ARCH 323, Section 2

In the Introduction to his book on Responsive Environments, Larry Busbea writes that
“the attempt to model and optimize the transactional points of contact ”between object and subject was the core project of design by the end of the 1960s. Funded by the military industrial complex, architects, engineers, and psychologists created new knowledge and new designed objects that would be responsive to a cybernetic land scape. This course explores the question of design as interface
in three units: chair, population, and energy between 1950 and 2000. We will ask: how do we characterize the entanglement of geopolitics, finance, form, and psychology from the second half of the 20th century? How old are these assemblages? Students will become familiar with a few key examples of architecture and design and while studying and reframing an interface (chair, window, room, hallway, street) of their choice.