Content area
Abstract
Tracking the material and discursive proliferation of design globally since 1980, the dissertation posits that, through accumulation, the qualitative nature of design has been transformed. No longer domesticated by architecture or contained within specializations (industrial, interior, product, graphic etc.) as it had been traditionally, design expanded into a generalized field. On the presumption that architecture's disciplinarity is inevitably redefined by its intersections with design, the dissertation argues that between 1980-2005 the historical relationship between architecture and design turned upside down: instead of design constituting a minor part of architecture, architecture came to be a minor part of a radically reconfigured design field. The dissertation locates historically and projects theoretically the disciplinary implications of such an inversion.
The research focuses on a cluster of occurrences that exemplify significant, transformative intersections between architecture and design. Concentrating on a single media per chapter—a conference, magazine, product, model, software, period, environment and debate—and an altered aspect of architecture—its milieu, status, code, practice, style, expertise, specialization, or discourse—the successive trajectories reveal a quantitative and qualitative subsumption of architecture by design across a global scale. In this context, the dissertation argues that architecture is advantageously de-disciplining into a species of design.
Distinguished from the existing design history scholarship that has rarely addressed the implications for architecture's discipline, or former architectural histories that have assumed design to be a minor part of architecture, this dissertation contributes another history by looking at how architecture constitutes itself through the mirror of design. At the very moment when debates over the future of architecture remain polarized between calls for a return to critical distance as recently evidenced in art historian Hal Foster's Design and Crime (2003) and new forms of experimentation devoid of criticality as theorized by architectural critic Michael Speaks in "Design Intelligence" (2002), the dissertation offers the optimistic strategy of disciplinary opportunism as an alternative to current polemics within the field.
