Architectural History

Abstract

In January 2015 a group of historians from both sides of the Atlantic gathered around a seminar table at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich to present research engaged in historicizing the relationships between architecture and technology.1 Given the symposium's title, Architecture/Machine, one could be forgiven for jumping to assumptions about the historical and theoretical subject matter based on the well-worn motif that has long underpinned conventional narratives about modern architecture: architecture as machine. For the most part, however, this metaphor and the various philosophically driven machine-related metaphors that have accrued over the past century were alien to the work of these scholars. The experts who gathered in the seminar room, including historians of architecture, science, and media studies, were more intent on what was represented by the three words of the event's subtitle, which followed the options implied by the “and/or” construct of the main title: programs, processes, and performances. These words signaled a methodological turn from investigations of machinelike metaphor or sociotechnical historical constructions toward a mode of research that attempts to track the concrete procedural networks and the materiality of cultural techniques that precondition architecture prior to its end form. At the Machine/Architecture conference the issue of whether or not architectural history is a media theoretical problem was not in question. The contents of the seventeen papers presented spanned more than two hundred years of history and engaged varied approaches to history and to architecture and its technologies. The differing approaches to research and analysis yielded much debate, which rarely succumbed to tendentiousness, as few presenters sought to close in on consensus regarding particular modes of working. The culture-laden semantic assumptions captured by the blinding sweep of the machine metaphor were displaced by approaches that looked to the heuristic of the technical a priori.2 …