COMPUTING

WITHOUT
COMPUTERS

John Frazer trained as an architect in

London and at Cambridge during the
1960s and 1970s. He identified at the
very earliest stages of their development
how the processing power of computers
might assist the design process, and
then tried to imagine the effects of
this on the role of the architect, the
client/user and the environment. For 30
years he has confronted this issue with
tireless enthusiasm through teaching,
researching and designing. Here, he
presents a very personal rough guide
to where he has been, with a thought
for where he thinks we are at now.

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Setting the agenda

the late 1960s
Covers of the International
Dialogue of Experimental
Architecture exhibition catalogue;
Amazing Archigram 4; the New
Society NON-PLAN issue; the
Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition,
curated by Jasia Reichardt; AutoDestructive Art Gustav Metzger;
Clip Kit, edited by Peter Murray
and Geoff Smyth; and manifesto
of Architecture Principe Claude
Parent and Paul Virilio.

The visions of the 1960s and

1970s took a long time to be
realised because access to
computer graphics equipment
only began to become available
in the late 1970s. The caption
to David Greens Logplug and
Rokplug (as featured in 2 May
1969) indicated a cable line
delivering AC and DC current,
telephone, international
information hook-up.
By 2004, when David Greene
reconstructed Rokplug as part
of the Archigram exhibition
in the Baltic Centre for
Contemporary Art, his proposal
had become technically
feasible, as demonstrated by
John Frazer using a wireless
connected battery-powered
computer to write this article,
and send it to guest-editor
Samantha Hardingham from his
garden hammock in Sussex.

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2004
I am typing this from a hammock in my garden in Sussex using
a wireless-connected, battery-powered computer only
dreamed of in the 1970s. The technology has at last arrived but
with a staggering performance far beyond the wildest dreams
of even the most optimistic gurus, and at an even more
astonishingly low cost. Whilst I type this sentence, a student
has logged in from China for a tutorial in one window, my son
is chatting in another, and in a third window an urgent email
query from Frank Gehrys office is being answered; it is 4pm
British Summer Time that magic time of the day when Los
Angeles is waking up and Shanghai is not yet asleep. Here I am
lying in my hammock wondering why it took so long to get
connected and what we have all been doing in the meantime
I pause for a moment to reflect on having just been
connected to the Peoples Republic of China and the United
States of America all from a hammock in the European Union
with an international network of agreed protocols the politics
of this seem more wondrous than the technology. The March
1974 copy of 2 is red with a full-cover portrait of Chairman
Mao holding a red copy of 2 in the form and classic gesture of
the little red book how did 2 know?

Whilst some commentators made prescient technical

projections (Fuller) and others social and political
predictions (New Society), only in 2 did the two come
together and, therefore, the insight into how the
advancing technology might be integrated with the
changing society.
The 1968 Paris student riots saw the chance of a
quick change in social injustice fail, and then fade away
by 1970. By the oil crisis of 1973 a new strategy was
emerging to effect social and political change, and the
solution was, at least in part, in the new technology and
the emerging science of cybernetics in particular. I
would pick 20 July 1969 as the pivotal date, when the
first step on the moon became the clich of
technological achievement and the views of the
spaceship earth became a symbol for all that
Buckminster Fuller had been preaching for decades.
The late 1960s and early 1970s became a prolonged
thought experiment for myself and fellow students at
the time. There were no affordable computers to speak
of, so the only option was to imagine that they existed
and imagine all the rest of the technology and social
and political change necessary to realise dreams. This
is what I mean by computing without computers; a
mental rehearsal of what architecture and a built
environment would be like at the beginning of the 21st
century.

Rescuing the 1970s from the Attic

As I write this caption, I am thinking specifically of
issues of 2 that I had read and contributed to as a
student and young architect. Then I realise that it is
architecture that has been in the attic since the early
1970s. Key ideas on the environment, ecology,
sustainability and technology transfer were shelved and
archived for future use why did this happen? When (if
ever) might that future use take place? Amongst the
boxes in the attic labelled Interbuild, OZ, New
Society, Archigram, Clip Kit, Arena and AAQ, I finally
find AD 960 79, and restore the volumes to my
bookshelves. The dust and the weight, and the
solemnity of the library bindings, do not distract from
the still fresh images and the lightness within the
covers. A random dip into 1971 produced an inflatable
tube, 250 metres long and floating on the Machsee in
Hanover; an open letter from Peter Cook to Warren
Chalk; an Auto-mat deployable pneumatic mat by Mark
Fisher; emergency housing in Peru; a long issue on the
social problems of the redevelopment of Covent Garden;
and an issue on the Beaux Arts Since 1968 that
reviewed the aftermath of the Paris student revolution.
The magazines quickly reveal that the agenda for the

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1970s had been set entirely in the 1960s. So, in order to revive
the flavour of the period and according to fickle memory
and some note taking at the time, the following sequence
of formative events is set out a personal Rough Guide to
Thought Experiments.

in the enclosure business, and Banham teasingly mocks

this idea by using it as the launch pad for his own
prophetic vision.

1967
1963
Buckminster Fuller lectures in the Architectural Association
(AA) first-year studio he is being filmed for BBC television.
He is seated on a trestle table, and stops mid-sentence every
time the camera stops, only to resume again mid-sentence
when the filming starts again.

1964
The Fun Palace by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, arguably
the seminal building of the century, in development since
1958, is revealed to the public in an article by Reyner Banham.
(Reyner Banham, Peoples Palaces, New Statesman, 7 August
1964, pp 1912)

1965
Autodestructive Art. During his lecture at the AA, Gustav
Metzger contrives for his slides to burn in the projector (the
flames go down the screen giving an impression of hell).
A demonstration ensues in Chings Yard. The choreographed
destruction of fluorescent tubes inspires an orgy of destruction
with models, drawings, drawing boards and furniture being
hurled from the studio windows overlooking the yard. I am
inspired to hurl myself from the rooftop onto this participatory
event (others have since admitted this feeling too), not from
depression but from a sense of elation.

World Design Science Decade Conference, London.

Buckminster Fuller is trying to involve architectural
students in this project and in his World Game on the
basis that design education develops a comprehensive
approach to problems whilst all other disciplines are
becoming increasingly specialist. He speaks for four
hours in one seamless sentence unbroken by the usual
need to breathe. His generosity of spirit shows when
afterwards, although visibly tired, he talks with me
personally for a further hour. I have talked with Fuller
four times in my life; every time was magic, every time
I felt a renewed sense of purpose yet I cant
remember a single word he said.

1968
Cybernetics Serendipity, an exhibition at the ICA
organised by the incredible Jasia Reichardt. A dogeared catalogue (a special issue of Studio International)
reveals an incredible mix: Norbert Wiener, Stafford
Beer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Edward
Ihnatowicz, Gustav Metzger, Gordon Pask poetry,
music, art, sculpture, dance, film, architecture. Page
after page documents seminal experiments that set
the agenda for the coming 40 years.
(Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity, Cosmorama,
2 September 1968, p 395)

1966
International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA),
Folkstone. Thousands of backpacking, beach-sleeping students
converge from around the world on a small hall designed for
an audience of a few hundred. They hear Cedric Price talk on
the Potteries Thinkbelt, Hans Hollein on the Retti candle shop
and the invention of Tote bags, which takes the tiny shop out
into the city, as well as Joseph Weber, Ionel Schein, Yona
Freidman, Arthur Quarmby and the Archigram Group. Claude
Parent and Paul Virilio speak in French in black suits, and are
translated by Colin Fournier, who also rescued them from
being booed off stage as they are seen as neofascist by a highspirited audience. Reyner Banham talks on the End of
Architecture. Cedric Price unguardedly said that architects are

The 1960s dream wholeheartedly embraced the idea of the general availability of
computers. But the reality was that in the mid-1960s there were no graphics display
devices generally available. John Frazer, as a student in 1968, plotted his final-year
project on cartridge paper on a hired pen plotter with no screen graphics available.

37

1969
The pyrotechnics to mark the end of the 1960s take
place in March when New Society publishes NON-PLAN:
An Experiment in Freedom by Reyner Banham, Paul
Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price, setting forth a
manifesto for the end of planning as we understand it.
(Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric
Price, NON-PLAN: An Experiment in Freedom, New
Society, 20 March 1969, pp 43543)

1970

In 1969, the only screen graphics display service at Cambridge University was a circular
cathode ray tube where the first lines fade before the last lines are drawn. John Frazer is
now able for the first time to interact directly with a growing seed of a design that
automatically reconfigures itself to spatial requirements.

Also in 1968
I do my first computer drawings plotted by pen on cartridge
paper (no screen preview). Generating drawings of a
geometrical complexity that is virtually impossible by hand is
inspirational, but the pain of writing the software (no AutoCad
yet) and entering all that data, start me on a lifelong project to
improve the situation. I plot my final-year project, win the year
prize for it, and all the original drawings are stolen from the
end-of-year exhibition.
(John Frazer, Reptiles, 2 April 1974, pp 2319)

Gordon Pask lecturing at the AA in 1977.

38

A new mood of seriousness and an urge to get the job

done. This means an end to my student years and a new
life as a don at Cambridge. I start to run the first year in
the Architecture School with Britt Andressen (Australian
Architects gold medallist) and Barry Gasson (now Sir
Barry). The personal change in mood and imperative
mirrors a change in society as it moves into the new
decade. It is as if for a glorious 10 years the whole
world has shared a formative student experience but
now we are expected to repay our debt.
Inventors, Masters, Starters of Crazes, and Diluters
so Ezra Pound classifies creative activity (Ezra Pound,
ABC of Reading, Yale 1934, Faber 1961). The Inventors
and the Starters of Crazes as I have described, resided
in the 1960s. The Masters step into the foreground in the
early 1970s. They use processes as well as, or better than,
those who invented them, and are often combining ideas.
The Diluters descend in the mid-1970s. If the 1960s is
characterised by inventive spirit, the 1970s will be an
era of developing mastery. The change is marked by an

extraordinary issue of 2 guest-edited by Roy Landau and

focusing on cybernetics and responsive systems with a galaxy of
star contributors, including Karl Popper, Warren Brodey, Nicholas
Negroponte, Stanford Anderson, David Greene, Cedric Price
and Gordon Pask. This issue defines the agenda for the coming
30 years.(Royston Landau (ed), Thinking About Architecture
and Planning, 2 September 1969, pp 478514)
Meanwhile, I have teamed up with Alex Pike, who I know
only as a regular contributor to 2, also new to Cambridge. We
form a research group (including the young Ken Yeang) to
investigate an ecologically responsible architecture. It is not
just an academic research group; we also plan to construct a
prototype autonomous house.

Also in 1970
I have gained access to a graphics display device (a circular
cathode ray tube where the first lines fades before the last
ones are drawn), the only one at Cambridge University. With
the help of expertise in the mathematical laboratory, I start
to develop generative programs based on a kind of digital
DNA that enable me to generate structural forms automatically
without the tedium of entering all that data.

1973
As the world economy stagnates following the oil crisis,
I wander from Cambridge back to the AA, teaching again with
Britt Andressen. We introduce the students to another thought
experiment, asking them to construct a computer from
matchboxes and coloured beads. I am subsequently afforded
the pleasure of teaching for a further year with David Greene
and Will Alsop.

Our company,
Autographics,
is founded,
followed by
software package
Autoplan, launching
a 20-year task to
write useful software
that we believe
assists design rather
than obstructs it.
A few years later
AutoCad appears,
eclipsing our
pioneering little
company.

The intelligent building is born in Cedric Prices Generator

project. My wife Julia and I are consultants (we are building
a computer system and writing the software) on the project
in order to facilitate Cedrics belief that an instantaneous
architectural response to a particular problem is too slow,
and that architecture should create desirable conditions and
opportunities hitherto thought impossible. The Generators
services and structures respond to the users wishes with
help from both a crane and computers embedded in every
structural element.

Design in Belfast and at last have access to the

resources to introduce computing into the curriculum
as the first microprocessor-based graphics system
becomes available. Christmas is spent sitting in bed,
snowbound, in a remote farmhouse in Killyleagh,
County Down, reading a stack of manuals for the
Tektronix 4051, which has just been delivered.
Excitement grows as the realisation dawns that here
is the potential for every architect to have a graphics
computer on his or her desk, and indeed the decade
is to end with the arrival of the Personal Electronic
Transactor, affectionately known from their acronym
as PETs. Apple and, eventually, IBM follow.

1977

1979

I take up a post as head of the School of Art and Design

Research, History and Criticism in the College of Art and

Our company, Autographics, is founded, followed by

software package Autoplan, launching a 20-year task

1976

39

to write useful software that we believe assists design rather

than obstructs it. A few years later AutoCad appears, eclipsing
our pioneering little company.

What Went Wrong?

Contributing factors:
1 The period suffered from the effect of two contrary tides
energy and information flowing in opposite directions (and
contrary to the laws of physics). On the one hand,
developments were made in technology and a profusion of
ideas for ways to save the planet. On the other, the exploitation
and trivialisation by three decades of visionless politics
culminated in 1979 in the beginning of the Thatcher era that
led to the draining of a nations creative spirit and imagination.

The Generator project became the worlds first intelligent building. Working model
of part of the interactive Generator environment with a microprocessor embedded in
every element for computing its own reconfiguration. Concept, electronics, mode and
software by John and Julia Frazer as cybernetic consultants to Cederic Price, 1978.

2 The technology moved fast in many ways faster than

expected. The social and political and economic systems did
not. When the problem becomes disconnected from the
solution, we do not have a solution at all but a new problem.
3 The optimism of the period is typified by a piece by Fred
Scott, How Its Made, lamenting the architects reluctance to
interest themselves in how things are made. He discusses CNC,
the computer numerical control of machines to produce a
flexible production line, quoting an article in Science
Journal. Scott was quick to see the implications for the
building industry. (Fred Scott, How Its Made, Cosmorama,
2 November 1968, p 507.) The line of argument was
expanded by Chris Abel in Ditching the Dinosaur Sanctuary
(2 August 1969, pp 41924). However, neither Scott nor Abel
engaged with the problem of the fantastic cost of these
machines in relation to the time it would take to machine the
parts. The vision was right, and the cost is now resolved, but
the one-dimensional, uncritical awe of the technology
remains unresolved.
4 The Diluters. RIBA got in early on the exploitation and dilution
act with its annual conference in 1972. Under the banner
of Designing for Survival, it pretended to be making a
professional effort to address the growing energy crisis.
My initial delight that RIBA was taking the environmental and
energy issues seriously, and my youthful pride at being invited
to speak, soon gave way to the horrific realisation that, far
from taking the issue seriously, the profession just saw it
as yet another exploitable opportunity. Serious issues were
appropriated and trivialised to justify the irrelevancies of the
formalists and the monumentalisers. I vowed never to join
this demeaning self-interest group. The outcome of the
conference was the RIBA Long Life Loose Fit Low Energy
programme. Andrew Rabeneck, Francis Duffy and John
Worthington wrote an open letter to the RIBA President,

40

By the late 1970s, the first microprocessor-based graphics storage devices became
commercially available. (Left) A Tekronix 4051 introduced by John and Julia Frazer
into the Belfast College of Art & Design in 1977. By the end of the 1970s the first
personal computers became available, but the screen graphics were of such low
resolution that a multicolour pen plotter still had to be used for graphics output.
(Right) Belfast College of Art & Design, 1977: a Commodore PET (personal electronic
transactor) with 10-pen colour plotter and software designed and written by John
and Julia Frazer.

The technology moved

fast in many ways
faster than expected.
The social and
political and economic
systems did not.
When the problem
becomes disconnected
from the solution,
we do not have a
solution at all but
a new problem.

Universal Constructor, AA diploma 11 unit students, 1990, with Gordon Pask and
Julia Frazer.

The 1990s
By 1992, all the tools are available: the computers, the
software virtual reality is a reality. The problem now shifts to
one that would make connections between 30 years or more of
pieces: How to integrate the new technology with the human
side, the interaction, the environment and the underlying
purpose. John Frazer works with students at the AA from 1990
to 1995 to build experimental interactive models, generative
and evolutionary systems and use genetic algorithms and
neural nets with which to explore architecture as if it were a
form of artificial life. Applications include creating a
participatory planning model for the citizens of Groningen
'Universal Constructor' (AA diploma11 unit students, with
Gordon Pask and Julia Frazer, 1990). Cedric Price and Gordon
Pask also worked with this group, helping to make the link
between formative thought processes and ongoing student
discoveries. The 'Universal Interactor' exhibition (AA diploma
11 unit students, 1992) invited visitors to interact with
networked input and output devices. The arrival of global
access to the Internet in 1994 was celebrated by diploma 11
students in their 'Interactivator' exhibition at the AA. Here, an
object evolved in the heart of the exhibition in response to
input from the actual visitors, virtual visitors on the Internet
and the changing environmental conditions of the exhibition
space. The computing without computers experiment is re-run,
although this time we have the computers. The purity of the
thought experiment is all the more poignant and the
imperative of doing without the encumbrance of the machine
all the more powerful. Working in a virtual space is further
developed when John Frazer takes up the post of head of the
School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in
1998 , where students build the Global Virtual Design Studio
with which to conduct shared global projects.

Universal Interactor exhibition, AA diploma 11 unit students, 1992.

Visitors interacting with networked input and output devices
include (left to right) Ken Yeang, Britt Andressen (with daughter),
Marcial Echenique, Samantha Hardingham and Sophie Hicks
(back to camera).

41

Interactivator exhibition, AA diploma 11 unit students, 1995. The form evolves

in response to input from the actual visitors to the exhibition, the
environmental conditions in the exhibition space, and input from virtual
visitors on the Internet.

Global Virtual Design Studio, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 1998.

42

Computers have
become ubiquitous,
pervasive and getting
close to being
invisible. So I toast
the new millennium
and declare myself
post-digital in the
sense of transcending
the need to anymore
talk about computers.
We can take them for
granted and get back
to the real problems
of designing a future
in response to the
needs of people
and the environment.
Alex Gordon, expressing their profound sense of unease at
the way the institute was running the programme (Andrew
Rabeneck, Francis Duffy, John Worthington, LL/LF/LE Open
letter to Alex Gordon PRIBA, 2 January 1973, p 6). The issue
of participation in design was similarly obscured.
5 The dream of CAD (computer-aided design) was sold cheap as
COD (computer-obstructed design) and soon collapsed into the
realm of ghastly renderings that polluted every minor school
of architectures degree shows for several years.
6 The technological optimism of the late 1960s and early 1970s
was one-dimensional. Many of its sources can be found in
much earlier work, and the richness of the thinking seemed
to get lost over time. Fuller, in writing Nine Chains to the Moon
(1938), raised environmental issues, and published 4D Time

Lock (1929) attacking the stagnation in the building

industry. Woudhysen and Abley have only recently
published Why is Construction so Backward (WileyAcademy, 2004). Patrick Geddes discussed
participation in his built project Citizens Outlook Tower
(1892) and Kropotkins political influence can be found
in his Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899).

2000
Computers have become ubiquitous, pervasive and
getting close to being invisible. So I toast the new
millennium and declare myself post-digital in the sense
of transcending the need to anymore talk about
computers. We can take them for granted and get back
to the real problems of designing a future in response
to the needs of people and the environment.

2005
A recent symposium on Architecture and Digital
Integration at the Royal Society of Arts established
that the hardware and software necessary for design
and computer-controlled fabrication and assembly
technology has now developed to the point where the
dinosaur of industrialisation by fabricating repetitive
elements can finally be ditched. Software adapted out
of the realms of the aerospace industry and into the
domain of construction has at last displaced software
written to merely speed the existing design process.
The dream of software to generate, and ultimately
construct, forms and spaces appropriate to a responsive
and ecologically responsible future architecture, is at
last with us. Examples as diverse as Gaud and Gehry,
baroque churches and gherkins, illustrated the
feasibility of the technology and its necessity, or so
many speakers claimed. A digital project ecosystem
has been formed of a loose affiliation of architects,
engineers, fabricators and builders to effect a radical
reform of the construction industry including education
and training.
Avid readers of 2 will have known this was coming
for over 40 years. We still have the same concerns.
Will the mistakes of the 1970s be repeated with a onedimensional approach to the technology without the
process and the purpose? Are we in danger of again
seeing the solution out of the context of the problem?
The last word to Cedric Price: Technology is the
answer but what was the question?
And the 2s? they will now be staying on my
bookshelves 4

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