4.647 | Fall 2014 | Graduate

Technopolitics, Culture, Intervention

Course Description

Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called “technology.” Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational …
Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called “technology.” Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational vehicle, and so on. Managerial or “systems-based” paradigms for societal, industrial and governmental organization have routinely percolated into architecture’s considerations, at its various scales from the urban to the domestic, of the relationships of parts to wholes.
Learning Resource Types
Exams
Written Assignments with Examples
A young boy in India walks while carrying a tied up bundle of punched-data cards on his head.
Benares, India: Silk industry. A young boy uses his head—the armature for intelligence—quite literally as he transports a bundle of punched-data cards—another form of embedded intelligence—down a brick walkway, to be fitted onto Jacquard weaving machines to print out new design patterns for saris. This course will consider some of the key ways in which questions of technology have been absorbed into architectural and cultural practice. (Image courtesy of Arindam Dutta. Used with permission.)