Architecture, so reluctant to fly, is now overtaking the lighter disciplines in comprehending the changes we have unleashed. It is no accident that both Mitchell and Negroponte, to whose Being Digital this book will surely be compared, share architectural backgrounds. The cataclysm of change is a cataclysm of problems, but problems are often opportunities in disguise. Confronting those problems directly can restore a long-faltering sense of urban and architectural optimism, as helplessness is replaced by the plenitude of possibility. Periodically, all the certitudes of a generation begin to shake and the time comes for revision and redefinition.
Key texts appear at such moments, and such texts animate the efforts of the succeeding generation.
In architecture, one such text was Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1966. An influx of animated exchange followed, bringing with it the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. In many ways the energy of that book carried architects through postmodernism and into deconstruction before exhausting itself, but exhaust itself it did. After deconstruction, cyberspace. At some point it became clear that what had felt like a vital and important exchange of ideas had become the staging of a play without an audience.