I gave an invited talk titled “Computing Choice: Participatory Design and the Enumerative Imagination” at the Pixels, Vectors, and Algorithms conference at the Architekturmuseum in Munich in October 2019. The conference is coupled with the exhibition The Architecture Machine, organized by Teresa Fankhanel, and will be followed by two book publications, one in English and one in German, in which I have contributed an essay.
Olga Touloumi and I presented a methodological intervention on a multilingual, polyphonic, scalar, protean space for thinking about histories of architecture and the computer at Harvard GSD’s 2019 Cambridge Talks. Themed “Other Histories of the Digital” and organized by Matthew Allen, Christina Shivers, and Phillip Denny, the symposium featured presentations by Daniel Cardoso Llach, John May, Andrew Witt, Sean Keller, Michael Osman, with comments by Antoine Picon and Andrew Holder, and a follow up round table on digital pedagogy.
I had the honour to be among the invited speakers in the Conference organized in memory of Prof. Lionel March in Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. The conference featured talks by Prof. March’s collaborators and students throughout his prolific trajectory from the Land Use Built Form Studies Center at Cambridge to UCLA. Full conference program and photographic coverage of the event here.
My presentation’s abstract: In a 2002 survey article reviewing relations between architecture and mathematics since 1960, Lionel March recounted the events that led to the Geometry of Environment — the first book publication of the Land Use Built Form Studies (LUBFS) Centre. The book, which March co-authored with Philip Steadman, was an invitation from the RIBA Library Committee to illustrate the potential of “new maths” in architecture. The invitation, March remembers, was triggered by Alison and Peter Smithson’s remarks about a “generational gap” between the mathematics that they knew as architects and the mathematics taught to young British students, including their son, which left them “at a loss.” This presentation traces influences and parallels between the educational movement of the new math –along with the mathematical cultures from which it emerged— and early work at LUBFS. It begins by providing some historical context on the new math and positioning it within broader currents in 20th century mathematics, with particular focus on debates about the status of geometry, shapes, and visual intuitions. Then, through examples drawn from the Geometry of Environment and other LUBFS working papers, it contemplates both technical and intellectual influences of these currents on the ways in which Lionel March and LUBFS researchers mathematically described architectural form. Ultimately, the presentation seeks to offer historical and critical insights on the ways in which this early body of work was permeated by, and contributed to, the cultivation of a new mode of seeing in architecture: one that moves away from sense-perceptible appearance and sees structures beneath.
I co-organized, along with Daniel Cardoso Llach (CMU), a session exploring architecture’s place in the postwar research university for the 2018 Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society in Seattle. The session examined academic architects’ adoption of scientific ideals and methods, their crafting of a scientific imaginary of architecture, and these trans-actions’ lasting effects on the discipline’s ever fluctuant intellectual and institutional definitions. Session participants were Matthew Allen (Harvard, U. Toronto) and Anna Vallye (Connecticut College), with Jennifer Light (MIT) as Commentator. Full session details, including abstracts, are here . My paper followed the mathematization of Friedman’s architectural work in its transitions and translations between North American research universities and the 1960s French architectural scene. Full abstract below:
In June 1966 Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman traveled to Folkestone,UK to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA)— a large two-day symposium on radical experiments with architecture and urbanism. A leading figure of “prospective” international groups of architects and artists crafting techno-futurological visions of three-dimensionally expanding cities, Friedman was a natural participant in what aspired to be a convocation of “all Europe’s creative nuts.” Yet at IDEA, Friedman set aside the provocative imagery of the Ville Spatiale —the architectural rendition of his late 1950s theory for “mobile architecture,” and instead presented the project through mathematical diagrams. These diagrams were part of a theory of “scientific architecture,” as he would later call it, that Friedman was developing through visiting appointments in US and Canadian research universities. While being enthusiastically received in North America, Friedman’s mathematical exposition was met with skepticism at IDEA and reviewed as a “pseudo-mathematical” and “naive” way of justifying his aesthetic preference for space-grids. This presentation follows the mathematization of Friedman’s architectural work in its transitions and translations between North American research universities and the 1960s French architectural scene. By examining how distinct epistemic cultures influenced and received Friedman’s claims to “science,” I shed light on collusions and collisions between postwar academizing tendencies in research universities and contemporaneous avant-gardist cultures of novelty and prospectiveness in architecture. I also dwell on how particular mathematical ideas allowed Friedman to negotiate a space between the “researcher” and the “artist-demiurge,” between aniconic rationality and the aesthetic consistency of his oeuvre.
I gave a paper on confluences between postwar experimental architecture and academic experiments with computer-aided architectural design software, specifically centering around new conceptual and technical renditions of architectural memory, in the 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society, part of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). Full abstract below:
Software for “Sociology’s Hardware”: Experimental Modernisms, Computer-Aided Design, and the Reimagination of Architectural Memory ca. 1970
This paper examines the reconceptualization of architectural memory as informational abstraction in utopian experimentations of postwar architectural modernism and its ties to research on computer-aided architectural design in the late 1960s. It weaves together technical infrastructures, intellectual debates, and institutional settings that engendered a new imagination of architectural memory not as remembrance, commemoration, or mnemonic activation of architectural form, but instead as a sequence of synchronic spatial configurations, amenable to mathematical representation and analysis, and “storing” states of human behaviour.
Specifically, the paper focuses on two computer program prototypes developed by Hungarian-born French utopianist Yona Friedman: a prominent figure of postwar “radical” architecture in Europe and participant of early research on computer-aided design in North America. The FLATWRITER, presented at the 1970 architectural World Fair in Osaka (Expo ’70), and YONA (Your Own Native Architect), developed from 1973-1975 in the context of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group NSF-funded project Architecture-by-Yourself, were both conceived as tools for do-it-yourself architecture and urbanism. Friedman promoted these software prototypes as both instruments for, and mathematical articulations of, his utopian visions of ever-changing architectural and urban assemblies affording urban mobility — a proposition epitomizing Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’s professed definition of architecture as “sociology’s hardware”.
The FLATWRITER and YONA were implementations of a mathematical rendition of Friedman’s architecture-theoretical propositions, which he had developed during research and teaching appointments at MIT and the University of Michigan between 1964-1971. In it, Friedman suggested using labeled planar graphs to map the spatial configuration of domestic and urban space in tandem with “activities” of its inhabitants. The graph collapsed architectural memory into a storing of, and recalling from, a series of prefigured states. Friedman imagined the graph as both container of architectural memory and design possibility. It enabled recording and storing the different states of architectural and urban form that was persistently ephemeral, ever-changing, amnesiac. At the same time, through a simple exercise of graph combinatorics, it could reveal all possible future states of one’s house and city.
The paper situates the development of these programs at the intersection of modernist displacements of architectural time and memory with the intellectual and material infrastructures of computer aided design. Ultimately, the goal is to open a conversation on how modernist theoretical commitments about architectural memory were reified in, and also inflected by, early computer-aided design programs and human-machine interfaces.
I gave a talk on images of abstraction and abstractions of images in the two-day symposium “Computational Design: Practices, Histories, Infrastructures”, organized by Daniel Cardoso Llach at Carnegie Mellon University, 7-8 October 2017. The event brought together historians, designers, and media artists in stimulating conversation about cultures, technics, and prospects of design computing.
Abstract: In 1961 architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander presented an audience of building scientists with a figure consisting of points and lines. This figure was not a geometric shape, but a mathematical entity that Alexander identified as a “linear graph.” Alexander enlisted the graph to “picture” the abstract structure that he saw as undergirding a “design problem” — a set of requirements to be met by a designer. He then presented a method for transforming what was a disordered entanglement of requirements into a neatly ordered “tree.” By the mid-1960s the tree would come into the parlance of architectural research as stand-in for the hierarchical nature of design processes and their physical outcomes, only to be soon dethroned by Alexander himself. Other graph manifestations —“simplices,” “semi-lattices,” “cascades,” “networks” — figured as correctives, signposting new eras in Alexander’s architecture-theoretical activity. In this talk, I track pictures of graphs in Alexander’s body of work from 1958 to 1974. Taking these pictures as instantiations of a mathematical entity with broader symbolic and operational attributes, I discuss the changing status of graph theory in the 1960s. Ultimately, I interrogate the forces that brought graphs into Alexander’s work as a way of concretely practicing structural abstraction — the lingua franca of architectural and mathematical modernism in the Postwar.
For the 4S Annual Meeting 2017, I am co-organizer, along with Clare Kim of MIT’s STS Program, of a closed panel that rethinks the abstract-concrete opposition in design and mathematics. The panel draws on A.N. Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” as a provocation to work with these in-between labels, shelving binary categories and studying how such categories strengthened at certain moments. Breaking from empirical traditions invested in material concreteness, designers enlist mathematical abstraction for purposes that range from epistemological consolidation to aesthetic renewal. At the same time, mathematical practitioners draw from aesthetic and material resources to reason with, teach, or communicate the abstractions with which they operate. We ask how abstraction engages with existing socio-technical arrangements in both planned and unplanned ways, facilitating both collaborations and contestations. Ultimately, this panel recasts “misplaced concreteness” as a productive process, bearing analytical and critical potential for STS. Participants include Alma Steingart, talking on midcentury mathematics and aesthetic autonomy, Daniel Cardoso Llach, presenting on plexes, patches, and the early history of CAD, and Matthew Allen, speaking about abstract art, concrete poetry, and algorithms in architecture. Clare’s paper revolves around mathematical abstractions of Eastern aesthetics in US math. My talk examines the Concreteness of mathematical abstraction in 1960s design theory by delving into graph’s geometric presentation. More details about the panel in this link.
I co-organized the session Disciplines in Transition: Postwar Encounters Between Design, Mathematics and Engineering, in the 2016 BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS joint Meeting at the University of Alberta. The session interrogated disciplinary osmoses between design, engineering, and the mathematical sciences after the Second World War with papers by Daniel Cardoso Llach, Clare Kim (session co-organizer) and myself, and an astute commentary by John Harwood. Daniel Cardoso’s presentation Maps Laced With Data: Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, 1959-1970 tracked the theories about design formulated by engineers and mathematicians working in the Computer-Aided Design Project. Looking beyond the university setting, Clare Kim’s paper Mathematics Meets Design: Ray and Charles Eames and the Aesthetics of the Mathematica Exhibit considered the design-influenced interpretation of mathematical theories that emerged in postwar museum exhibits. Investigating influences of mathematics and computation to design theory, my paper “To See in a Hard Intellectual Light”: Graph Theory and Design Theory in the LUBFS Centre examined the uses and meanings of graph theory within the scientizing and rationalizing work of the LUBFS Centre in the early 1970s.
I was invited as one of the speakers at the fall 2015 MIT SMArchS Colloquium. My talk ‘For every field which has some structure’: Graph Theory & Design Theory, 1960-1975 was a synopsis of my ongoing PhD research on design theory and structural mathematical ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. I will be posting a video as soon as it becomes available online. Many thanks to Timothy Hyde for the invitation and to all the participants for a great discussion!