Bill Mitchell, 1944 - 2010

Melbourne alumnus William J. Mitchell died last month after a long fight with cancer. He was 65.

Mitchell’s field of interest was broad, emcompassing (as well as architecture) the internet, education and smart cars . He ran a massive building at MIT and succeeded in commissioning buildings from Frank Gehry, Kevin Roche and Steven Holl. At the opening of the Gehry-designed Stata Center in 2004, Mitchell said,

“Leading intellectual institutions, such as MIT, carry a particular responsibility to conceive of architectural projects not just as the rational allocation of resources to achieve quantifiable management goals, but also as inventive, critical contributions to our evolving culture… Anything less is as scandalous a betrayal of their advertised principles as pedestrian scholarship or mediocre science.”

Mitchell is perhaps best known for his books about the convergence of architecture with digital networks. In 1996 he published City of Bits, a look at the then impending world of virtual communities. He saw this as an extension of architecture as we then knew it.

“For designers and planners, the task of the twenty-first century will be to build the bitsphere – a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere, and most of the artifacts that function within it (at every scale, from nano to global) have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities… Eventually [designers] will find new ways to accommodate human needs by recombining transformed fragments of traditional building types in a matrix of digital telecommunication systems and reorganized circulation and transportation patterns.

( It is interesting to read back through City of Bits now, as it now reads as a history of the last ten years, for myself at least. I expanded my practice in 2002 to include design for the web. Web design has moved on from being a mishmash of hyper-linked html pages into something far more complicated and pervasive. The processes are simlar to architecture, and I have no problem switching back and forwards between the two disciplines during a working day. One issue has been that the web industry is changing at a rate unknown in architecture, and this is reshaping the industry. In 2000 a sole web designer and builder could do everything, now there are multiple subdisciplines with scant knowledge of how the others work. Yet someone is needed to bring it all together – someone with a good understanding of all the elements, who can design spaces and plan and detail, who can bridge between clients and builders, someone who can see the wood for the trees. This person is increasingly being called a web architect. The tentacles of the web are entwining more and more with traditional architecture, so the next five years are going to be interesting. Maybe that’s fodder for another post. )

CITY OF BITS
M.I.T. OBIT
MELBOURNE SCHOL OF DESIGN OBIT
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Posted by Peter on 22.07.10 in computing