"The 'Implicit Enumeration' Algorithm: Decision Science and the Architectural Research Economy"

In the spring of 1969, Welton Becket and Associates requested guidance from UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, expressing a desire to establish a “research arm” of the design office. Complementing the dean’s plans to form a “practice arm” of the recently established professional school, the project was quickly set in motion. Though the cachet of bridging research and business formed a major part of its promise for both parties, the applied research itself held a particular value for the firm. At its center of the relationship was the department’s access to an IBM/360 system, and the reserve of specialized expertise it held in the automation of architectural practice.
Robin Liggett, a student in the School of Business Administration, was hired by the School of Architecture as a computer assistant. Her research explored a novel mathematical approach to the optimization of decision-making—a topic that her employers quickly identified as a potential source of such expertise. Rationalizing the design process as essentially a series of binary decisions, she translated her program to analyze spatial data and generate architectural plans, sharing it with faculty and practitioners in the school. Over the next decade, Liggett’s “implicit enumeration” algorithm circulated in a highly active area of architectural research and application. The field of automated space planning proliferated in hundreds of papers and programs, while offices reshaped internal practices to accommodate the distinct labor of data entry, records management, and programming.
Following Liggett’s algorithm into practice, this paper will describe how computational tools of design—as seen through this circuit from business to architecture and back—functioned as managerial technologies distinct from the disciplinary knowhow of architects, and that, in doing so, it served to more closely align architecture with other spheres of professional labor in a “knowledge economy.”