Announcements

  1. The Instruments Project, Workshop IV
    MIT School of Architecture + Planning, 10-105 (Vannevar Bush Room)
    04.05.14

    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