Michael Osman: 'A Material Without Qualities' (Apr 28)

This lecture is about steel: its chemical composition, its shapes, and their assembly. These were the ways to define this material as a medium for construction. And any construction material requires standards--that is, normalized methods for its use. Modernists looked to the standardization of steel as a way to produce purified architectural forms for industrialized society. Taking this material as universal, however, occluded the fact that steel was never a stable material and its standards were constantly changing. How can history help explain modernist architecture once we understand that this industrialized material never produced a stable essence? Can the history of skyscrapers, for example, be revised based on the knowledge that steel was always a material without qualities?

MICHAEL OSMAN
teaches courses in history and theory at UCLA . His scholarship focuses on the technological, environmental, and economic aspects of architectural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published in Log, Perspecta and Cabinet as well as in Governing by Design (2012). He is a founding member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative .

Response by Frida Rosenberg