Making the World Discrete. Workshop on Methods

Invited lecturers: Prof. Alla Vronskaya, Prof. Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Prof. Cristobal Amunátegui

 

This workshop invites three leading scholars of architectural history - Prof. Alla Vronskaya, Prof. Zeynep Çelik Alexander, and Prof. Cristóbal Amunátegui - to present and discuss their work on the intersections between architecture and numerical regimes since the nineteenth century. As we learn from mid-twentieth-century anthropologists, counting is always rooted in material practices, from body techniques such as finger counting, to objectification of numbering with devices such as khipu, abacus, or ledgers. With the rise of liberal societies in the mid-eighteenth century, new regimes of calculation emerged to tame the growing social and economic uncertainties that followed the toppling of older political and productive orders. While histories of probability, statistics, and accounting have long addressed for the ways risk began to be managed via quantification, the material and spatial dimensions of this process have received comparatively less attention. 

 

Joining a host of new architectural histories concerned with these developments, we aim to bring together scholarship that grounds numbers in material and spatial practices. The course guests will present their ongoing research on histories of risk management, statistics, probability, accounting, and other such actuarial practices. Special attention will be paid to the objects of these bureaucracies, ranging from paper data sets to buildings housing counting offices and infrastructures designed to store and quantify materials and commodities. Similarly, the discussions will aim at identifying the hierarchies and resistances embedded in the history of these architectures of counting.

This workshop welcomes doctoral students in the history of architecture working on the long modern period, ranging from 1750 to 1950, with any geographic focus, whether at the center or periphery of the commercial and administrative empires that emerged during this two-hundred-years historical arc. 

 

Students are expected to attend the lectures by the guests and complete the reading assignments in advance. They will also be expected to participate actively in the reading discussions. This workshop is offered by the SNSF-founded project "Data Centers: An Environmental History of Information" lead by Alfredo Thiermann, Xavier Nueno, and Pedro Correa.