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...]
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...]