This session explores architecture’s place in the postwar research university. Specifically, it examines academic architects’ adoption of scientific ideals and methods, their crafting of a scientific imaginary of architecture, and these trans-actions’ lasting effects on the discipline’s ever fluctuant intellectual and institutional definitions. Pertinent historical scholarship often portrays architecture’s postwar realignment —its flirtation with mathematics, computing, and the basic sciences— as an uncritical subscription to a culture of scientism, and rejects their outputs as pseudoscientific. This session tactically suspends these categorical judgments to consider architecture’s self-fashioning as a science in a new historical and historiographic key. Taking as a premise the situated, contingent, and non-monolithic nature of both architectural and scientific practices, we ask: How did local epistemic and institutional cultures reflect in architects’ efforts to endow their field with scientific legitimacy? What images of postwar science are outlined by architects’ invocation of scientific theories and practices? What does the case of architecture, a field traditionally dominated by vocational traits, offer to debates about the demarcation between science, non-science, and pseudoscience? What analytical tools may best assist us in addressing the research university’s endemic modes of knowledge production and dissemination? What non-archival sites of historical inquiry (oral histories, ethnography, media archaeologies, etc.) may we explore in pursuit of these questions? What common historical and methodological ground can we draw between architectural history and the history of science? Ultimately, the session seeks to consider mutualities and exchanges between architecture and science as an open field for historical and historiographic inquiry.
