In a 1967 report published in Eye: Magazine of the Yale Arts Association, Charles Moore, chairman of the department of architecture at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture (A&A), spoke to a “marked shift” then taking place. 01/11 Students and faculty have now become involved to an unprecedented extent, in real problems in all their complexity with a concern for social issues and more concern for its form and less concern for the shape of objects in it. To an increasing extent, design solutions are expected to come at least partly from interaction with the user Felicity D. Scott rather than from the imposition of an architect’s formal preconceptions. With the development of these concerns comes of “Vanguards” course an interest in new tools which are likely to make design more responsive to the complex needs of the world around us.1 Moore identified two new streams of architectural research and teaching within the school related to this shift: on the one hand, the rising fascination with the computer and techniques it facilitated and, on the other hand, a series of initiatives directed towards poverty in America, projects then focused on Appalachia, New Haven, and Harlem. This nexus of computerization and “a concern for social issues” was then informing vanguard practices within architecture, giving rise to research – along with objects, systems, and spaces – affiliated, knowingly or otherwise, with the complex and multifaceted regulatory apparatus emerging to govern the built environment and t t o c populations within it. S . ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhile frequently situated as a radical or D y t avant-garde departure from traditional formal i c i l and aesthetic concerns in architecture, the late- e F Ê sixties engagement with information 5 1 technologies and computerization as well as the 0 2 l rise of the “user” as an object of social scientific i r p knowledge – all under the rubric of a — “responsiveness” – can also be read as 4 6 symptomatic of the discipline’s functionalist # l ” response to a period of rapid technological a s n r d r transformation and of tumultuous social change, u a o j u for which it was indeed seeking new tools. In x g u n l a f what follows I want to trace some instances from - V e “ the late 1960s wherein the ambivalence of such “responsive” architectural strategies – resonating between attempts to forge departures from a dominant matrix of power and inscribing architecture more firmly within it – came to the fore at the A&A: at a moment when architects are again engaging the unstable forces of technological and material change while seeking new modes of social engagement, 04.07.15 / 14:02:40 EDT Charles Moore and Felix Drury in collaboration with Kent Bloomer, Project Argus: An Experiment in Light and Sound Environment, Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, Connecticut, 1968. Photo: Joel Katz. Charles Moore and Felix Drury in collaboration with Kent Bloomer, Project Argus: An Experiment in Light and Sound Environment, Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, Connecticut, 1968. Photo: Joel Katz. 04.07.15 / 14:02:40 EDT understanding the complex dynamics at work basic questions; it let us get on with our during this earlier period seems to warrant work in actualizing the program and making critical attention. Shifting fluidly and at times architectural decisions.4 indistinctly between forging participatory environments and testing social and The question of to whom the architect listened environmental control mechanisms, these and for whom they were working would remain at ambiguous experiments remind us of the the forefront of dissident actions at the school. complicated and politically charged milieu within 03/11 which architecture necessarily operates and to New Tools which it contributes. If these dynamics were Soon after, when outlining the School’s activities evident elsewhere, Yale during the remarkable for 1968–69, Dean Howard Sayre Weaver period under Moore offers a particularly cogent stressed that “relevance” was to be understood case study of the difficulties of negotiating this not only in social terms but also in technological milieu, and of the need to take responsibility for ones. In this respect too Yale sought to operate one’s position within such a shifting matrix.2 at the forefront of contemporary transformations, incorporating classes on Complex Needs “experimental architecture,” film, and video into At the time of his report, Moore and newly hired the curriculum and hosting an early World Game faculty member Kent Bloomer were, as Moore seminar run by R. Buckminster Fuller and faculty noted, launching the famous Yale Building member Herbert Matter. As Dean Weaver Project (an initiative which continues to this day) explained, with a spring 1967 studio for first-year Masters of Architecture students dedicated to designing, The term “relevance,” much maligned and and in turn constructing, the soon-to-be-much- often facilely used these days, has a celebrated Community Center in New Zion, particular significance for this School. As Kentucky. Drawing on the precedent (and often America develops into a post-industrial, the aesthetic) of recent Yale graduates David “technetronic” society, the impact of Sellers and Bill Rienecke of “Prickly Mountain” science and technology affects every fame, but redirecting those design-build aspect of the concerns and explorations of activities from for-profit speculative housing those who would aspire to assume ventures in rural Vermont to community responsibility for art and design – for buildings for low-income communities, students pondering man’s seeing and feeling and were encouraged to shift their attention from moving about, his relationship to his formal concerns to questions of social relevance environment, and his conscious ordering of and political engagement with less privileged his physical circumstances. The artist, persons and hence less familiar ways of life.3 If architect, and planner share today in widely championed as a radical pedagogical discovering and accommodating to t t o initiative, not all Yale students were satisfied c changes brought about by proliferating new S that such missionary zeal translated into . capacities in communications and D y actually engaging community concerns and t computer techniques. The challenge is not i c i participation. When in November 1968 a group of l merely to adopt technology nor to inject e F A&A students founded an alternative student Ê modern gadgetry into art or practice. It is 5 publication – a countercultural broadsheet titled 1 nothing less than to comprehend the 0 2 5 Novum Organum – it opened with the dissident l changing nature of experience itself. i r headline “Education for Alienation.” Asking p a “What was Yale Architecture trying to do in — This commitment to investigating the impact of a 4 Kentucky?” and for whom, it outlined a very 6 “technetronic” society on architecture and the # l different picture of the venture; Novum Organum ” arts translated, in the first instance, into hosting a s n r d stressed instead the slippage between the r an important early conference on u a o j project’s avowed social concerns and its more u computerization in architecture in April 1968, x g u n l a evident architectural (and formal) ones. f “Computer Graphics and Architecture,” hence - V Rhetorically asking “Didn’t you ever ask what e “ returning us to the other pole of Moore’s “marked they wanted?” the editors concluded: shift.”6 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊProduced in conjunction with this event – I don’t think so. I can’t say that we ever which included technical and professional found out what they wanted, much less considerations of computers as tools for drawing needed. And yet for some reason this didn’t – was an experimental inter-media installation: worry anyone É Our agreement to accept Project Argus: An Experiment in Light and Sound federal funds within the outline of their Environment. Designed by Moore and Felix Drury program released us from the need to ask in collaboration with Bloomer, and constructed 04.07.15 / 14:02:40 EDT by students, Project Argus was, in the first light show, by Pulsa É The pulses, both aural and instance, a two-story structure spanning visual, and flashing superimpositions inflicted a diagonally across the exhibition and jury space in dazzling bombardment.”11 the A&A building. (It took place on the occasion ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIllustrated by a bird’s-eye view of the of the tenth anniversary of a US atomic testing control panel driving this machine-enhanced operation over the South Atlantic of the same perceptual bombardment, Project Argus was the name.) In retrospect Project Argus appears to subject of a front-page article in Yale Daily News have been something like a testing ground for 04/11 that raised doubts not only about the primacy of Moore’s prescient speculations on the emergent its physical or architectural infrastructure but electronic environment, that “aspatial electronic also about its liberatory character. The authors, world” which he identified in his contribution to Thomas Hine and John Coots, noted that the Perspecta 11 of 1967, “Plug it in Ramses, and See “slightly varied electronic hums and É constantly if it Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It changing patterns of light reflected off the Unless it Works.”7 mirror-like mylar walls” produced an assault on ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊExemplary of changes in the school, this the retina and perceptual distortion and went on remarkable issue of Perspecta, edited by Peter to cite a series of responses to the encounter de Bretteville and Arthur Golding, also included: that implied the potential of a flip-side inherent “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” R. to the fluidity of the environment: “I feel as Buckminster Fuller, experimental composer John though I am in a sort of trance with the lights and Cage, media theorist Marshall McLuhan, people sort of suspended.” And, “I think it’s experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, critic dangerous, like the ultimate weapon.