February 12, 2015
Part of the MIT Department of Architecture 2014-2015 Public Lecture Series titled “Experiments in Architecture”
The rejection of organic materials that marked the material tolerance crises central to modernity didn’t just produce the steel and glass icons we know so well, but also a generation of newly metalized aircraft that were so heavy they could not fly. These engineered dodos, which resulted directly from architecture’s ideological reconfigurations around predictability, precision and error, ask of us difficult questions about the role of inference and approximation in instrumental rationalism, and about the exemption from cultural and sociological explanation which architecture always reserves for the technological: what if it simply does not work?
At about the same time, but in an utterly different cultural milieu, that last Victorian architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, was conducting two scalar experiments in domesticity, power and entropy: the ¾ mile wide house and grounds of the Viceroy’s Palace at New Delhi and Queen Mary’s 4’ 8” Dolls’ house. Not unlike that first digital architect, Erwin Schrödinger and his “architect” gene, Lutyens fast realized that by installing power in not the giant, but the miniature (that was to become code), architecture’s already precocious tools for managing its unique fear of physical error would redefine precisions relations to truthfulness.
This lecture will examine some of the ways in which these tools, and the fears they barely conceal, intersect in the seminal technological and cultural crises that mark architecture’s twentieth-century and the exponential rise in redundant precision that it witnessed.
Francesca Hughes
Hughes Meyer Studio
Francesca Hughes lives and works in London where she ran design studios at the Bartlett School of Architecture and then at the AA for many years. She has lectured internationally and is author editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT, 1996), Drawings that Count (AA Publications, 2013) and, most recently, author of The Architecture of Error (MIT, 2014). She is founding partner of the art/architecture practice Hughes Meyer Studio whose work has been published by AA Files, AR, ANY, Art Forum, Merrel, Routledge, Monacelli and Wiley and exhibited in the UK, Europe and Asia. Francesca is currently collaborating on Piano Falling, an Arts Council funded multi-media project with video artist Catherine Yass, and sound designer David Sheppard, involving a grand piano and a very tall building.
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