Technology, place, and the nonmodern thesis

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 130-139

  Moore, Steven A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049484618     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/10464880152632442     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "Critical Regionalism," in Critical Regionalism: The Pomona Meeting Proceedings (Pomona, CA: The College of Environmental Design, 1991), pp. 3-28.
2. John Agnew, Place and Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 62.
3. Agnew also discusses the theme of the historic devaluation of place in "Representing Space: Space, Scale and Culture in Social Science," in James Duncan and David Ley, eds., Place/Culture/Representation (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 251-271. Although Agnew interrogates the concept of place, I use the term region interchangeably in this text. Place and region do not mean the same thing, but for the purpose of this discussion I conflate them.
4. For example, crime statistics reveal that the murder rate in New York City is dramatically less than that of rural Arkansas. See Box Butterfield, "Nationwide Drop in Murders Is Reaching to Small Towns," in New York Times, May 9, 2000. Available at http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/.
5. Although Max Weber is commonly credited with the coinage of these terms, they belong to Ferdinand Tonnies who first used them in 1887. See Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (New York: Harper, 1963).
6. Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 231.
7. Soja's position is associated with the tradition of critical theory, however, his intention is revisionist. See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 120.
8. Anna Bramwell, for example, has argued that German anti-Semitism arises from the doctrines of environmental determinism. To generalize that all Germans share a genius that originates in the forest and that wandering Jews share a rootlessness that originates in the desert is a classic example of determinist, reductivist logic. See Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walter Darre and Hitler's Green Party (Abbotsbrook: Kensal House, 1985).
9. See also Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
10. John Agnew, Place and Politics, p. 28.
11. The definition of these terms is further amplified in his essay "Representing Space," p. 253.
12. Thomas Misa, "Retrieving Sociotechnical Change From Technological Determinism," in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds. Does Technology Drive History? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 115-142.
13. Tzonis and Lefaivre, "Critical Regionalism," p. 4.
14. The authors credit the term "defamiliarization" to Victor Schlovsky, a member of the Russian Formalists, who coined the term around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. See also Victor Schlovsky, "Art as Technique," in L.T. Lemon and M. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Critique (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
15. Reductive, materialist definitions of technology tend to be less sophisticated in their understanding of the social construction of artifacts. However, Bruce Bimber's essay "Three Faces of Technological Determinism," in L.T. Lemon and M. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Critique (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) develops a very scholarly, yet reductive, definition of technology as limited to apparatus. Bimber's project, however, leads to other ontological problems beyond the scope of this study.
16. I have discussed the various traditions within science and technology studies elsewhere in greater detail. See Steven A. Moore, "Technology and the politics of sustainability at blueprint demonstration farm," in Journal of Architectural Education, 51/1 (September 1997): pp. 23-25
17. and Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).
18. Donald MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman, "Introductory Essay," in The Social Shaping of Technology (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), p. 3.
19. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 117.
20. Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (JAI Press, Inc., 1986); pp. 1-40.
21. Implicit in the first point is the claim that original nature, if it ever existed at all, has long ago been incorporated into second nature, which is a work of society. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991, p. 190.
22. See ibid., p. 31, for the second point.
23. Anthony Giddens is credited with developing the theory of structuration, which is an attempt to synthesize the seemingly opposed principles of voluntarism and determinism. He argues that humans are free to transform social structures but are also products of those structures. My argument here, regarding the relation of places and technologies, is drawn from the same logic. See also MacKenzie and Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, p. 6.
24. Philip Brey has examined how "space-shaping technologies" have disembedded the contemporary phenomenon of place. Where Brey's study has focused upon the role of "connectivity development" in transforming the experience of place, my own emphasis has been on what Brey terms "local development." See Philip Brey, "Space-shaping technologies and the disembedding of place," in Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 242.
25. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 187-203.
26. Latour, We have Never Been Modern.
27. The term sustainability is much used and much contested. For an excellent analysis of the term see, in this issue of JAE, Simon Guy and Graham Farmer, "Reinterpreting Sustainable Technology: The Place of Technology."
28. See also Scott Campbell, "Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities: Urban Planning and the Contradiction of Sustainable Development," in APA Journal (Summer 1996): 296-312.
29. The term eco-tech has come into use to describe the environmentally responsible projects of those firms, like Sir Norman Foster & Partners, that were previously described as high-tech practitioners. For example, see Catherine Slessor, Eco-Tech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 7.
30. Jameson, Seeds of Time, p. 194.
31. John Tilman Lyle, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (New York: Wiley, 1994), p. 10.
32. The other firms represented in the exhibition include: Foster and Partners, London; Clare Design, Sydney; Jourda & Perraudin Architectes, Kassel; Andrew Lee for Hackland + Dore Architects Ltd., Edinburgh; Michael Hopkins and Partners, London; Lake/Flato Architects, San Antonio; Rick Joy Architects, Tucson; Fernau & Hartman Architects, Berkeley; and Brian MacKay-Lyons Architecture Urban Design, Halifax. For a review of the exhibition, see Muschamp, "Good Buildings and Good for You," New York Times, Apr. 16, 2000: Arts and Leisure, p. 37.