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Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology's role in architectural design


Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume's contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories--some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode--of seven techniques regularly used by the designer in the architectural studio today: rendering, modeling, scanning, equipping, specifying, positioning, and repeating.

Starting with observations about the epistemological changes that have unfolded in the discipline in recent decades but seeking to offer a more expansive meaning for technics, the volume casts new light on concepts such as form, experience, and image that have played central roles in historical architectural discourses. Among the questions addressed: How was the concept of form immanent in practices of scanning since the late nineteenth century? What was the historical relationship between rendering and experience in Enlightenment discourses? How did practices of specifying reconfigure the distinction between intellectual and manual labor? What kind of rationality is inherent in the designer's constant clicking of the mouse in front of her screen?

In addressing these and other questions, this engaging and timely collection thereby proposes technics as a site for historical and philosophical reflection not only for those engaged in architectural design but also for any scholar working in the humanities today.

Contributors: Lucia Allais, Edward Eigen, Orit Halpern, John Harwood, Matthew C. Hunter, and Michael Osman.

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CHOICE Review

This book presents both historical and theoretical accounts of the design techniques and technologies central to architecture. The focus on systems and operations of representation and on forms of experience result in a unique outlook on the profession and on the historiography of architecture not centered on a particular building or architect. Through in-depth analysis, or "archaeologies," of the various technologies of design, the contributors address the principal processes though which designers have conceptualized and devised the built environment. These include rendering, modeling, and scanning as well as operations such as specifying and equipping structures. The historical range of the essays is broad, allowing the reader to see the development of these different practices starting in the 19th century and continuing though the 20th century (and principally from a Eurocentric perspective). Though the book might seem to be a sort of primer for the design studio or office environment, in fact its reflections and writing are erudite and intended more for advanced scholars of architectural history and theory, and for cultural historians and philosophers. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Luis E. Carranza, Roger Williams University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design .



John May is assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and author of Signal. Image. Architecture . He is founding partner of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based architectural practice.