Hidden Lives of Algorithms

Philip D. Plowright, Ph.D. is Professor of Architecture and Chair of Design at Lawrence Technological University, USA. He has been recognized for work at the intersection of cognition and design and explores how human thinking shapes—and is shaped by—our environments. Plowright’s research and writing are distinguished by a drive to reveal the foundational ideas that generate meaning in the built world, focusing on clarity and practical relevance for both practice and teaching. His books, including Urban Design Made by Humans (Routledge, 2023), Making Architecture Through Being Human (Routledge, 2020), and Revealing Architectural Design (Routledge, 2014), offer new frameworks for understanding space, architectural discourse, and design method. An active theorist, educator, and architect (NCARB), Plowright supports a human-centred, evidence-based approach to architecture—one rooted in the shared, embodied knowledge that shapes our built environment.Silvio Carta, Ph.D. was an architect (ARB/RIBA), Chartered Building Engineer (MCABE), and Professor of Architecture at the University of Greenwich, UK. Previously Head of Architecture and Design at the University of Hertfordshire, his research bridged artificial intelligence, machine learning, urban data science, and computational design to explore how digital methods reshape spatial and social systems. He was Section Editor of Computational Sustainability and Design, City and Built Environment (Springer/Nature), contributed to the European Council on Computing in Construction, and was active in SCOSA, AHRA, and ACADIA. Recognized as Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), Silvio’s books include Big Data, Code and the Discrete City (Routledge, 2019), Machine Learning and the City (Wiley, 2022), and How Computers Create Social Structure – Accidental Collectives (Palgrave Macmillan/SpringerNature, 2024). His work continues to inspire new ways of thinking about algorithms in architecture.

• 1. How geometry holds social content 2. LINE/Path/Movement 3. CIRCLE/Boundary/Containment 4. POINT/Attention/Importance

"Crackerjacks, Plowright and Carta! This is an excellent book! First, the authors remind architects that the paths, circles, and points in architectural design always symbolize objects and experiences in the real world, translating into issues of providing access versus blocking, inclusion versus exclusion, and privacy versus publicness. Second, they demonstrate how metaphors and embodied schemas developed within CMT do not only govern language, but also fundamentally shape our experience of our surroundings. But not just architects and schema aficionados will profit from reading The Hidden Lives of Algorithms. Greater awareness of how theories and algorithms inspire conceptions of reality (think of Gen-AI) but can never replace it, and understanding how the built environment may both facilitate and hinder socio-cultural integration, will benefit all of us."Charles Forceville, Review in Leonardo, June 2026