Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics

A theoretical history of anthropomorphism and proportion in modern architecture, this volume brings into focus the discourse around proportion with current problems of post-humanism in architecture alongside the new possibilities made available through digital technologies. The book examines how the body and its ordering has served as a central site of architectural discourse in recent decades, especially in attempts to reformulate architecture’s relationship to humanism, modernism and technology. Challenging some concepts and categories of architectural history and situates current debates within a broader cultural and technological context, Hight makes complex ideas easily accessible. Extensively illustrated and written without academic jargon for an informed but non-specialized architectural audience, this book elucidates the often obscure debates of avant-garde architectural discourse and design, while demonstrating how these debates have affected everyday places and concepts of architecture. As a result, it will appeal to professional architects, academics and students, combining as it does an insightful introduction to the fundamental issues of architectural history and theory over the past fifty years with entirely new formulations of what that history is and means.

1. Introduction 2. The Phenomenal Origin of Architecture 3. The Structural Continuities of Classicism 4. Modulor Residues of History 5. A Mid-Century Renaissance 6. The Schema and the Diagram 7. The Symbolic Strikes Back 8. Measured Response 9. Reflections of the Modulor 10. Measuring Vortices. Appendix 1: Notes on Terminology. Appendix 2: Program of the 'Primo Convegno Internazionale Sulle Proporzioni nelle Arti'

Christopher Hight teaches graduate and undergraduate design and theory at Rice University School of Architecture. He previously taught at the Architectural Association in the Design Research Laboratory and has worked and published internationally.