The Organizational Complex
Author: Martin, Reinhold
ISBN: 9780262633260
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 23 Sep 2005
Pages: 324
Format: Paperback / softback
b>A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War./b>p>The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape./p>p>In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image-of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system-is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively./p>p>Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns-images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages./p>
ISBN: 9780262633260
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 23 Sep 2005
Pages: 324
Format: Paperback / softback
b>A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War./b>p>The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape./p>p>In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image-of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system-is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively./p>p>Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns-images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages./p>
