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ing from the Fun Palace toward the present, in the development of design
tools as well as building structures. It remains the case that nothing on the
scale of the Fun Palace has yet been built, but perhaps the sixties might be
coming back: in 2002 the Royal Institution of British Architects gave the Ar-
chigram group its gold medal (Sadler 2005, 7).
Let me end this chapter with one more, light-hearted, example of cybernetic
architecture, an installation exhibited by Pask's collaborator, Nicholas Ne-
groponte, at the Jewish Museum in New York from September to November
1970.
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Close inspection of figure 7.27 reveals of a mass of small cubes inhab-
ited by a colony of gerbils. The gerbils push the cubes around, as is their wont.
At intervals, a computer scans the scene and either pushes the blocks back
where they were, if they have not moved much, or aligns them to a grid in their
new positions. The gerbils then go to work again, the computer does its thing
once more, and thus the built environment and its inhabitants' use of it co-
evolve open-endedly in time in ways neither the architect, nor the computer,
nor the gerbils could have foreseen—just like a Musicolour performance.
