每一件艺术品都承载着被具现化的历史，即制作或建造它的故事。笔触或凿痕都保存了作品与工匠的历史。这部分历史是否可见，取决于艺术品和建筑的“工艺”做法。维托里奥·加莱塞在神经美学方面的最新发现表明，通过镜像神经元的作用，我们会对杰克逊·波洛克的笔触或米开朗基罗的凿痕产生共情。这种铭刻其中的历史为理解艺术或建筑作品提供了一种不同的方式——它自始便蕴藏其间，我们虽有所感应，却未曾明辨；而它们的存在将会挑战我们对精湛工艺的固有认知。如果工艺是完美的，那么这些历史将被隐藏。它们的可读性有赖这些条件：工具的痕迹、做工的误差以及形式的未竟。在过往的建筑中，无论是工艺美术运动时期，还是在现代的路易·康和斯蒂文·霍尔的作品里，这种铭刻其中的历史都不难寻见。但在数字时代，这种被具现化的历史是否仍有意义？通过考察近来一些以机器人技术为核心且传统工艺同样发挥重要作用的建造实例，我们或许能获得部分答案。答案中的观念并非源于加莱塞，其思想可以追溯到大卫·派伊，乃至约翰·拉斯金。

Every work of art has an embodied history, the story of its construction. The mark of the paintbrush or the mark of the chisel leaves behind a history of the work and the craftsmen. These histories may or not be visible depending on the “craft” of the building. Recent discoveries in Neuro-aesthetics by Vittorio Gallese show that through the action of mirror neurons we react to the marks left by the paintbrush of Jackson Pollack or the chisel of Michelangelo in an empathetic way. These embedded histories represent an alternative way of understanding a work of art or architecture, one that was always there, that we reacted to but one we were not aware of, and their presence may challenge our conceptions about what good craftsmanship is. If craft is perfection these histories will be hidden. For them to be legible certain conditions must be present-the mark of the tool, imperfection in workmanship and incompleteness in form. It is easy to find these embedded histories in the architecture of the past the Arts and Crafts or in the recent modernism Kahn and Holl, but can this be of any significance in the digital age? An examination of some recent constructions in which robotics played a key role, but in which traditional craft played one as large, provide part of an answer. It is an idea much older than Gallese, going back to David Pye and ultimately John Ruskin.