modernarchitecture.net

studioplex.org

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:34:33 +0000

This web project examines the potential for web-based collaborative technologies and social media to foster dialogue between students, teachers, and critics within institutions worldwide. It will offer an online space for publishing, discussion, and commenting on student work from the participating institutions. A beta version will be launched during the summer of 2010.

A history of Western architecture and urban design: Prehistory to Mannerism

admin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:21:28 +0000

I am currently teaching this undergraduate survey course in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.

The full syllabus is here.

Virtual Machines: Culture, telematics, and the architecture of information at Centre Beaubourg, 1968-1977

admin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:36:04 +0000

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.

In late 1950s the architectural Avant-Garde recognized that the technologies of an emerging information society offered the possibility of a renewed architectural commitment to social transformation. But in the early 1970s — at the precise moment that the information society and its technologies took the form that we know today — architects appear to have suddenly abandoned those earlier utopian discourses, exchanging the possibility of a fertile engagement with the broader ideas, metaphors, and methods of information technology for the relative security of tool-based approaches to architecture’s theoretical and logistical problems. This dissertation examines architecture’s troubled relationship to the information society and its technologies during the decade between 1968 and 1978. It focuses on the history of the project for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from the original conception of the building as an “information center” in the ideas of Pompidou himself to the reception of Piano and Rogers’ building in the years following its completion.

In particular, I focus on the building’s role in a more general program of social and cultural reorganization in the post-industrial society. I show that architects during that time did not in fact retreat from information technology but rather that the very nature of information technology underwent a radical change in the late 1960s, one that demanded new modes of architectural thinking which rendered obsolete the traditional discursive function of the “machine” underpinning the Avant-Garde projects of the earlier decade. In this way, Beaubourg’s successes and failures suggest architectural modes of engagement with information technology that go beyond recent tool-based design practices.

LA Forum online presence

admin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:25:44 +0000

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

admin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:15:48 +0000

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.

Instead, apart from Place Bonaventure in Montreal, the two most significant realized Canadian megastructures of the late-1960s were in southern Ontario. The first, which I visited for the first time since my regular summer visits while growing up, is Ontario Place in Toronto by the architect Eb Zeidler, part of an only partially realized plan to develop not only the waterfront but also the water itself (think Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay). The second, which Banham does mention, is a superblock hospital at McMaster University in Hamilton (my hometown), also by Zeidler.

Ontario Place stands out, however, because it embodies the ludique in both program and spirit, which Banham felt was central to the megastructure ethos. I have no idea why this project is not better known outside Toronto: where else can you paddle-boat in late-60s techno-utopian sublime?

Above: Ontario Place (in 2007)

Above: Ontario Place under construction (Domus 502, Sept. 1971)

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Above: Ontario Place map. Below: McMaster University Health Sciences Center (in 2006)

Thinking inside the box

admin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:45:43 +0000

Why you should never, ever leave a copy of the Harvard Business Review lying around where your six year-old daughter can reach it.

Eve Branda, 2008

Hypercities 2.0

admin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:11:48 +0000

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

admin — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:08:34 +0000

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.

Also left out, but of importance to architectural historians, is Otlet’s collaboration with Le Corbusier on a scheme for the Mundaneum in Geneva. While Corb was quickly mired in references to primal historical forms (as the critic Karel Teige pointed out in 1929), Otlet’s equally figural attitude was naively diagrammatic.

Le Corbusier’s sketches for the Mundaneum (from Oeuvre complète)

Otlet’s sketches

ELO Directory of Electronic Literature

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:22:18 +0000

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.

NETLab Hub

admin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:18:48 +0000

NETLab Connect (New Ecology of Things Lab Connection) is a project to create free, open-source software and hardware tools for student and professional designers who want to create interactive objects and spaces. The project strives to open up new possibilities for design work that previously required relatively deep technical knowledge or close collaboration with engineers.

My role in this collaborative project has been the design and programming of a server application (the NETLab Hub) that allows designers to program client applications (written in Flash, for example) to easily talk to sensors and microcontrollers in a networked environment. Although it currently supports a few microcontrollers, the Hub also allows more seasoned developers to write plug-ins for any controller hardware.