UCLA

During the course of the 1960s, computers and information networks made their appearance in the public imagination. To architects on the cusp of architecture's postmodern turn, information technology offered new forms, metaphors, and techniques by which modern architecture's technological and utopian basis could be reasserted. Yet by the end of the 1970s, when computers and networks fully appeared in the workplace, schools, and even homes, architects had all but abandoned information technology as a source of architectural ideas, relegating computers to a supporting role in architectural practice where they performed only the most mundane of tasks, one from which they would emerge only two decades later.

This dissertation argues that architecture in the 1970s did not in fact retreat from information technology but rather that the changing nature of information technology demanded new modes of architectural thinking that destabilized the traditional discursive function of the machine underpinning modern architecture. It examines various ways in which information technology influenced architectural thinking during this troubled period of transition through the historical treatment of a single case study, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (or Beaubourg, as it was and is still known). It considers on the building's role in a more general program of social and cultural reorganization in the information society, from the original conception of the building as an enormous information processing machine to the reception of Piano and Rogers' building in the years following its completion. In chapters examining the informational ideas in the competition brief, the architectural responses to the competition, the sources for the winning scheme by Piano and Rogers and its relationship to technological utopianism in British architecture, the development of the final building and its challenge to the megastructure paradigm, and the privileging of the user in new techniques of architectural programming first deployed in a cultural building at Beaubourg, this dissertation tries to identify a broad spectrum of modes of engagement between architecture and information technology beyond the tool-based approaches prevalent today.