Contrary to intuition, we find automatic relations in all matters important to Architecture. As they are not restricted to technology and lifeless matter only. Today, digitalization of the dominant technological, social and cultural areas is being archived. As an effect, an explicitly new kind of automation technology drives the forth industrial revolution. Now with its unprecedented means, scale and scope it is about to transform every aspect of everyday life. Architecture faces the challenge of developing concepts for a built-up life world whose elements control themselves arbitrarily as if they were living. There are no references for this, for western culture was formed by classical categories which regarded the animate and the inanimate, the created and the evolved, the subjective and the objective, things and humans as dualistic opposites. The inherent mixture of categories that were classically strictly separated results in a comprehensive new direction of scientific issues. "Automation and Architecture" presents widely unknown projects from early modernism till today and discusses automatic phenomena within and beyond technology.

Oliver Schürer, Tischlermeister, studierte Architektur an der TU Wien, Dissertation 2005 zum Thema Automation in der Architektur. Forscht und lehrt an der TU Wien, Fachbereich Architekturtheorie. Autor zahlreicher Beiträge und Bücher, zuletzt über "Berufsfeld Architektur", 2007.