Generally, when we say that someone has tried to reinvent the wheel, we don't really mean it. With William J Mitchell, however, the phrase could be used literally. Mitchell, a professor of architecture at MIT, died this month at the age of 65. With him, we lost one of the most original, audacious and influential thinkers of the age. What distinguished Mitchell wasn't so much that he created innovative designs, it's that he wanted to change the way we design things. His most famous idea was so-called "smart cities", which envisioned the city as a kind of organism, or robot, whose various interconnected parts acted in accordance with the needs of its inhabitants.
This proposition took Mitchell's thinking beyond his core discipline. The Smart Cities research group that he led at MIT created designs for everything from transportation systems to street lights - though these everyday terms don't begin to capture the weird complexity of the stuff that Mitchell and his team dreamt up. Mitchell's designs - and those he inspired - usually involve novel combinations of engineering and digital technology. He was also interested in combining function and form in ways that don't so much modify object as transform them - hence his New Object Studio.
His group's car designs, to take just one example, did away with the need for engines (and even drivers) by introducing robotic wheels, which are capable of both powering and steering a vehicle. In this way, Mitchell didn't stop at reinventing the wheel: he re-imagined our relationship with the world.
