Ettore Sottsass, Il planeta come festival, 1973
the MAP. Machine, Architecture, Politics
In 2016, renowned New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman subsumed the accelerating changes in »technology, globalization, and climate change« (especially in the last ten years) as »the Machine«, claiming that »the power of many—that be us—is now the dominant factor shaping and reshaping Earth systems and pushing out planetary boundaries«. As as consequence,
»We as a species are now a force of, in, and on nature. That has never been said of humans before the twentieth century, but starting in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Industrial Revolution reached many new parts of the globe with full force, particularly places such as China, India, and Brazil, populations and middle classes started to expand together.« 1
Friedman hereby echoes Michel Serres, who some decades ago wrote that human societies have grown to a size where »the decisive actions are now, massively, those of enormous and dense tectonic plates of humanity.« Especially »megalopolises are becoming physical variables: they neither think nor graze, they weigh.« Thus, »globalization forms a new universe«, as we have created objects of a new scale, thereby putting into question our conception of an object as a distinctive entity:
»Let's give the name world-object to artifacts that have at least one global-scale dimension [...] We now live in those world-objects as we live in the world.« As a consequence »we ourselves suddenly depend, and increasingly so, on things that depend on actions that we undertake. Our survival depends on a world that we create with technologies whose elements depend on our decisions.« 2
So the future is up to us! But to understand, and deal with, the changes that are happening now, globally and networked, we need to rethink some of the basic concepts that inform our dealing with what Friedman calls »the Machine«.
What's the future for architecture? Our profession regularly deals with objects in which we live, and has a penchant for working on different scales, ranging from the local to the global. We will especially ask for the political and ethical implications of those changes within architecture. To do so, we will read and discuss texts that range from their downright euphoric approval to more substantial and philosophical ones.
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[1] Friedman, Thomas L. Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. Penguin Books, 2017.
[2] Serres, Michel. Le contrat naturel. Paris, 1992. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=515
We will discuss the following topics, and how they are presented by some authors:
- on the map and on the new
- on the machine and on the plan
- on the object and on ethics
- on work and on exchange
The course is bilingual (German/English) and subdivided into three main parts. The units will be detailed further at the beginning of the semester.
a) Supervised research and formulation of a research question
b) Independent research and writing of an academic abstract
c) Oral presentation of the state of the art, construction of the argument and writing of the final paper
A reader and a list of literature will be made available during the course.
Literature in progress (excerpts)
on the map and on the new (2 units)
- Friedman, Thomas L. Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. 01 Aufl. Penguin Books: Penguin, 2017.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions, New York: Viking, 1999.
- Danto, Arthur Coleman. “Narrative and Style.” Jaac 49, no. 3 (1991): 201–9.
on the machine and on the plan (2 units)
- Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge, London ; New York : Routledge, 2002.
- Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture, Dover Pubns, 1986.
- Hillier, Bill. Space Is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture. 1. publ. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge UnivPress, 1996.
- Easterling, Keller. “Extrastatecraft.” Perspecta 39 (January 1, 2007): 4–16.
on the object and on ‚morality‘ (2 units)
- Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2010
- Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
- Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology.” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 5 (2002): 247–60.
- Verbeek, Peter-Paul. Moralizing Technology, University of Chicago Press, 2011.
on work and on change (2 units)
- Hénaff, Marcel. The Price of Truth Gift, Money and Philosophy. Stanford, California: University Press, 2010.
- Serres, Michel. The Parasite, 2007.
- Acemoglu, D, and P Restrepo. “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work,” (Working Paper), December 26, 2017.
