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...]
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.”
Engineering Beaubourg’s information spaces
From the outset, the Centre Pompidou was to be a live center of information. This paper situated the challenges posed by that vision in the context of emerging models of technical expertise in architecture.
Real Immaterial
Review of 2004 exhibitions of the work of Yves Klein at the MAK Center Los Angeles and Superstudio at Art Center College of Design. Read the review on the X-tra web site. [More...]