Larry D Busbea
Larry D. Busbea is associate professor of art history at the University of Arizona, Tucson where his research focuses on the interactions of architecture, art and critical theory in Europe and the United States after WWII. His critical essays and reviews have appeared in October, The RIBA Journal of Architecture, Design Issues, The Architect’s Newspaper, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. His book Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970, was published by MIT Press in 2007.
His current work addresses itself to a historical moment at which the concept of "environment" was at the height of its aesthetic, technical, and discursive elaboration as a potential object and method of design. These initiatives sought to synthesize ecological data from the fields of biology, systems theory, psychology, and anthropology with modernist legacies of total design. In these, space itself was reconceived as an apparatus; as a responsive environment sensitive to the smallest input or modification from its newly-sensitized and responsive inhabitants.
A book relating to this material is forthcoming:
The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/proxemics-and-the-architecture-of-social-interaction/9781941332672
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Responsive_Environment/fVnHDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
His current work addresses itself to a historical moment at which the concept of "environment" was at the height of its aesthetic, technical, and discursive elaboration as a potential object and method of design. These initiatives sought to synthesize ecological data from the fields of biology, systems theory, psychology, and anthropology with modernist legacies of total design. In these, space itself was reconceived as an apparatus; as a responsive environment sensitive to the smallest input or modification from its newly-sensitized and responsive inhabitants.
A book relating to this material is forthcoming:
The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/proxemics-and-the-architecture-of-social-interaction/9781941332672
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Responsive_Environment/fVnHDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
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Papers by Larry D Busbea
Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction presents selections from Hall’s extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science. Together these materials illuminate a moment in American history when new spatial practices arose to challenge the environmental conditions of cultural, political, and racial identity.
While architecture’s complicity in processes of subjectivation is commonly acknowledged as a function of modernity, dominant (Marxist) histories have mostly eschewed considerations of the individual subject, dismissing it as an alibi for the interpellation of broader social categories. This panel asks instead how architectural history might deal with these categories not as fixed, but as alternating patterns of self and collective, personal and political, secular and sacred, inside and outside. We welcome papers that explore how religio-therapeutic practices have informed and/or are informed by post-WWII architectural culture, but we are also interested in earlier iterations of architecture’s engagement in questions of therapy, wellness, mind-body intersections, self-development, psychology, consciousness, and personality.