Rocker, Ingeborg M. (Author)
Allen, Stanley T
Princeton University
Edition Details: Advisor: Allen, Stanley T.
Physical Details: 937 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation explores the effects of the emerging disciplines of information theory and computer technology on the discourse about architectural form creation and generation in postwar Germany. My work will not only closely trace the course of architectural discourse, but will also investigate neighboring technical, philosophical, and artistic discourses. This wide-ranging investigation is necessary because an essential feature of the historical phase under investigation--the period between 1948 and 1968--is the establishment of information theory and digital technology as a powerful force across almost all disciplinary boundaries. Not only did this new approach create a common frame of reference for the most heterogeneous fields, but it also stimulated knowledge transfer between widely varied disciplines. The development of architecture and its positioning in the discursive network in postwar Germany can, therefore, only be understood against the background of this interdisciplinary transfer of terminology and concepts, and the technology that made this transfer possible and established the conditions under which it would occur. More specifically, this work focuses on the origin of information aesthetics , new aesthetics based on Claude Shannon's information theory. In parallel, at the beginning of the 1960s with the arrival of the computer, which then was only accessible to a few mathematicians and programmers, a theorizing of the digital medium started, perhaps precisely due to the medium's inaccessibility. This coincided with new creative impulses in art and architecture and led to new design processes. My work reconstructs the more informal discourse network of Max Bense, who is considered the founder of information aesthetics, and investigates the institutionalization of information aesthetics when it became part of the curriculum at Stuttgart University, and at the newly founded Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, Germany, where information aesthetics was introduced against the background of the still vital Bauhaus tradition in Germany. Through the 1950s, Bense further developed his aesthetics at the HfG Ulm in close feedback with the school's aesthetic production. It was at the HfG Ulm that a new pedagogy, informed by information theory and computation, came into being. My work investigates how the actors at the HfG, like Max Bill, Thomas Maldonado, Horst Rittel, and Gui Bonsiepe, positioned themselves when computation started to influence the thinking on design and architecture. Also elsewhere, in Berlin, where Bense's former student, Helmar Frank, became the head of the department for information sciences (later cybernetics) at the Pädagogische Hochschule Berlin, Bense's information aesthetics became the springboard for multiple interdisciplinary inquiries like the work of the architect Manfred Kiemle, who analyzed the information content of buildings. Only by the early to mid-1960s, did computers became the laboratory for information aesthetics. Algorithms took on the role of analyzing and synthesizing aesthetic phenomena. The first computer graphics and computer architectures emerged in Bense's circles. It was only then that computers and computation actually transformed the practice of designing, by focusing on architects and artists like Georg Nees, Frieder Nake who, inspired by Bense's information aesthetics, pioneered the field of computer graphics. Based on the resources of the firms Siemens and MERO, Georg Nees and the architect Ludwig Rase, along with architects who followed their lead, experimented with the new possibilities of the digital medium, resulting in one of Germany's first computer-generated buildings: The Siemens Pavilion at the Industrial Fair in Hannover in 1970. My work presents the close entanglement of politics, pedagogies, industries, technologies, and the arts, as they all have informed but also were informed through a new medium: the digital computer.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 71/12, Jun 2011. Proquest Document ID: 822194071.
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