Article

Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History.

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... 24 Zevi 1945Wright 1946. Con ‹era della meccanizzazione› viene tradotto il volume di Sigfried Giedion (Giedion 1948, trad. it. ...
... Cronache e storia a dare loro rilievo (Zevi 1955;Candela 1957). La lezione di Felix Candela, così come quella di Victor Lundy, riaffiora nel decennio successivo con lo stabilimento Brinel a Casella d' Asolo (TV), realizzato da Zanuso per la Brionvega (1963-1967; cfr. Baglione 2013. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
The first phase of construction of the industrial complex built by Olivetti Industrial Sur America near São Paolo (1956–1959) coincides with one of the crucial historical moments in Italian architecture and industry in the last century. Designed by Milanese architect and designer Marco Zanuso (1916–2001), the complex had been commissioned by Adriano Olivetti with the aim of taking production of their typewriters overseas and making themselves more competitive in the US market. This essay reconstructs the dynamics that led to Zanuso being appointed as architect of the Olivetti complex and outlines the chronology of its intermittent construction. It identifies the likely architectural reference models, situating Zanuso’s design both in the debate on industrial aesthetics that was dominant in Europe during the period and in the context of the exuberant Brazilian architectural scene of those years. The essay also explores the concept of the organic in architecture and argues that Zanuso’s highly innovative and inventive project reflects a specifically corporate approach to organicism, characterized by the hexagonal geometry of modular structures. The broader picture that emerges is one of a moment of intense brilliance in Italian industry and architecture which, despite its importance, is yet to be fully explored.
... Unos pocos clásicos como "Technics and Civilization" (Mumford, 1934) y "Mechanization takes command" (Giedion, 1948) plantearon un alcance más amplio que abarca la relación bidireccional entre lo técnico y lo cultural, y lograron fundar una línea de discusión con este foco. A pesar de estos esfuerzos, los procesos de innovación tecnológica, tanto en los principios estructurales, los procesos constructivos, o el comportamiento ambiental apenas han sido incluidas en la agenda crítica de la arquitectura y aún están por desarrollar. ...
... Construcción en Altura en Chile: Hormigón Armado, Mecanización e Infraestructura El proceso de mecanización de la arquitectura que, tal como lo describe Giedion, se remonta internacionalmente a la 2ª mitad del siglo XIX (Giedion, 1948), tuvo lugar en Chile a comienzos del siglo XX. Durante este periodo, varios edificios comenzaron a ser construidos con métodos constructivos innovadores que incorporaron tecnologías emergentes, como el hormigón armado y las instalaciones para habilitar la construcción en altura, en un proceso escasamente estudiado. ...
Article
Full-text available
En este trabajo, abordamos los inicios de la construcción en altura en Chile, desde el punto de vista del proceso de innovación técnica y cambio social en Santiago y Valparaíso durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Nos enfocamos en la consolidación en la práctica constructiva de las nuevas técnicas de construcción en hormigón armado, así como también en la implementación de los primeros sistemas de instalaciones en los edificios. Para abordar estas cuestiones, estudiamos las problemáticas suscitadas en este período en casos representativos que definimos por períodos relevantes, en una síntesis técnica-arquitectónica para discutir de qué forma los sistemas constructivos y estructurales, así como de sistemas de instalaciones dieron forma a esta transición. Esto nos permite entender el proceso de innovación técnico-arquitectónico, que se dio de forma paulatina y articulado a través de redes profesionales, técnicas, comerciales y financieras con alcance local e internacional. Estas redes promovieron el cambio con objetivos diversos, consolidando nuevos estándares técnicos y un nuevo imaginario cultural que se transformó hacia nuevos patrones de construcción en altura en Chile durante este período.
... I had, therefore, to go back to the sources, as I could not hope to understand the effects of mechanisation without knowing, in outline at least, its evolution. (Giedion, 1948) 19 Understanding the home from the perspective of industrial gadgets (or gizmology) has a long history in architecture from Sigfried Giedion to Reyner Romeo is a humanoid robot that aids the elderly with normal everyday tasks while Gita is a smart luggage / cargo carrying system. RFID is Radio Frequency Identity Identification. ...
... I had, therefore, to go back to the sources, as I could not hope to understand the effects of mechanisation without knowing, in outline at least, its evolution. (Giedion, 1948) 19 Understanding the home from the perspective of industrial gadgets (or gizmology) has a long history in architecture from Sigfried Giedion to Reyner Romeo is a humanoid robot that aids the elderly with normal everyday tasks while Gita is a smart luggage / cargo carrying system. RFID is Radio Frequency Identity Identification. ...
Article
The production regimes of every era do not remain in the factory but permeate every aspect of a society including its architecture and design culture. Mechanisation transformed space, in particular the household into an efficient machine, with industrial components and standardised dimensions (from the bathtub to the streamlined kitchen), while military manufacturing efficiencies and emerging technologies allowed consumer goods (from TV sets to Tupperware) to fill the middle class suburban home in the post-war era. This essay contemplates how logisticalisation, the latest incarnation of capitalist production, is permeating the design and conception of contemporary space through an exploration of the gadgets and objects that are increasingly used by the public as portals to the larger world of logistical flow. I refer to previous object-based theories of space in architecture as well as to Object-Orientated Ontology, a philosophical movement that elevates the meaning of objects as independent conscious entities beyond human agency. These serve to contextualise my own reading of logistical objects as manifestations that not only allow us intimacy with the larger and complex world of logistics, but more significantly, as dynamic shapers of new types of architectural and urban space, here characterised as territories of equivalence.
... Especially in recent fields such as the history of design in its various declinations -industrial, product, communication, graphic, and so on -writing history is a significant part of the disciplinary construction. This is the case of Siegfried Giedion [2], who approaches the history of design as the history of inventions and machines, the evolution of techniques and technologies originating and originated by the Industrial Revolution. On the contrary, Nikolaus Pevsner [3] creates a constellation of personalities around archetypical, mythical and legendary personalities, from William Morris to Walter Gropius. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Teaching the history of a discipline is a way of gradually introducing students to a phylogenetic path that presents its foundations, relationships, and implications from its origins to the present day. In the context of the history of more practice-oriented disciplines and design in particular, editorial production is scarce. Considering the sub-sectors of graphic design and digital communication, they represent a niche compared to publications in the field. However, they serve as a critical observation tool for identifying specific patterns, such as the lack of gender balance and inclusion in the educational environment. History provides insight into the evolution of a knowledge field, showcasing its milestones, paradigm shifts, new ideas, discoveries, and perspectives. Additionally, it shows the contributions of prominent figures, often portrayed as heroes and stars, i.e. the canon. However, this individualistic narrative can overshadow or erase the nuances of pioneering minority phenomena and antecedents, limiting historical understanding. In particular, there is an evident imbalance between the presence of female students (over 60% of the entire student population) who enroll, graduate, and then work in the field of design disciplines and the female personalities mentioned in books and manuals. Furthermore, there is a notable discrepancy in the gender gap of professors across different generations, which in turn influences the culture and context of teaching. The research here presented and discussed forms part of a broader investigation into the historicisation of graphic and digital design in the Italian scenario, with particular reference to historical and professional developments. The research maps the design history textbooks, focusing on the field of graphic design and visual communication, adopted in the history classes of the Bachelor and Master degree courses in Design. It analyses them according to two main parameters: the presence of female protagonists to assess the frequency (1) and the number of times the same woman is mentioned in several books (2), namely the recurrence. The results are discussed in order to highlight the limitations and contradictions of an educational system that, on the one hand, remains profoundly exclusionary. On the other hand, it draws attention to critical aspects of historiographic construction and the traditional canon.
... However, from the second half of the 19th century, a specific interest in this design approach can be discerned. Giedion (1948) qualifies the 19th century as the age of invention and mechanisation of work, both in the industrial and domestic fields. In the latter, various social conditions -the increasing shortage of service personnel, the shift of family residence to the suburbs, and the family's economic autonomy-directed Americans' lifestyles. ...
Article
Full-text available
Among the many problems highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic is the inadequacy of many homes to accommodate people during a health emergency. During the various lockdowns, flats that needed to be bigger, more distributed, or more modern did not help to organise one’s time or daily activities (studying, working, exercising, or simply secluding oneself) in the best possible way. Redesigning the existing seems a possible solution, not by demolishing obsolete dwellings, but by adapting them through ‘light systems,’ i.e., through furnishings: an ‘ex-post’ intervention that can redevelop spaces by leveraging the concepts of transformability and flexibility. Lessons can be learned in this respect, from the history of modern housing to contemporary experience. The article broadly traces this history (with a look at the culture of Italian living) so that from experience, we can learn solutions for living in the future.
... However, from the second half of the 19th century, a specific interest in this design approach can be discerned. Giedion (1948) qualifies the 19th century as the age of invention and mechanisation of work, both in the industrial and domestic fields. In the latter, various social conditions -the increasing shortage of service personnel, the shift of family residence to the suburbs, and the family's economic autonomy-directed Americans' lifestyles. ...
Article
Full-text available
Among the many problems highlighted by the recent Covid-19 pandemic is the inadequacy of many homes to accommodate people during a health emergency. During the various lockdowns, flats that needed to be bigger, more distributed or more modern did not help to organise one's time or daily activities (studying, working, exercising, or simply secluding oneself) in the best possible way. Redesigning the existing seems a possible solution, not by demolishing obsolete dwellings, but by adapting them through ‘light systems,’ i.e. through furnishings: an ‘ex-post’ intervention that can redevelop spaces by leveraging the concepts of transformability and flexibility. Lessons can be learned in this respect, from the history of modern housing to contemporary experience. The article broadly traces this history (with a look at the culture of Italian living) so that from past experience, we can learn solutions for living in the future.
... Aligned with the approach of Heinrich Wolflin, whose methodology for analyzing and defining the "Spirit of an Epoch"was through contrast-ing one period with another such as in Renaissance and Baroque (1889), this thesis will be drawing a historical parallel with a moment in time when (Giedion, 1948). In Mechanization Takes Command (1948), Giedion analyzed extensively the implications of electrical mechanization as well as the ways modern architect's theoretical thinking has been influenced by the Second Industrial Revolution (Giedion, 1941). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
In the light of new digital technologies, architecture is challenged to become intelligent and data driven by interweaving sensing layer with cognitive abilities through the architecture form. This creates a condition where information flows becomes two-directional and as the dweller of the space can experience, perceive and draw meaningful information from his surrounding, so can the architecture experience, perceive and draw meaningful information from the person being within its proximity or interior. As architecture becomes a cyber-physical system, the information it is able to capture becomes a new resource of potential economic value as it encloses and provides a stage for human activity. Through participation in the system, dwellers of the space become part of the overarching economy related to the physical location they visit as the interaction of the system and the dweller is captured in form of digital data. Buildings becoming data mines highlights the uniqueness of physical spaces, opens a discussion around the existing ambiguity of personal spatial data privacy and shows a potential to change drastically design of commercial architecture. The architecture form is critical for performance of the data mine and in order to enhance this capability, design can become hyper-focused on navigating human activity, segmenting space into high and low interest areas for viewing and on creating a spatial experience that draws visitors inside while also facing the challenge of creating structural support for numerous sensing devices with their own spatial requirements. This thesis aims to make a contribution through research of this emergent typology of architecture with further focus on commercial private spaces, where two-directional information flow is enabled by advanced computer vision technology. This thesis provides theoretical context for understanding cyber-physicality as a quality of architectural space, the existing nature of information flows within buildings and the role of private sector in shaping the built environment. Further, this thesis demonstrates the implications to architecture design through presenting a proposal for a cyber-physical architecture as a data mine based on analysis of a commercial architecture typology whose spatial design has been already disrupted by the emergence of online marketplaces. This thesis is concluded with a discussion on its research findings and the general implications the emergence of this new typology will have on architecture design.
... After "mechanization takes command" [7], the presence of those systems has made it possible to build architectures with the same characteristics (shape and materials) in completely different locations: nowadays, thanks to the HVAC systems, buildings can guarantee the same temperature at the equator and at the pole. This approach has in turn generated new needs: one related to a huge change of the perception of thermal comfort; the other related to the strong increment in energy demand. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Before industrialization, architecture itself was designed for ensuring specific microclimatic indoor conditions. When “mechanization takes command” – citing the title of a volume by Sigfried Giedion –, this task was transferred to the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Starting from a reflection on this pivotal passage, the present paper focuses on the indoor environmental control in 20th-century historic buildings. In so doing, it outlines an investigation concerning the building-plant system of some significant case studies: Villa Tugendhat in Brno, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California and the French Cité de Refuge. Attention is focused on both the plant solutions implemented during the realisation of these iconic buildings and the restoration interventions that have been carried out for their preservation. The aim is to underline the relevance of restoration interventions capable of not removing the historic plants and, at the same time, not implementing an uncritical musealisation.
... Accordingly, the cultural shift from extraordinary to ordinary solutions, from handicraft to reversible technology [124], entailed by the embedding of the basic equipment/fixtures in the construction of buildings, can found a possible parallel in the recent history of the introduction of installations and building services in the home, expanding the path of mechanisation [125]. ...
Article
Full-text available
The recent global pandemic has sped up architectural research in residential design aimed at rethinking housing layouts, services, and construction methods to accommodate the changing needs of the rapidly evolving contemporary society. New typological and technological design approaches are required to address, on the one hand, the adaptability of the plan as a result of higher flexibility and temporariness in familiar and working patterns, together with a downsizing of the layouts to ensure affordability and quality of life. On the other hand, the issues of sustainability and circular economy require specific attention to interpret the resilience of the building and the reuse/recycle of the fit-out systems. The paper aims at interpreting the notion of integration between fixtures and furnishing in housing design, based on a comprehensive literature review enriched with a case study analysis that shows design concepts and approaches rooted in theories and experiences of 20th-century architecture. Principles, potentials, and barriers to the development of integrated systems are highlighted and the possible implementation of industrialised production components, the potential for modularity, flexibility, and assembly are discussed.
... Estos progresos remiten a avances tecnológicos que fueron transformando la posibilidad de los arquitectos de trabajar con los materiales, potenciando la ductilidad y las variantes formales (Pérez Oyarzún, 2017). En este sentido, existe literatura que ha enfatizado en la materialidad y sus formas de uso como parte de los modos de construcción e innovaciones tecnológicas implementadas en diversas épocas (Giedion, 2013). ...
Article
Full-text available
Este artículo estudia la Basílica de los Sacramentinos, inaugurada de forma parcial por la Congregación Sacramentina en 1931 en el Barrio San Diego, en el centro de Santiago. Aunque posee la figura legal de Monumento Histórico e integra una zona típica, fallas acu- muladas a través del tiempo y los efectos de los terremotos han llevado a que actualmente esté en un profundo deterioro. Así, desde la perspectiva de la historia urbana, se analizan tres dimensiones: arquitectura y evolución constructiva, emplazamiento y contexto urbano, y estado actual. Se utiliza un corpus bibliográfico y documental que considera las normativas de protección patrimonial, estudios de diagnóstico y proyectos de rehabilitación desarrol- lados en las últimas décadas. La hipótesis es que el templo y su sitio han vivido relevantes transformaciones, siendo crucial su relación con el barrio circundante en los problemas de inserción en el espacio urbano, sumado al deterioro y obsolescencia de la construcción, impactando en la accesibilidad y su vinculación con la ciudad.
... Similarly, it may be argued that the current architectural system splits at the top level between the "celebrities" (McNeill 2009), "archistars" (Lo Ricco and Micheli 2003), or "warlords" (Raisbeck 2020), and the work of megafirms. If the former deal with authorship and values of artistic creation, the latter rely on a greater degree of anonymity, something that architectural histories generally dislike (except for Giedion 1948). Other authors (Coxe et al. 1986) have described architecture firms in relation to their delivery process as "strong-idea," "strong-service," and "strong-delivery." ...
Chapter
This chapter extensively discusses the relationship between current trends in general historiography, especially “global” and “world history,” the problem of globalisation, and architectural historiography. Borrowing from both the tradition of “serial history” and from more recent approaches in literary studies, it also presents the theoretical framework adopted to investigate architecture from a quantitative perspective and integrate a “distant reading” of the design production to the common qualitative and “close” analysis, not least explaining the importance of hard data and their visualisation through tables, graphs, and maps. The chapter also discusses the methodology adopted for constructing the data set of 1,025 design firms of different types—especially megafirms, celebrities (like the Pritzker Prize winners), and boutique/idea firms—on which this study relies. It explains the representativity of the sample, which allowed for gathering data on almost six thousand projects designed by firms from Europe, the USA and Canada, Japan and South Korea, and Australia and New Zealand in a selection of emerging markets.
... A word on sources: Like many household appliances, the answering machine is a quotidian technology with an anonymous history (Giedion, 1948). For this reason, comprehensive understanding of early answering machine use is difficult to reconstruct from anecdotal accounts. ...
Article
Full-text available
During the 1970s and 1980s, telephone answering machines became widely available in the United States. Their use immediately disrupted long-established patterns of interpersonal communication and self-presentation. While solving the temporal limitations and lopsided power of telephone calls, answering machines introduced a range of new techno-social problems. Significantly, they required callers to interact with a machine instead of a human being. The history of the household answering machine provides insight into how telephone users were habituated to changing communication norms during the closing decades of the 20th century. This study examines cultural responses to the answering machine during the 1970s and 1980s, drawing attention to the following three key themes: the perils of perpetual contact, mediated performances, and social surveillance. These themes would shape understandings of digital mediation and become defining characteristics of an emergent “participatory condition.”
... Então, utilizar, por exemplo, um pequeno pedaço de árvore dá à série dos "animais domésticos" uma espécie de variação permanente, uma espécie de vibração. Andrea Branzi Giedion (1970), aponta para o perigo de um desequilíbrio entre a vida humana e o ambiente. Restany (1978) também desloca-se nesta direção, criando um manifesto a partir do qual sugere um modelo de naturalismo integrado que confronta o poder hierárquico do modelo de vida econômico sobre a natureza. ...
Article
Full-text available
O artigo apresenta uma análise crítica da obra Animali Domestici (1985) projetada por Nicoletta Branzi e Andrea Branzi. O texto coloca em questão a extemporaneidade do trabalho que, em meados dos anos 1980, antecipou importantes discussões sobre as transformações da cultura do design, o desenvolvimento da tecnologia e da economia. Diante disso, retomamos os textos de Giedion, Restany, Branzi, Weil, Bourriaud etc para ampliarmos as discussões centrais da obra: o nomadismo cultural como vetor para se pensar a diversidade. Assim, investigamos como a atuação dos designers exploradores apresenta o conceito radicante impactando a concepção do design ecossocial em seu diálogo com a moda.
... 30 In zijn kri tiek noemde Collins Brown expliciet: 'Even Theodore Brown, Rietveld's biographer, in the five lengthy pages devoted to the chair, has to admit that the jagged, an gular quality of the piece, as well as its hard surfaces, verwees naar het feit dat Rietveld in Space, time and architecture afwezig was en in Mechanization takes command alleen werd genoemd als voorloper van mo dern meubeldesign. 23 In een reeks artikelen na zijn dissertatie verduidelijkte Brown zijn kritische positie. Hij zette vraagtekens bij Giedions technologische se lectiecriteria, want Space, time and architecture por tretteerde architecten als leden van een 'onfeilbare technologische stam'. ...
Article
Full-text available
In the post-war historiography of Dutch modern architecture, the monograph of Gerrit Rietveld written by the American architectural historian Theodore Morey Brown (1958) played a pioneering role. The Work of G. Rietveld, Architect was the first monograph of a by then already internationally renowned Dutch architect and since it was written in English it was also the only source of detailed information about Rietveld for an international readership. Brown was the first art historian in the Netherlands to write a dissertation on a living architect; as such, his book signalled the start of modern architectural history as practised by art historians. Yet despite the fact that it is almost impossible to overstate the significance of Brown’s study, the book remains until this day a curiosity. Why was the first scholarly work on Rietveld written by an American scholar and published in the English language? Who was Theodore Morey Brown and how did he end up at a Dutch university in the 1950s? This article examines the history of Brown’s book: its genesis from a research initiative by post-war Dutch professors of art history to the contents of the final book. It also discusses the international historiographical debate in which Brown participated. Brown’s book heralded a new era in the relationship between the art historian and the architect, one that was connected with the challenge to write contemporary history from an ideologically engaged attitude. As an ‘operative history’ Brown’s book was distinguished by its collaborative nature. While it was a book about a single architect written by a single historian, in the background there was a ‘team Rietveld’ consisting of, among others, the historian Pieter Singelenberg and the designer Truus Schröder-Schräder, who were vital to its creation. Only with the help of these people could the work of Rietveld be made accessible to a foreign scholar who, upon arrival in the Netherlands, did not speak the Dutch language. This article argues that Brown’s book was important not only for the historiography on Rietveld. The book also had an institutional significance as it ushered in the study of modern architectural history by art historians in the Netherlands.
... Esta leitura nos coloca questões em relação às estratégias disciplinares vinculadas ao trabalho de Aloísio Magalhães, dentro dos domínios do Design. Neste sentido, debate-se, a partir da análise da série de slides "Artesanato com pneu", a possibilidade de vinculação das atividades do CNRC com a epistemologia da História Cultural do Design, tomando como base a reflexão Outros trabalhos se sucederam, como os apresentados por Sigfried Giedion (1948) e Reyner Banham (1960), mas todos eles se empenharam em organizar uma narrativa positiva e, de certo modo, historicista. No caso de Giedion, nota-se uma preferência pelos artefatos anônimos, sem autoria, mas que ainda assim foram tratados como obras exemplares, excepcionais e reduzidas a aspectos funcionais e formalistas, como resultantes das técnicas que lhes foram empregadas. ...
... Instrumentality contention: A decade before Sputnik, Giedion [99] released his seminal tome, Mechanization Takes Command which became one of the earliest works to situate technologies and humans together as holistic evolving systems. Technology and automation temporally evolve from simple novelties and fascinations to being dominant in the structure and material production of everyday life thus reducing uncertainty. ...
... The company reached its export peak in 1872 with 225,000 tons (Täubrich and Tschoeke 1991, 51-67). The principles to produce ice artificially were already laid in 1805 (Giedion 1970(Giedion [1948, 601), but it was not until around 1913 that the international trade in natural ice became increasingly displaced by ice from artificial ice factories. To satisfy the need for refrigeration, the production of bar ice made in the artificial ice factories was soon supplemented by cold storage. ...
Article
Full-text available
The impending climate catastrophe gives rise to an increased environmental awareness among many designers, who direct their work towards the paradigm of sustainability. While designing with an ‘ecological lens’ is necessarily oriented towards the future, we highlight the past as an inspiring realm to explore. Rather than recycling materials, we encourage the recycling of ideas as a combination of historiographic and speculative design methods. We will present a framework that extends the idea of design as a ‘projecting’ activity into the idea of design as a constant negotiation process about the relevance and appropriateness of current and past technologies. Design revolves not just about what will be, but to a large extent about what should remain and what should recur, or as Jan Michl put it: “seeing design as redesign” (Michl 2002).We will illustrate the thought of designing futures with pasts by means of a research project that aims at developing a refrigerator for circular economy. The refrigerator – as the currently dominant technology to preserve food – will serve as a starting point to show how artefacts and architecture as well as human skills and knowledge in the preparation and preservation of food are historically interlinked. The history of food preservation unfolds not only along the evolution of the refrigerator, but encompasses household techniques like smoking, curing and fermenting, as well as long-forgotten architectural ‘answers’ such as deep-freeze community buildings. We will revisit three historical examples of food preservation and present the method ‘throwing’ past ideas into the future. Three main arguments are presented in this richly illustrated paper: First, that historiography is a form of designing, second, that designing is constituted and influenced by path dependencies (cf. David 1985) that are deeply rooted in the past and third, that the past is a valuable source of inspiration when designing for sustainable development. Looking at history becomes a way of “mental window shopping” (Simon 1985, 188) for approaches that are to be reactivated and transformed.
Article
This chapter is about that coming process of transformation with focus on human activities and our working life. It is structured as follows: Section two contains some methodological remarks followed by a third section which summarizes “the state of the climate”. Section four provides a short analysis of the great acceleration, i.e. the rapid global growth process after WW2 and which basically has created the present climate crisis. In section five we analyze the conditions for the great transformation ahead. In section six we leave the general analysis in favor of the specific: we focus on the climate impact of the balance between activities within and outside the formal economy. Section seven is focused on productivity presently and in the post fossil society followed by a section (eight) on the role of coal. After a general discussion on the coming transformation of working life in the ninth section we focus on the role of AI in section ten followed by a competence-related approach in section eleven. Section twelve, which also concludes with the paper, discusses the necessary and probably most important issue in the path ahead towards a post fossil society: the transformation of our minds, i.e. the paradigm shifts in our understanding of the planetary conditions for human activity and work Keywords:AI power consumption, artisan small-scale mining, carbon budget, climate and workinghours, coal and work, the Great Acceleration, planetary boundaries, productivity decline,working conditions
Article
Full-text available
This article explores how advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering transform the relationship between life and death under contemporary biocapitalism. Discussing two cases of synthetically produced mosquitoes designed to combat vector-borne diseases by targeting their own species, the article contends that these organisms function not only as (lively) commodities but also as metabolically working bodies. These mosquitoes, as the article shows, engage in a specific form of labor, termed ‘metabolic death work,’ which aims at the eradication of fellow members of their species, thereby generating a unique form of value, introduced as ‘necrovalue.’ Complementing the notion of ‘biovalue,’ the concept of necrovalue highlights how death is reimagined as a site of value production in molecular biology and beyond. By applying these concepts to the analysis of the two cases of synthetically produced organisms, this article shows how death enters the realm of the political economy in novel ways as capital gains full control over the metabolic and reproductive capacities of engineered life forms.
Chapter
The chapter briefly discusses the current debate on architecture, technology and culture, highlighting the role of construction history as an emerging discipline able to help bridge the widening gap between techno-scientific and humanistic culture in design. It then introduces the three sections into which the book is divided and its chapters.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The establishment of large-scale sugar manufacturing in the Americas posed an important challenge to technology and, therefore, to scientific knowledge. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, sugar production in Brazil, in addition to being costly and time-consuming, was possible only due to slave labor, the first trade apprentices in the country. In 1888, with the abolition of slavery, the country embarked on a mission to establish and encourage ways to improve technical education required for its modernization and industrialization. Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851–1923), Afro-Brazilian artist, professor, politician, and historian who fought for the development of an efficient educational network to generate technicians and scientists who would contribute to the country's technological progress, is remembered as an example of community and pedagogical action for legitimate transfer of knowledge. In its pursuit of transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial nation, this study reveals that Brazil emphasized the cultivation of technical skills, with design education playing a pivotal role. This strategic shift aimed to facilitate industrial expansion by dismantling the historical influence of sugar mills, which had not only shaped the sugar-centric economy but also molded the fabric of Brazilian society. In more straightforward terms, the goal was to eradicate the stigma of servitude that had characterized the early stages of industrial education and the devaluation of manual labor in the country. From a broader perspective, it highlights the importance of drawing as a means of technical, political, and social transformation in architecture and construction. e-Book (open access) available at: https://vdf.ch/construction-matters-e-book.html
Chapter
Full-text available
Rosa Chacel was one of the most important writers of the generation of ‘27, the group of intellectuals that introduced the European avant-garde to Spain at the beginning of the 20th century. Artists, philosophers, and, above all, writers, became fundamental figures of Spanish modernity of that time. And yet architecture, still deeply influenced by historicism, had many problems incorporating itself into this process. The relationship of intellectuals of the generation of ‘27 with architecture was not especially fluid, except in the case of Rosa Chacel, who often used the city as a main character of her works. This text analyses some of her writings and explains her unique perspectives on the relationship between people and the city.
Article
The broad contours of the personal computing industry can be traced via contradictory waves of consolidation and fragmentation. For example, the incorporation of diverse systems under the banner of Internet connectivity in the 1990s paradoxically resulted in a narrower range of platforms. This paper extends this framework backwards through the inverse case of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. While the market was heavily splintered during its late 1970s and 1980s heyday, the CPU's ubiquity, including in Asian, Latin American, and European hardware following the MSX standard, shows how material and logistical histories of microprocessor standardization did not inevitably lead to interoperability. Nevertheless, hardware standards predate cross-platform PC software compatibility, and the Z80’s transnational impact is especially visible in its unauthorized East German clone, the U880. Despite platform divergences, the Z80 represents an important illustration of globalizing computational infrastructure prior to the collapse of state socialism and the breakthroughs of the 1990s.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
ABSTRACT: Empathic imagination, namely the ability to internalize and project potential emotions, actions, and experiences anticipated in designed spaces, is an essential creative expertise architects should nurture to better perceive, understand, and shape the built environment. This essay analyzes two digital techniques helpful for studying the imaginative empathy driving designers: video games and virtual reality simulations. Both interfaces provide opportunities for free movement, first-person perspective, autonomous decision-making, sensory immersion, and emotional engagement, thus fostering architects’ imaginative problem-solving skills by situating, embedding, and extending their resonating bodies. Two examples support this theoretical framework: 1) the popular life-simulation game The Sims clarifies our building instinct and need for direct control, a sense of agency, and affective affinities during the design process, and 2) outcomes from a workshop crafting virtual atmospheric sceneries discuss how drawing, simulation, and experience affect architectural creativity among students. *** KEYWORDS: architectural design — creativity — empathic imagination — video games — virtual reality. *** OPEN-ACCESS DOWNLOAD: https://gup.unige.it/IDEA-Innovation-Design-Application-2024
Article
Located between a vast agricultural plain and the sea is a 10-kilometer fragment of land. This plot both interrupts the agriculture landscape with an abrupt line of hills and frames a valley of wetland estuary. The location is ecologically sensitive, diverse and beautiful. The site is the epitome of Albania today, displaying natural beauty alongside abandoned infrastructure of the former communist agriculture complex. Among the ruins is a local populous that subsists on the natural resources through both industrialized and preindustrial farming practices. This essay identifies the dilemma that faces this small fragment of land. It will question and interrogate the social, political and agricultural issues. It will seek to ask the questions for a landscape that finds itself undergoing economic pressure in rapidly developing Albania. Within the outlined constraints of context, time and place; a design proposition will be described that attempts to tend to, not fix, a small fragment of land containing a slow valley. (Fig.1) Slow will be argued as an economic asset. This stands in contrast to many capitalist models but seeks to recognize the post-industrial context this fragment of land is situated. The valley is named in this study as slow valley due to both its relative speed in contrast to the city center and in the time needed to cultivate an agrarian life. It is intentional that the valley takes its name from the successful slow food moment in Albania. The modest design proposition presented is the physical manifestation that aligns with the slow food movement’s values (Gowing, 2017).
Chapter
The intersection of robotics and architecture supports the search for new spatial, structural and construction models useful to support the innovation in conception and making of spaces towards a more sustainable production, and to refine the “Industry 4.0” paradigm from a humanistic perspective to meet the needs of the socio-ecological transition. One of the major emerging challenges of technological innovation, in fact, is to accelerate the realization of a high quality architecture that is responsive and sensitive toward the environmental and social context within which is designed and implemented. This requires a holistic and transdisciplinary approach during the whole process, from conception to construction. In this regard, the self-production in every-day architecture practice (starting from small scale projects) represents an important field for theoretical and empirical investigations that calls for a smarter use of traditional and non-traditional building materials, and innovative computational ways of dealing with craftsmanship for more sustainable manufacturing methods along the whole factory life-cycle, suggesting a greater insight into the humanistic basis of architecture. This chapter will frame the design-research in contemporary strategies and processes for architecture undertaken at ALO, architecture and design studio based in the south Sardinia (Italy), and will showcase some of the computational design and robotic fabrication research carried out within the daily practice.
Article
Full-text available
“Design by Accident: For a New History of Design” is a book by historian Alexandra Midal, published in 2019 by Sternberg Press. It is a translation of Midal’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Pascal Rousseau, and defended in 2012 at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Chapter
Food design is an emerging field of research in the past decade, with interdisciplinary attributes that integrate culture, ecology, health, and society. Especially in the post-epidemic and post-carbon context, the importance of food design as a pathway to sustainable development has been gradually highlighted. By summarizing the food design research from the perspectives of eating, cooking, experience design of food, as well as ecology, agriculture, and system design of food, the article defines the research scope of sustainable food design. Based on this, the author proposes a four-dimensional transformation theory of food design in the post-carbon context and analyzes how to translate strategy into action with case studies. The four-dimensional transformation are from Human-Centered to Life-Centered, from Object-Centered to Hyper-object Centered, from Experience-Economy to Post-Carbon Economy, from design for consumption to design for Crisis. In this way, the article builds a new framework and guideline for sustainable food design and propose strategies to deal with the crisis of the times.
Chapter
Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society. Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America pursues this guiding premise through six chapters, each framing the problem of the ongoing vitality of language as a social medium with respect to a particular poet: Louis Zukofsky and the commodification of language; Muriel Rukeyser and documentary photography; Charles Reznikoff and Depression-era historiography; Sterling A. Brown and the blues as both an ethnographic phenomenon and a marketable cultural product; Norman Macleod and Southwest regionalism; and Lorine Niedecker and ethnographic surrealism. The book closes by examining the shifting status of the poet as society transitioned from a focus on production to an emphasis on consumption in the Post-war period.
Chapter
Autumn 1924. The German architect Erich Mendelsohn is on a study trip through the north-eastern United States of America. A visit to the administrative building of the Larkin Company in Buffalo, completed in 1906 under the direction of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is ‘a great experience’ for the German architect.
Chapter
This history of the infrastructures and networks of Berlin meat production reconstructs the emergence of meat as a common urban food at the end of the nineteenth century. To do so, the text follows the material networks of animal logistics—from the site plan of Berlin’s Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse, via its connection to the Prussian railway network, to the time-synchronised rhythms of the stock exchange and cattle market sales. This history of the infrastructural conditions of meat production leads all the way to the cooperative media close to the body of the trader himself: the livestock trading calendar, which connected the trader and the market by synchronising them. Plus, the loading ramp of the Central Livestock and Slaughterhouse had a decisive interface function, as all relevant practices were brought together and focused here.
Article
Full-text available
In her book The Cinematic Footprint (2012), film studies scholar Nadia Bozak proposes an analysis of the cinematographic production of images based on the consumption of energy and matter resources upon which it depends. From this point of view, this article examines three scenes from the filmography of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. By inquiring about the material conditions of his production, a field of interactions beyond representation between image and landscape transformation is brought to the foreground. Tarkovsky’s work is then analyzed in this text from the relationships established throughout the 20th century between image, extractivism and plant growth. In particular, the examined sequences will be related to agrarian colonization programs, precision agriculture practices and reforestation techniques such as seed bombardment. The contrast between the extractivist nature of these cases and the character of «vegetable cinema practice» with which Tarkovsky’s cinema has been described (Uhlin) invites us to rearticulate the difference between image and plant growth in terms of the so-called elemental media approach introduced during the last decade in the domain of media theory.
Article
The private/public distinction and the gender distinction often go together. Domestical work has mainly been done by women. Practices like cooking, cleaning or doing the dishes are still to a great extent female tasks, even if women also have a full-time job. In this article the authors sketch the historical development of washing practices that has taken place during the last five centuries. This development is in a sense atypical. Whereas most productive functions that used to be fullfilled in the sphere of private household have been taken over by the public sphere of industrial economy, the washing practices show an opposite tendency. In premodern times washing used to be performed in public. During the 19th century washing was the object of commodification and professionalisation. After the introduction of the full automatic washing machine in the fifties, washing increasingly became a practice located in the private sphere. The authors first of all describe the evolution of the washing practices situating it on the private/public distinction. Secondly, they analyse the evolution of bourgeois' cleanliness standards in terms of the construction and maintenance of their (public) identity.
Article
Full-text available
Este trabalho propõe a análise das relações entre criadas e patroas, na cidade de São Paulo, entre as décadas de 1870 e 1920, a partir das diferenças étnicas, sociais e de gênero (re)produzidas no espaço doméstico. Utilizando como principal corpo documental os manuais de prescrição de conduta (manuais de etiqueta, de economia doméstica, de puericultura e de higiene e saúde), o intuito é compreender a formação identitária a partir do uso de objetos e espaços, entendidos estes como indutores de comportamentos e hábitos corporais. [Recebido: 26 fev. 2016 – Aceito: 15 mar. 2016]
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Buildings not designed by architects, but simply built by their dwellers, are seldom considered in the architectural literature. Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without architects, published in 1964, addressed in a manifesto-style the issue of spontaneity in a built environment. Most of the cases illustrated by Rudofsky are referred to buildings entirely built without a project by a professional. Rudofsky implied the mutual extraneity between buildings by architects and buildings by non-architects, and he exhorted architects to transfuse into their own projects the wisdom that he found in non-authored buildings. Though, what happens when buildings designed by architects are radically modified by their dwellers? Is this a reaction to a lack of design that needs to be compensated, or to an excess of design that needs to be moderated? How can architects take advantage of the tension between designing and dwelling, professionalism and ingenuity? Is this tension generated by symbolical values clashing with utilitarian needs? And if yes, do architects stand for symbolism and dwellers for utilitarianism, or vice-versa? This article addresses these questions by using as a case study the extensions built by dwellers to add rooms and functions to their apartments in post-communist Tirana, Albania. Shtesa, somehow translatable as an extension, is the Albanian word for this spontaneous modification that is widely visible in Albanian cities, and in Tirana particularly. Every shtesa is built literally "against and within" communist architecture, as well as it embodies the anti-disciplinary stance that architects have always to expect from the inhabitants of their buildings. Shtesas are not merely architecture without architects; they are counterattacks against the invasion of architecture by ideology and of space by politics. The theoretical background of this article is the elements of architecture research project for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale by Rem Koolhaas, to whom Manfredo di Robilant was associate.
Thesis
Ongoing social, cultural, sanitarian and economic changes in western societies are affecting the way people experience both urban and domestic environments. Contemporary technologies, the gender revolution and the evolution of habits are among the factors that are leading to the emergence of new forms of urban life, of new commons, of emergent domesticities where the very ideas of home and city blur. This implies that the dualities such as man/woman, interior/exterior, public private, work/leisure, sedentary/nomadic, inside/outside, which were traditionally used to understand the human cultural landscape, are now dissolving. In fact, the domestic environment is opening up, adapting many of its uses and spaces to new forms of nomadic, post-human and digital life; its identity is changing, evolving into a hybrid environment difficult to define, where the pace replaced ubiquity while changing the way the common is measured. At the same time, the urban environment is being domesticated: many of the activities normally associated with domestic life, such as resting, eating, finding some intimacy, watching movies, or talking to relatives, are increasingly taking place in the spaces of the city. The same occurs for the digital sphere where it is possible to meet, work, dance, flirt, play, etc, outside the boundaries of the physical environment and into new virtual spaces. In the contemporary era domestic and urban life are slowly but inexorably merging. Home is increasingly understood, rather than as a fixed place enclosed within four walls, as a mental territory that extends into the broader context of the city and of the virtual space, fueled by the increased speed of action, growing individuality and the expansion of public relations. The very meaning of its architectures is transformed, and it needs to act on several layers between the material, the digital and the urban. This invisible territory, this new common space, is turning the urban built environment into an endless domestic landscape, that entails a profound rethinking of physical places and of the meaning of domesticity itself. With the rise of the diffused home, domestic spaces, on the other hand, have been driven to become more generic, reprogrammable in response to capital’s ever-changing needs. This blurring of boundaries between home and city is radically changing the way of thinking and designing private and public spaces, the way we live the common, the way we make them able to respond to emerging and future lifestyles. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce the main issues about the current blurring of the boundaries between domestic and urban space, as well as to explain how this is affecting the architecture of both the house and the city, resulting in a new common.
Chapter
Our hope with this book is to show the need and importance of developing a new language to (re)articulate ideas about life, through the experiences we have accumulated as artists working with fragments of life.
Article
Full-text available
This article sets out to analyze the connections between three different but related phenomena (capitalist globalization, the Anthropocene, and the coronavirus epidemic) through the lens of iconic buildings and spaces and the cities in which they are mostly found. I argue that the transnational capitalist class uses cities as competitors in a global system of lucrative investment opportunities. Capitalist globalization is widely implicated in the Anthropocene (signifying human impacts on the Earth system, usually destructive) and together they facilitate the spread of the coronavirus. The concept of “administrative evil” is mobilized to highlight the ethical dimensions of city planning, and the increasingly “beleaguered city.”
Article
Full-text available
By the early 1970s, concern about the rise and prominence of large conglomerate corporations had fully saturated economic discourse in the United States. As products of a brief yet powerful merger mania during the 1960s, large industrial organizations began to restructure the economy by aggressively merging with and acquiring firms in disparate industries and geographies in order to obtain what business executives referred to as ‘geopolitical’ power. With hundreds of diverse subsidiaries, many of these military-sponsored conglomerates — from Union Carbide to Litton Industries to Teledyne — demanded new laboratories and office buildings that seemed to defy modernist tendencies of material standardization, reproducibility, and homogeneity, since the rates and directions of their future growth were indeterminable. The buildings produced for conglomerates between the 1960s and 1980s have been described by urban geographers and historians as the aesthetic and material epitomes of postmodernism, since they were often designed with highly reflective, hermetic surfaces that protruded, curved, and folded — simultaneously revealing and concealing the late capitalist logics that undergirded them. This article considers how conglomeration was viewed as a geopolitical act that challenges existing histories and theories of postmodernism, which reduce the aesthetic conditions of these buildings to abstract representations of late capitalist economics. Instead, the article draws on the laboratories designed by architects César Pelli and Anthony Lumsden for conglomerates during the late 1960s in order to reveal how these aesthetic conditions were responses to the particular geopolitical practices and structures of conglomerate business, including the imperialist acts of ‘acquiring’ people, land, and other businesses.
Article
Full-text available
Why was bleaching—despite early concerns about this new food technology—left unregulated for over half a century? This article focuses on the processes developed to artificially whiten flour in the first half of the twentieth century. It shows how, instead of circumscribing adulteration to practices that they could identify precisely, most scientists in fact foregrounded the limits of their expertise and called for a precautionary approach when dealing with new food technologies and the attendant risks. Setting the British case within a more international context provides a window into the difficulties that regulatory regimes faced, narrowing their definition of adulteration to demonstrably harmful practices. This type of regime led to legitimizing the use of new, potentially dangerous products and processes and made further regulation much more complicated once these technologies became widespread.
Article
Full-text available
p>El artículo revisa la incidencia de la implementación de nuevas tecnologías en el pensar y el hacer arquitectura, para reconocer que las posiciones iniciales, tanto de entusiasmo como de rechazo, ya se han difuminado. En particular, se interesa por identificar un giro reciente en las reflexiones sobre la ampliación del uso de medios digitales, circunstancia que puede resultar provechosa para enfrentar de manera dialógica los desafíos que enfrentamos como sociedad actualmente. </p
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.