Antoine Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD & DDes) at the GSD. He teaches courses in the history of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian of science and art, Picon is best known for his work in the history of architectural technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary “deep structures” of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. In addition to six other books, Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la curiosite d’un classique (1988), L’Invention de L’ingenieur moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees 1747-1851 (1992), La ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), and Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), Tra utopia e ruggine, Paesaggi dell’ingegneria dal Settecento a oggi (2006), Marc Mimram Architect-Engineer: Hybrid (2007). Picon has also published numerous articles, mostly dealing with the complementary histories of architecture and technology. He has received a number of awards in France for his writings, including the Medaille de la Ville de Paris and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la ville de Briey. Picon received engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a doctorate in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
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