Eve Branda, 2008

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

In 1969, the president of France, Georges Pompidou, announced his idea for a new cultural center that was to be “at once a museum and a center of production, where fine arts will coexist with music, cinema, books, [and] audio visual research” [1]. It was conceived as “a field of experimentation,” “a place of exchange and encounter,” “a polytechnic instrument touching on the quasi-totality of all domains of contemporary life” [2]. Meeting these goals would mean rethinking the traditional library and museum as a vast real-time system for the processing of information. The brief for the international competition held for its design between 1970 and 1971 thus declared that “the entire Centre has been inspired by an original perspective, that of constantly renewing information.” In their winning scheme, Piano and Rogers shrewdly echoed this rhetoric by proposing a “live center of information” that was to be a hybrid of the British Museum and Times Square.

Both the original idea for the Centre and its architectural translations thus suggest that architecture be seen as constitutive of information culture rather than simply as one of its products. In recent years, Beaubourg (as the Centre Pompidou was and is still called) has enjoyed renewed attention as a prototype for an architecture appropriate to our contemporary information society, particularly where cultural buildings are concerned. Considering it as such allows us to track transformations in the traditional role in Western culture of libraries and museums at a moment when culture starts to be seen as “virtual” and when the virtual is understood as inherently spatial [3]. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this study looks for connections between the social aspects of functionalism, usability, and program and approaches to the organization of information in computer and information sciences, systems engineering, and organization theory at the time.

Where historians of the period have generally interpreted the building as a marker of the end of 1960s avant-garde experiments in cybernetic, informational architecture, this dissertation suggests that it both terminates certain theoretical threads while opening others. It argues that the approaches of Archigram and Price in the early 1960s (with which the project is most often allied) were based on concepts of the information society that were in many respects outmoded by the time of the Beaubourg competition. It thus situates the project at a precise historical moment of epistemological shift in architecture and information culture: from modernist functionalism to the “performance concept” and rational programming, from closure to openness in systems thinking, from a view of culture shaped by the notion of a fixed archive to one in which culture was performed through real-time interaction and exchange, from the logic of the machine in the postwar information age to the logic of virtuality in the post-industrial society. [4]

[1] Georges Pompidou, interviewed in Le Monde, 17 October 1972.

[2] Claude Mollard, L’Enjeu du Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976).

[3] My definition of the virtual is borrowed from the philosopher Pierre Lévy. The most recent form of the spatialization of virtuality is the recent “geographic turn” in IT, such as Google Earth, Geotagging, and urban sensing.

[4] In their famous government report, Nora and Minc coined the term “télématique” to describe the ubiquitous system of computer networks and telecommunication devices. Their report was commissioned in 1975 and was published a year after the Centre Pompidou opened. See Simon Nora and Alain Minc, L’informatisation de la société (Paris: La documentation Française, 1978), translated as The Computerization of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980).

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.

Related links

• The New Ecology of Things
• NETLab Connect

A second thread of my research has been in the parallel emergence of the concepts of the built environment and information in modernity, which I have explored through problems of curatorship and cultural heritage, with specific emphasis on new modes of environmental display in the late-19th century such as the open-air museum and the archaeological park. As Western culture’s view of the historic city as a collection of monuments works gave way to a vision of a total environment, it increasingly saw the world in quantitative terms through new techniques of control and communication. My argument has been that the emergence of environmental thinking and the rise of what we would today call an information society are not merely coincident symptoms of modernity but are closely related developments, which reached their fullest synthesis during the 1960s. The historical relationship between the built environment and the information society has motivated much of my work, whether in the domain of digital libraries, historical research, or (I now realize) in some of my much earlier design work.

A large part of my practice involves information technology consulting for cultural organizations, most of which are non-profit. These are generally in the domains of architectural history, design, and electronic literature, and currently include the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (where I have just signed on as a board member), the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center (where I am a Research Fellow), the Electronic Literature Organization (and a partner collaboration with the Library of Congress), the Alt-X Digital Arts Foundation (which sponsored work on the Electronic Book Review), and Art Center College of Design. Previous collaborations include the journal Art and Text, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, and various collaborations with digital media artists. My work in this area includes digital library design and construction, information policy consulting, and context-aware device programming; some of these projects are described here.