Stills from Man and Computer – A Perspective, written and directed by Peter de Normanville, 1967. Anthony Gilkison Associates/IBM United Kingdom.image courtesy of CCA.

7 May 2015, 6:00 pm
Presented in English

“This lecture, titled ‘The Architecture of Error,’ will examine some of the ways in which these tools, and the fears they barely conceal, intersect with the exponential rise in redundant precision in architecture during the twentieth century.”

“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, pose difficult questions about architecture’s relations to science and technology. Not long after, in 1944, that first digital architect, Erwin Schrödinger, chose to describe the centralized authority of the chromosome as the ‘architect’s plan’ with its ‘law code and executive power.’ He correctly identified both that architects shared his acute anxiety regarding the transmission of information via material, and that they had developed precocious tools for managing their unique fear of physical error within their own practices.

“This lecture, titled ‘The Architecture of Error,’ will examine some of the ways in which these tools, and the fears they barely conceal, intersect with the exponential rise in redundant precision in architecture during the twentieth century.”

Francesca Hughes

> via The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)