The Informational Built Environment
I taught this upper-division architectural history and theory seminar at UCLA in 2008. Focusing on case studies between the early 19th century and the postwar period, it examined ideas, models, and metaphors shared by the architectural culture of modernity and the information society.
Paul Otlet, Schematic plan of the Mundaneum (1925), Organisation mondiale (1934)
Abstract:
This seminar interprets the built environment as a vast system for the storage, transmission, and reception of information. It tracks the emergence of what we will be calling “information spaces” in European modernism during the period between 1800 and 1970. As much actual as virtual, these spaces demonstrate a tendency in modernity to think about architectural and urban space according to metaphors and methods of information organization. By examining them we will see how information operates as an invisible form of organization in the built environment both historically and today, and so speculate on architecture’s place within a the modern information society.