Overview

Leading scholars historicise and theorise technology's role in architectural design. Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume's contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories - some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode - of seven techniques regularly used by the designer in the architectural studio today.  Starting with observations about the epistemological changes that have unfolded in the discipline in recent decades but seeking to offer a more expansive meaning for technics, the volume casts new light on concepts such as form, experience, and image that have played central roles in historical architectural discourses. n addressing these and surrounding questions, this engaging and timely collection thereby proposes technics as a site for historical and philosophical reflection not only for those engaged in architectural design but also for any scholar working in the humanities today. 

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9781517906856

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Weaving together material instruments and mental habits, professional organization and artistic imagination, Design Technics brilliantly demonstrates that design techniques such as modeling, scanning, and specifying enable us to write a different history of architecture. Instead of focusing on authors and buildings, Zeynep Celik Alexander and John May focus on the concrete operations of the discipline--operations that are nevertheless inseparable from larger perspectives, for techniques contribute to the construction of the human. --Antoine Picon, author of Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence

Author Information

Zeynep elik Alexander is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design. John May is assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and author of Signal. Image. Architecture. He is founding partner of MILLINS, a Los Angelesbased architectural practice.

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