Adventures in the Algorithmic Ordinary and/or Odd Operations on the Everyday

Architecture of the built environment (and reality in general) is overwhelmingly ordinary. This ordinariness is represented through a range of architectural expressions: the generic, the copy, the perfunctory, the banal, the useful, the bare logics of capitalism, etc. The identity of American architecture in particular has been built on the ordinary. Algorithms underlie much of current architectural production in the form of instructions, and packages of commands which follow logic driven formulas of optimization, economic constraints, codes, and cultural standards. We might say that we are beginning to live in a post-algorithmic age, one in which everything is reducible to a set of instructions with particular goals in mind. The recent popular emergence of AI evidences a new world in which the algorithm reigns supreme – from producing texts to making images and videos to speculating on new forms of physical reality. We find ourselves at an interesting moment in time. A weird moment. There is little doubt that all of this will have profound effects on the practice, design, and the production of architecture. Our interest here though, is not in optimization and standards (which are well understood) but looking at the strange and enchanting interactions between the ordinary and the algorithmic.