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Vitruvius's De architectura, written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, its enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. The book at hand bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys overa hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths and how a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the built emerges. The resulting picture is that of a zigzagging thread between practice and theory, an elusive network of fruitful carelessness in architecture.

By the time the computer arrived on the architectural scene, its place had been prepared by decades of avant-gardist experimentation. The modernist program of rationalizing creative practice took a decidedly bureaucratic turn between two generations of constructivists in the 1930s and 1960s. From Paris to Cambridge, painters, poets, designers, and architects poured their energy into cracking the code of artistic genius in hopes of democratizing the creation of better environments, thus stimulating a nascent repertoire of algorithmic techniques. The motivation to use these new techniques emerged from attempts to understand art and architecture through serial effects. By reformulating their disciplines in terms of flowcharting procedures developed in the field of scientific management, artists and architects enacted a paradigm shift that had long been a cherished dream of modernism, replacing composition with organization as the basis of design.