A “ROBOTIC-WIKI” - Clemson University

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
“This will kill that … Alas! Alas! Small things come at the end of great
things; a tooth triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the
swordfish kills the whale, and the book will kill the edifice”
-- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
At the beginning of the 19 th century, Victor Hugo prophesized that new
technologies, the printing press at that time, will kill architecture, leaving architects with
no tools for edifying history (Lienhard, 2006). In the 21 st century, evidence that small
things have killed great things include information technologies, embedded in our daily
lives and everywhere as “Ubiquitous Computing” (Weiser and Seely, 1997). Information
technology has become an essential part of our social and environmental lives that
include, but are not limited to, the internet, personal computers, laptops, smart cards,
cellphones, and personal digital assistants (PDA’s). What if these seemingly small
technologies were embedded into our environments to shape physical architectural
spaces? Computing and architecture share a common basis which gives architects of the
21st century the impetus to retune their approaches to accommodate the psychological,
sociological, and environmental needs of human beings.
This thesis envisions architecture embedded with information technologies (IT);
that the small things of IT will become part of our physical and social environments.
Admittedly, an architecture comprised of “hardware” and “software” is no longer capable
of satisfying our increasingly social and environmental needs. Architecture in the
informational world should not be only concerned about hardware and software, but more