Search

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012., Cataloged from PDF version of thesis., Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-390)., Explorations of aesthetic design and scientific experimentation have traditionally relied upon the natural world as a source of inspiration. Notably absent from previous studies of the eighteenth century is the dynamic connections between contrasting disciplines of this time period. Terrestrial objects such as diamonds, silver, gold, and stone, situated between architecture, the decorative arts, and geology, superseded classical models of Aristotelian emulation, which privileged original visual forms. They evoked newfound tensions between modalities of intuition and empirical observation, providing alternate paradigms of nature based upon firsthand experience. This dissertation takes up an extensive assembly of historical actors who analyzed these objects - architects, artisans, chemists, collectors, engravers, geologists, jewelers, and silversmiths. Late Enlightenment designers Robert Adam, William Chambers, and Batty Langley as well as intellectuals Denis Diderot and Louis Dutens explored some of the same materials that piqued the curiosity of silversmiths Pierre-Simon Augustin Dupre, Francois-Thomas Germain, and Jacques Roettiers. Artisan Pierre de Fontanieu and chemists Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier and Jean-Louis Baptiste Rome de l'Isle also problematized the aesthetic usages of these objects, arriving at differing conclusions. Pervasive debates throughout Europe attempted to determine the quotient of hardness in minerals, plasticity of metal, or durability of stone. These provocative cross-currents between the domains of the arts, sciences, and politics generated remarkable insight into these objects taken from the earth; in turn, these intersections shaped a unique conception of materiality, which anticipated untapped potential for architectural styles, artistic production, and geological determination. Mining and related images of the subterranean - mineralogical atlases, etchings of rock formations, maps of sedimentary deposits, imagined grottos, and utopian, Ph.D.

Farmers sometimes relied upon the intuition of wind direction, the natural instincts of animals, imminent storm clouds and heavy rainfall to predict how the weather would influence the prosperity of their forthcoming harvest. The U.S. Weather Bureau during the early 1920s, partially composed of several thousand unpaid volunteers who collected and transmitted local observations for regional forecasts that affected crop and road services, was, at the time, an ineffective government bureaucracy that envisaged how extreme heat temperatures would impact the transport of livestock and published empirical data on fruit frost for tobacco and alfalfa seed districts. Placing the Weather Bureau as one of the many strategic organizations at the heart of meteorology’s expansion into a theoretically sophisticated science, Kristine Harper traces from World War II into the 1960s the tribulations and successes of American and European scientists who introduced numerical computing techniques to the art of forecasting the weather as part of the Meteorology Project based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She shifts the spotlight away from the better-known contributions of mathematical prodigy John von Neumann and instead accentuates the daily decisions made by American meteorologists collaborating with external Norwegian experts who possessed more theoretical training and time-tested experience. Harper challenges some historians’ interpretations of von Neumann’s central role in developing numerical weather prediction, represented by such works as Frederik Nebeker’s Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (1995) and William Asprey’s John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (1990).

The spectacular display of industrial products showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace is familiar to most enthusiasts of 19thcentury Victorian culture. Using the Great Exhibition as a backdrop to her historical narrative about design reform in Britain, Lara Kriegel restores the significance of labor to the field of cultural history, highlighting how quotidian tradesmen assisted in shaping the ideological missions of once humble institutions such as the modern-day Victoria & Albert Museum in London’s South Kensington. While these educational and political battles raged within studio classrooms and the halls of Parliament, activist teachers of the fine arts such as Benjamin Robert Haydon and Charles Heath Wilson deliberated over the merits of drawing the human figure and Etruscan vases, jockeying for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of their students in training. The pursuit of genius, as perceived by one of the protagonists, William Dyce of the Government School of Design, was frowned upon, not for its elevation of the individual ego in artistic creation, but for its lack of modesty (and perhaps morality) on the part of the artist in pursuing the “useless” occupation of being a painter. Torn between remaining common men with ordinary tastes and becoming savants who could be assimilated into the proper world of art, these British artisans serve as reminders of those who brought some of the most important Victorian issues of class, economics, education and gender to the attention of their middle-class peers, as well as to contemporary consumers of decorative ornament.

Artist and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had imported beat poetry into France from the United States, once invited Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to a 1975 concert held in Massachusetts, where the two had the opportunity to meet Bob Dylan and Joan Baez backstage. Somewhat unimpressed with the two French philosophers, the folksingers had not bothered to read Anti-Oedipus, and likewise the two theorists were unfortunately not interested in smoking marijuana: an inadvertent misalignment of social interests, creating a somewhat awkward encounter for all parties involved. This anecdote of an ill-conceived compatibility epitomizes the spirit of comprehending the objectives of French theory and prompts an inevitable query: have we on the U.S. side of the Atlantic been able to come to terms with the French, their traditions of intellectual thought and their philosophical legacy?

Reviewed by Jennifer Ferng, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. E-mail: . Bobigny, La Courneuve and Sarcelles, as well as other planning projects such as Maine-Montparnasse and La Défense, constitute some of the grand ensembles constructed in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s that scholars have examined in order to understand the effects of national identity and political regionalism on the French urban landscape. Regulated by the administrative policies of Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, these housing prototypes of the Fifth Republic transformed the Parisian periphery into a series of “dormitory cities” composed of habitations à loyer modéré (HLMS), plunging what was to be ordered reconstruction into contentious social and economic problems. Topologies is another notable volume that contributes to the widening body of literature on postwar architectural history that reinterprets the technological thinking of French utopian architects, along with those such as Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, the Metabolists, Cedric Price and Team 10, who collectively foresaw the dawning of a new age, tempered not by revolution but by the scientific techniques gained from economics and the social sciences. The book provides detailed biographical information on the work of David Georges Emmerich, Yona Friedman, Claude Parent and Michel Ragon while contextualizing their building schemes of 3D space frames and networked agglomerations against the ideas of well-known theorists Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Johannes Huzinga and Paul Virilio, whose thoughts on consumer society, space, play and the body, respectively, inspired these architects’ visions of the evolving city.