Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lee, Sang Pil

Titel

Expanded Environments: Isozaki Arata and Hans Hollein, Architects of the City and Urban Media in the First Electronic Age, 1955 – 1976

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation explores the endeavors of postwar architects to create new living environments. It highlights their designs and theories in response to novel contemporary modes of thinking, notably cybernetics, Gestalt psychology, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, as well as through their cultural exchanges with America. To trace the impact of the circulation of these theories in distinct national contexts and in relation to the dynamics of Americanization and globalization, this study analyzes the theoretical and design endeavors of architects Hans Hollein of Vienna and Isozaki Arata of Tokyo. It also pays close attention to their international collaborations and intellectual exchanges with the British architectural group Archigram, based in London. All of these architects functioned as cultural nodes connecting their local architectural cultures to international currents and discourses on architecture and the city during the postwar period. Among their various points of intersection were German-born American architect Konrad Wachsmann’s seminars on new methods of industrial building construction, Harvard and MIT scholars’ discourses on “urban design” and Gestalt-theory-based visual perception of the city, Team 10’s urbanism, the space race and technology, and American discussions on post-industrial society and information technology. This dissertation particularly focuses on how the modern idea of space was reconceptualized by Isozaki and Hollein into an environmental approach to the postindustrial city and, as a result, how the seemingly distinct concepts of environment, architecture, city, and media became, in certain decisive contexts, interchangeable.This interdisciplinary research engages with multiple discourses on the environment, going beyond issues of sustainability to foreground the role of space in urban-architectural environments. It also aims to contribute to a better understanding of transnational culture and the role of architecture in our current information age. In an age of artificial intelligence, cities are understood in relation to accumulations of data, information, software, invisible networks, and ambiguous boundaries. The spatial conceptions inherited from modern architecture—and the aesthetic, experiential, epistemological, and organizational logics associated with it—are insufficient for dealing with the types of environments we inhabit now. Isozaki’s and Hollein’s spatial conceptions of the environment in architecture and the city can perhaps afford new insights into today’s cities and building projects.