Virtual Machines: Culture, telematics, and the architecture of information at Centre Beaubourg, 1968-1977
This doctoral dissertation examines the way in which the architecture of the library and museum in the late 1960s was conceived as a technology for the organization and dissemination of cultural information. It considers the overall history of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from its origins in the mid-1960s to its opening in 1977. In particular, it looks at ways in which the verbal, graphic, and built statements of the project’s creators, apologists, and critics engaged the discourses of the post-industrial information society. [More...]
LA Forum online presence
In my capacity as board member of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design I am working on the redesign and rethinking of the current Forum web site. Among the new roles for the site will be a research database of all publications and documents produced by the Forum since its inception.
Canadian megastructure
In 1976, the architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote about a new building type of the late-postwar period. These “megastructures,” as he called them, were characterized not by their size but by their structural frameworks that promoted (if only rhetorically) formal and programmatic polyvalence. Banham dubbed late-1960s Montreal “Megacity” because of its seeming abundance of megastructures, but this was to some extent an illusion created by Expo 67. [More...]
Thinking inside the box
Why you should never, ever leave a copy of the Harvard Business Review lying around where your six year-old daughter can reach it. [More...]
Hypercities 2.0
I have working as an information and data architecture consultant to the UCLA Hypercities project, a map-based information publishing framework. My interest in the project lies in its approach to the spatial organization of digital media and in particular how a single system might be designed to offer a broad range of approaches to documenting the history of specific built environments, from synchronic comparison to diachronic narrative.
The current version of Hypercities that predates my involvement is here. The new version will be launched later in 2009.
The early 20th century World-wide Web
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
ELO Directory of Electronic Literature
In the capacity of Technical Director of the Electronic Literature Organization, I am coordinating a major rebuild of the ELO Directory of e-Literature (to be launched later in 2008). During the past year we have also been working as a partner in the Library of Congress digital preservation initiative, where we have been working on the problem of preserving web-based, born-digital works of e-lit.
Décollage
Renovation work in the École Militaire métro station during a visit to Paris last Spring produced this found object — a promotional poster inviting visitors to the new Orly south terminal, inaugurated by de Gaulle in 1961. Translation: “Visit Orly: Come see an achievement of French technology.”