Systems aesthetics: Architectural theory at the University of Cambridge, 1960--1975 (Massachusetts, Peter Eisenman, Lionel March, Leslie Martin, Christopher Alexander)

Following World War II, many architects became fascinated by computers, by mathematical analysis, and by the idea of grounding design in logic. This dissertation examines the influence of such interests on architectural thinking in the 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on influential research at the University of Cambridge that grew out of the university's wartime work in computing. I argue that a new understanding of architecture---what I term the "systems aesthetic"---emerged from Cambridge during this period. Whether enacted in the formalism of Peter Eisenman or the methodology of Lionel March, the systems aesthetic is thoroughly syntactic, anti-semantic, and iconoclastic. Ideally, for the systems aesthetic, there are no architectural figures, objects, meanings---only relationships and forms.; Both as an electronic tool and as a conceptual model computing exerted a profound effect on architectural theory and forms in the 1960s. I show how the computer contributed to the collapse of functionalism and to the development of a new approach to architectural design that was based on the sequential use of transformational operations such as duplication, rotation, scaling, and skewing. Taken up by the architectural avant-garde in the 1970s and 1980s, this approach is widespread in architecture today.; The dissertation has three main sections. Chapter 1, "The Scientific Sixties," lays out the context of postwar English architecture, its fraught relationship to science, the professional anxieties produced by the war, and the growth of the Cambridge architecture school under Leslie Martin. Chapter 2, "Lone Scholars," examines the influence of the new scientific inclination at Cambridge on the early work of Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander. Chapter 3, "Systems Laboratories," gives a history of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Study at Cambridge, its research, and the work of its director, Lionel March. In a conclusion I consider the implications of the systems aesthetic as a general trend and its connection to later developments such as the "topological" architecture of recent years.