Pablo Miranda Carranza

My research examines the history of technology in architecture in its interplay with broader economic, social, and political processes. More specifically, I am interested in how computers and software influence architectural thought and practice. 

My 2018 PhD at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, looks, for example, at how computer programs reorganize the different knowledge, values, and subjects involved in making architecture, in contrast to how hand-drawn geometry has done so until recently. 

As a postdoctoral fellow in 2022 at the History, Theory and Criticism group at the Department of Architecture at MIT, I studied how computers became instrumental, since the 1960s, to efforts of rethinking architecture as a science of form. The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet (VR).

Currently, and also with support from VR, I am tracing the history of algorithms in geography and their role in transforming it from a purely descriptive discipline into a predictive one, that is, into a form of planning.