02 TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION AND ARCHITECTURAL ADAPTATIONS Direct technological disruption Design tools Buildings tools & materials Indirect technological disruption Socio-economic transformations
Mathieu Bujnowskyj / @jykswonjub Version 1.00 “Kernel” 160108 / Basel, CH
Architecture being a cultural, and in the same time a technical discipline, the majority of important changes that happened throughout the architectural history were related to technological disruption events. These architectural shifts are resulting to direct technological impacts and also to indirect ones, more diffuse but not necessary less influential. Direct technological disruption The direct technological disruption concerns the innovations which are directly impacting the architectural practice, which have consequent transformative power on the architecture and also possible transform the design and the construction process leading to it as a resulting product. Direct technological disruption concerns new tools, new materials and new construction techniques. The invention of new design tools impacted the work and perception of architects, giving them the opportunity to explore further the potentials of architecture. The democratisation of paper and tracing tools delocalised the design phase from the construction site at the end of the medieval period. The study of geometry and perspective in the European renaissance was at the origin of the complex set of rules and proportions inscribed in the classical language of architecture for centuries. The development of advanced mathematics and physics in the late eighteenth century initiated the idea of an architecture based on performance rather than absolute proportions; this architecture was developed in relation to the new languages of iron construction. The last decade of the twentieth century brought powerful digital tools to architects, allowing them to further explore and visualise in real-time difficult non-euclidian geometries. It empowered them to design optimised shapes and structures with the help of complex algorithms and digital simulations.
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Iron Profile and Assemblage element from the 19th century
Complex structural optimisation advanced digital simulations (finite elements analysis)
Technological innovations in the field of construction, such as the apparition of new building tools or materials allowed new kinds of architecture and aesthetics. The mastery of steam power and mechanical machinery in the beginnings of the first industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century led to a large-scale iron production that was not possible before. It is considered as a technological disruption because the physical superiority of iron over other material like wood or stone propagated the use of iron elements in the construction industry and directly impacted the architecture of this period. The use of Iron was at the origin of new construction techniques like bolting riveting standardised elements. Larger structural spans combined with industrial flat-glass allowed brighter open-spaces,and new aesthetics were developed by architects, illustrating the big changes of their time. Similar phenomena happened later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the mastery of steel production and welding assemblage, and the large improvement of reinforced concrete related to the second industrial revolution.
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Indirect technological disruption From that observation, it is necessary to understand that technology also disrupted architecture in indirect ways through a series of economic or societal transformations. As economist Nicholas Carr explains: “Technologies shapes economics, and economics shape society. It’s a messy process—when you combine technologies, economics and human nature, you get a lot of variables—but it has an inexorable logic.1» As presented in the Prolog if technological penetration is shaping the economics and cultural paradigms of a historical period, it predictably impacts architecture as well because architecture is answering the societal concerns and absorbing the culture of its time. On this viewpoint, the mastery of steam power and the large iron production from the first industrial revolution had also disrupted architecture indirectly with the development of new programs and architectural typologies. The steam engine and steel fabrication led to the Steam Locomotive… and to the creation of national networks of rail transport. It created the need for a new type of urban infrastructure: the train station with its significant impact on occidental cities configurations. Going further, this technological disruption initiated the beginnings of a society of advanced logistics with a new need for infrastructures like railways, bridges, or buildings like warehouses, factories, etc… that constituted a large part of the industrial city of the nineteenth century in Europe.
Crown Street Station Crown Street railway station, is the first terminal railway station of 1
CARR, Nicholas, The Big Switch, 2009—Reflexion in opposition of Lewis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power, p.27
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the world, built in 1830 in Liverpool. The fast propagation of railway transportation in the UK pushed the apparition of several train stations across the territory. Crown Street station, as the first large “terminus”, brought a new architectural element unseen until then : the contemporary “train shed” as showed in the engraving. However, these stations also evolved very fast, making the first ones not adapted to an ever expanding technology. The Crown Street station was demolished only 6 years after its construction and replaced by the actual Liverpool Lime Street Station built in the center of the city with more than 10 times the original surface.
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