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Antoine Picon: "Architecture and the Digital: A Question of Materiality""

©akk, TU GRaz

02.10.2017

Ringvorlesung | Doctoral School | Architekturforschung

Lecture Series | Doctoral School | Architectural Research The lecture will take place on Monday, 2nd of October 2017 at 7.00pm at HS II, Alte Technik, Rechbauerstraße 12. This event is hosted by the Institute of Architectural Theory, History of Art and Cultural Studies. Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Research at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is also Director of Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris and Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on this subject. Four of his books are devoted to the transition from early-modern societies to the industrial era: French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment(1988, English translation 1992), Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la curiosité d'un classique (1988), L'Invention de L'ingénieur moderne, L'Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992), and Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002). With La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Picon began to investigate the changes brought to cities and architecture by the development of digital tools and digital culture. His three most recent books are dealing extensively with this question. Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).