, and of the city itself. Evocative of Chomsky’s generative grammars and Christopher Alexander’s design patterns, CISP construed design as a process of search through a combinatorial space governed by rules. While its inscription of design as a series of machine operations made it a legitimate expression of an increasingly dominant mode of knowledge production, its imbrication with academic, defense, and urban vectors show it as an illustration of a broader post-war re-alignment of the design disciplines in the US foreshadowing present-day ambitions to think of the city, its design, and its actors, as computational.

Author

• Daniel Cardoso Llach, Carnegie Mellon University