Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics

by Hight; Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780415384810
• ISBN10: 0415384818
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, this volume brings into focus the discourse around proportion with current problems of post-humanism in architecture alongside the new possibilities made available through digital technologies. The book examines how the body and its ordering has served as a central site of architectural discourse in recent decades, especially in attempts to reformulate architecture#xE2;#xAC;"s relationship to humanism, modernism and technology. Challenging some concepts and categories of architectural history and situates current debates within a broader cultural and technological context, Hight makes complex ideas easily accessible. Extensively illustrated and written without academic jargon for an informed but non-specialized architectural audience, this book elucidates the often obscure debates of avant-garde architectural discourse and design, while demonstrating how these debates have affected everyday places and concepts of architecture. As a result, it will appeal to professional architects, academics and students, combining as it does an insightful introduction to the fundamental issues of architectural history and theory over the past fifty years with entirely new formulations of what that history is and means.

Author Biography

Christopher Hight teaches graduate and undergraduate design and theory at Rice University School of Architecture.

Table of Contents

Credits & Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Prologue: Infernal Returns	p. 3
The Body of Architectural Knowledge	p. 5
The Structure of the Book	p. 12
The Phenomenal Origin of Architecture	p. 15
Primal Identification	p. 18
The Home of Man	p. 20
The Decay of Modern Architecture	p. 22
The Pathos of Phenomenology	p. 29
The Structural Continuities of Classicism	p. 33
Classical Systems of Knowledge and Subjects	p. 36
Gendered Bodies of Architecture	p. 38
The Hidden Interior of Architecture	p. 41
Modernity as "The End of the Classical"	p. 44
The Paradoxes of Not-Modern Architecture	p. 48
Post-Structural Problems	p. 51
Modulor Residues of History	p. 55
Recalling the Modulor	p. 57
The Residual Historicity of the Modulor	p. 61
The Modulor as "One Example"	p. 62
The Modulor as Vitruvius's Heir	p. 64
Unfinished Business	p. 67
A Mid-Century Renaissance	p. 71
Wittkower's Renaissance	p. 73
A Paradigm Shift?	p. 76
The Architectural Principles of the Modulor	p. 77
Points of Emergence	p. 79
The Rowe Effect	p. 81
Diagrams of Discoursivity	p. 88
The Schema and the Diagram	p. 91
The Modern Problem of Knowledge	p. 93
The Schema and the Post-Kantian Subject	p. 96
Neo-Kantian Networks, aka, Architectural History as Anthropological Epistemology	p. 97
Proportion as a Modern Problem	p. 100
The Subject of Architecture	p. 103
The Symbolic Strikes Back	p. 111
The Mechanization of Life and Death	p. 114
Researching the New Human: Giedion's Activities in the 1950s	p. 117
Disputed Boundaries of Man and Animal	p. 118
"Man" as "Animal Symbolicum"	p. 121
The Netz-worked Body	p. 125
Simian Architecture	p. 128
A Manifesto for Equipoise	p. 131
Measured Response	p. 135
Prehistory of the Golden Section	p. 141
The Golden Section as a Natural Constant	p. 143
A Measure of Empathy	p. 147
The Golden Section as a Modern Quasi-Object	p. 152
Reflections of the Modulor	p. 157
A World of Flow	p. 162
The Ideal Average	p. 164
Corrective Lenses	p. 167
Post-War Anamorphorsis	p. 170
Containment Protocols	p. 179
Measuring Vortices	p. 183
Untimely Mediations	p. 189
Aqueous Solutions and Conclusions	p. 193
Appendix 1	p. 198
Appendix 2	p. 200
Notes	p. 202
Index	p. 232
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