Benares, India: Silk industry. A young boy uses his head—the armature for intelligence—quite literally as he transports a bundle of punched-data cards—another form of embedded intelligence—down a brick walkway, to be fitted onto Jacquard weaving machines to print out new design patterns for saris. This course will consider some of the key ways in which questions of technology have been absorbed into architectural and cultural practice. (Image courtesy of Arindam Dutta. Used with permission.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Arindam Dutta
MIT Course Number
4.647
As Taught In
Fall 2014
Level
Graduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called "technology." Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational vehicle, and so on. Managerial or "systems-based" paradigms for societal, industrial and governmental organization have routinely percolated into architecture's considerations, at its various scales from the urban to the domestic, of the relationships of parts to wholes.