In Service
Abstract
As an architectural historian interested in issues of building perfor- mance, engineering, and integrated practice, I was excited to hear about TAD and I looked forward to the inaugural Call for Papers, but when VIRAL came, it surprised me. This is the passage that r Figure 1. Centre Pompidou, by Richard caught my attention: Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Peter Rice, 1973- 77. Photograph by Anthony Denzer. … nineteenth-century architects who neglected to consider Figure 2. Palm House at Kew Gardens, by the impact of emerging industrialized technologies of cast Decimus Burton and Richard Turner, 184 4 - 48. Photograph by Anthony Denzer. iron, glass, and steel; and who hesitated to acknowledge the many ways they were destined to redefine architecture? Figure 3. Rockefeller Building, Cleveland, It was fifty years before architects embraced ferrous met - Ohio, by Knox & Elliot, c.190 0. Credit: Li- brary of Congress, Prints and Photographs als and sheets of plate glass in service to design, and this, Division, Detroit Publishing Company Pho- only after historian Sigfried Giedion conceptualized their tograph Collection. potential. The phrase in service to design is striking. If a new technology or material operates in service to design, subservient to design,