As it transited from tech to university in the late 1960s, Carnegie Mellon started the School of Urban and Public Affairs (SUPA) with the ambition to “deal in a scientific manner with problems of the public sector” and help build the “civil-industrial complex.” Funded by gifts from the Richard King Mellon Trusts and the Aluminum Co. of America, the new school sought the confluence of disciplines such as political science, anthropology, sociology, and urban planning into issues of public administration and —crucially— urban renewal. Aligned with its interdisciplinary mission, the school organized three institutes in cooperation with other Schools: The Institute of Physical Planning, with Architecture; the Urban Systems Institute, with Industrial Administration; and the Joint Urban Science Information Institute, with University of Pittsburgh’s Public and International Affairs. In this paper I draw from archival materials, interviews, and historical software reconstructions to offer a detailed picture of the intersection of architectural and scientific sensibilities at SUPA with a special focus on the work by faculty and students at the Institute for Physical Planning between 1969 and 1974. Examining it as an illustration of the broader intellectual realignment of architecture in the postwar, and drawing methodological insight from recent experimental reconstructions and media archaeologies, I will show the IPP as one site where a self-consciously scientific architectural discourse emerged in the United States; discuss its technical and institutional supports; and document the role it played in articulating new architectural identities and imaginaries, shedding light on their generative contradictions and ongoing legacies.
