Resumen de Correlations instrumental architectures of the SSA and Knud Lönberg-Holm 1927-1953
This thesis correlates influences across time of core members of Structural Study Associates, a coterie of productivist architects who joined Buckminster Fuller's takeover of Shelter Magazine in 1932. Propagating a radical technologist manifesto, particularly apt to transforming in relation to postwar systems and communication theory, already in the early 1930's, the SSA introduced seemingly postmodernist neologisms such as performance, ephemeralization, environmental controls, emergence, emergency, biologic design, networks, flows, decentralization, ecology and entropy. Promoting a research based, macro-scale approach, their vision of advanced techno-society included a nomadic dwelling unit and data driven design predicated on freely deployed information. They promoted architecture as instruments, the outcome of the service minded mediation of technology for the benefit of the community.
Some later projects by SSA cohorts can be seen as particular case studies of a proto-history of informational architectures, emerging from the journal's context and the depression era's economic and social crisis. Beyond Buckminster Fuller's apparent protagonism, this study explores ramifications of the SSA's extremist credo, impacting everyday design through the work of little known Danish émigré Knud Lonberg-Holm. Affiliated with European vanguards in the 20's, in the US, he abandoned practice to rehaul the building industry, a central aim of SSA, while serving as CIAM's east coast delegate, 1928-1958. His professional trajectory of largely anonymous collaborations, concentrated on organizational assemblies and information technologies within a specialized field. Instrumental architectures transformed quotidian practice in the 1930's as diagrammatic scientific protocols supplanted compositional modes.
Part I of this work situates the SSA within American technology discourses of the era, examining their proximity to coeval technocratic movements and their common techno-lineage, including the assimilation of economist Thorstein Veblen's ideas into architecture and urban initiatives. Distinguishing the SSA from direct disciples, Lewis Mumford and members of Technocracy Inc, who also drew on network and systems paradigms, the modern conception of technology as well as Fuller's formulation of Comprehensive Anticipatory Design are correlated to Veblen.
Part II charts the transmutation of Shelter, site of divisive discourse between groups promoting modernism, from Beaux Arts to International Style, as broadened institutional and commercial realms intersected with architecture. The role of aesthetics vs. technology was debated while the SSA's counter position remapped the country as networked resource, communication, and transportation infrastructures. Foregrounding the depression, they mobilized Veblian categories against the obsolete building industry and urban centers. Emergency projects targeted vacant skyscrapers, monuments of capitalism's collapse, for reuse as instruments of collective housing. A crisis response, the prefabricated house was set within a growing field of competitive alternatives.
Part 3 positions Lönberg-Holm as Fuller's fellow traveler, surveying his anonymous history and invisible architectures, 1927-1953. With an insistence on collectivity, he instigated modernism within corporate America's architectural apparatus including Architectural Record's Technical News from 1929 and in reformulating Sweets Catalog, an essential compilation of fabricated building components, as director of design and research from 1932. Standardization was considered a radical endeavor in a mass technological society. With Czech graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar, he theorized the field of information design. With Theodore Larson, he sought postwar CIAM as a platform for a dynamic database of information related to community design and environmental controls, comparable to similar pre and postwar encyclopedic world projects, based on the centralization and transmission of knowledge, including Fuller's Geoscope, 1962.
Drawing on primary archival research, this work revisits a well known period, episodes and figures, bringing to light unexamined correlations regarding architecture, science, advanced technology and information normally attributed only to Buckminster Fuller, that carries contemporary resonance. The Postscript speculates upon the ramifications of the SSA's positions regarding the instrumentality of architecture and technology and their standards of serviceability serving the world community.
