Presentation at the Bartlett, 2005.

“Enabling Architecture and technological responsivity in Cedric Price … post WW II architectural discourses” [Report], Bartlett-University College of London, 2005
Gonçalo Furtado

Abstract
"This … focuses on the profound transformation that took place in the culture of architectural design during the transitional period from Late-modernity to Post-modernity. Such a transition is associated, not with the more commonly known and studied sequence of concerns and formal-stylistic results, but with the influence of a new technological sensibility (cybernetic and systemic) that infiltrated itself in architectural thought and design, at the time, and through some specific experiences. The research … collect and analyse specific design propositions of … Cedric Price …, which were significant but, nonetheless, remain less studied [ie Generator, Japan Net etc]. These … inspired and established pioneer relationships of the discipline with the new techno-scientific domains of the new information sciences. In doing so, they expected not so much to insinuate an idea of progress conducted by technology (as was the case with the previous modern mechanistic thought), but precisely to advance what was emerging as a new post-modern epistemological condition (that possesses an affinity with the scientific logic of complexities and its non-hierarchical organizations of individual components).In analysing this critical historical account of the development of the post-modern epistemological condition in architectural design by taking Price … technological strategies on indeterminacy as crucial; this research … further discuss the influence that they have had on today’s architectural practice, within the Post-modern Culture and technological reality of the Information Society. Analogies between second order cybernetics and post structuralism are also ... to be delineated; highlighting the question as to the future purpose of architecture and the role of the architect by the former, as well as the crucial relevance of the latter to a current design epistemology of design marked by the new science of complexity’s logics of emergency and evolutionarism."

Gonçalo Furtado, “Enabling Architecture and technological responsivity in Cedric Price … post WW II architectural discourses” [abstract of presentation], Bartlett-University College of London, 2005