By José Aragüez
Presented at MIT, Yale, and NYIT. Upcoming presentation and discussion events include the official program of the Venice Biennale, the Steven M. Holl Foundation in New York, the AA, and ETSAM in Madrid.
Dispositional Intelligence proposes a contemporary theory of spatial organization in architecture through original research into a particular kind of hybrid design production—inherently architectural yet strongly driven by modes of intellection traditionally associated with engineering—which surfaced between the mid-1950s and the mid-2000s.
Three highly important yet radically overlooked bodies of work are examined here: those of the Italian architect and artist Vittorio Giorgini (1926–2010), the Israeli architect, engineer, and geometer Michaël Burt (b. 1937), and Sri-Lankan-born, London-based engineer and theorist Cecil Balmond (b. 1943). Giorgini was a trailblazer in incorporating surface topology into architectural thinking with a considerable level of scientific self-awareness. Burt’s body of work proves to be one of the earliest, most thoroughgoing investigations into the discovery and visualization of three-dimensional models for the subdivision of space based on patterns of configurational continuity. Balmond pioneered the translation of aspects of nonlinearity into design moves of significant architectural consequence as well as the application of design frameworks thus initiated to the conception of entire buildings.
By combining granular historical analysis of these bodies of work with advanced theoretical investigation, this volume substantially expands the distinct dispositional possibilities for architecture enabled by the deep scientization of design that unfolded across the West over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In so doing, it extends the boundaries of architectural thinking and contributes not only a new mode of thought to the history of architecture, but also novel critical and design frameworks to today’s discourse and practice culture.
José Aragüez is a practicing architect running his eponymous firm and a thinker holding a PhD from Princeton. He teaches at Yale and is the editor of The Building (Lars Müller Pub., 2016) as well as the author of Spatial Infrastructure: Essays on Architectural Thinking as a Form of Knowledge (Actar, 2022).
“The question of architectural form is more often a point of contention than the subject of serious theoretical inquiry. In Dispositional Intelligence, author José Aragüez adroitly approaches architectural form through the side door, by analyzing the work of three astonishingly original engineers, Vittorio Giorgini, Michaël Burt, and Cecil Balmond. Yet this book is much more than the historical tracing of a fascinating trajectory in engineering. Aragüez architecturally theorizes that corpus to posit a way of looking at form through formulation rather than formalism. In doing so, he bypasses debates that foreground autonomy and authorship, and dives into a science-based approach to process that offers an innovative theoretical argument for embracing form … perhaps even unconditionally.”
—Sunil Bald, William Henry Bishop Professor of Architecture (Adjunct) at Yale University
“In this brilliant book, Aragüez deftly upends well-worn narratives about the two cultures of architecture and engineering, and through that counter-history he develops a radical theory of form. Generally linked to bureaucratic operations and infrastructural values, the figure of the engineer has operated within conventional historical narratives to safeguard form as an attribute of the architect and as a natural byproduct of his genius, mastery, and authorial control. Through careful attention to an alternative genealogy of experimental architect/engineers, Aragüez reconstitutes form as a phenomenon that is neither autonomous and expressive nor merely a residual effect of systems of production, but rather a specific type of material reorganization computed by hybrid modes of intelligence. The book will be of great interest to readers in the history and theory of architecture, aesthetics, and materialist philosophy, as well as in the history of science and computation.”
—Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University
Lear more about the book here.
Published by Actar
Hardcover, 49.95 USD / 45 EUR / 45 GBP
400 pages, 7.68 x 9.37 in. / 19,5 x 23,8 cm
272 color illustrations
ISBN: 9781638401322
