Caught between technophilia and technophobia, the fields of architecture, landscape, and urbanism are unable to articulate the material and epistemic conditions under which they labor today. Architectural techniques and tools remain consigned to the celebratory rhetoric of scientific discovery and technical innovation, whose principles now govern design practice and pedagogy simply by way of theoretical exhaustion. Speed, exactitude, acumen, efficacy, expertise, efficiency, and other trusted axioms of modern life can no longer conceal the political and existential silence that resides at their core. The Instruments Project is an excavation of that silence: its continuities and divisions, its hidden historical impulses, and the forms of reasoning and representation resident within it. Through sustained attention to instrumental processes that are by design simultaneously material and metaphysical, the project works towards establishing the technical dimension of architecture, landscape, and urbanism as a legitimate site for historical inquiry and philosophical reflection.

The Instruments Project, Workshop IV

April 5th, 2014 at 10:00-12:00
MIT School of Architecture + Planning
10-105 (Vannevar Bush Room)

Speakers
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, University of Toronto (co-organizer)
John May, University of Toronto (co-organizer)

with:
Lucia Allais, Princeton University
Edward Eigen, Harvard University
Orit Halpern, New School/Parsons
John Harwood, Oberlin College
Matthew Hunter, McGill University
Michael Osman, UCLA

Schedule
10:00-10:20: Introduction (Zeynep Çelik Alexander & John May)
10:20-10:40: Michael Osman, “Specifying”
10:40-11:00: Matthew Hunter, “Modeling”
11:00-11:20: John May, “Imaging”
11:20-12:00: Questions and discussion

Sponsored by
MIT HTC
The Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada