"This book is more than a treatise on robotic aesthetics. It is a psycho-historical critique—and simultaneously a visual celebration—of the techno-biological world in which we live. It brings to the fore the overlapping intellectual and visual dimensions of our modern culture.”
Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT
“From architecture parlante to Gundam towers, this fascinating book offers a panorama of the many faces that define the messy skyline of late-modern Tokyo, situating the aesthetics of cacophony and narcissism in the complex confrontations between autonomy and automation, tradition and modernity, Japan and the world.”
Seng Kuan, Project Associate Professor, University of Tokyo; Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard University
"Once you see François Blanciak's disarmingly grayscale photos of the facades of everyday buildings in Tokyo, you can't unsee them. Grimacing, grinning, groaning, yawning, fawning, these visages will haunt your future drifts through the late-modern city. But this book is more than a whimsical excursus into the affectivity of serendipitously anthropomorphic architecture. It's a provocative psychosemantic analysis of the techno-aesthetics of modernist abstraction and evidence of architecture's irrepressible affinity for figuration."
Joan Ockman, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History, Yale School of Architecture
"Astroboy, Robocon, Asimo, Aibo—Japan has a long lineage of 'gentle robots.' Here the robot is not a stranger, nor a mysterious, inorganic object, but only ever a friend who mediates between the world of people and that of the external environment. This book similarly mediates between people and places, and in its own robotization offers a new kind of architectural theory.”
Hitoshi Abe, Terasaki Chair for Contemporary Japanese Studies, UCLA
"Modernist buildings often looked like machines; classical and post-modernist architects often copied the forms and proportions of the human body. But today's robots are machines that look like bodies. As François Blanciak argues in this rich, personal, and scholarly book, architecture's traditional imitation game is left in disarray, and now having to navigate uncharted waters."
Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory, The Bartlett UCL, London; Professor of Architectural Theory, Die Angewandte, Vienna
