Abstract: 

From agriculture to urbanism, from household appliances to large infrastructural systems, the broad reconfiguration of the built environment in Europe (and further afield) can be traced back to the various industrial developments and their outcomes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And indeed, the factors that widely transformed society and its architecture throughout these centuries were less a set of formal accomplishments, but rather a set of new fields of scientific expertise (e.g. hygiene), processes (e.g. electrification or access to water), and expert knowledge (e.g. the professionalisation of architects, engineers, and urban planners). These new fields allowed for the regulation of the environment through a series of systems, devices, and techniques.The lecture will therefore focus less on people or buildings and more on those ‘things’ that have been the subject of modernization in architecture and urbanism over the last 200 years, such as the revolving door, the elevator, the glass, the clock, the duct, the insulation, and so on. The term “thing” includes both the concrete material object and the interests associated with the object. Understanding objects as “things” does not mean, therefore, to diminish significance to author architecture, but, on the contrary, to add reality, to understand them in terms of the complex, historically situated, diverse concerns in which they were created.