Books by AnnMarie Brennan
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
The technological innovation and unprecedented physical growth of the cold war era permeated Amer... more The technological innovation and unprecedented physical growth of the cold war era permeated American life in every aspect and at every scale. From the creation of the military-industrial complex and the beginnings of suburban sprawl to the production of the ballpoint pen and the TV dinner, the artifacts of the period are a numerous and diverse as they are familiar. Over the past half-century, our awe at the advances of postwar society has softened to nostalgia, and our affection for its material culture has clouded our memories of the enormous spatial reorganizations and infrastructural transformations that changed American life forever.
Cold War Hot Houses casts a clear, even playful, eye on this pivotal time in history, examining topics as diverse as the creation of the interstate highway system and the shopping center, and the domestication of the national parks as well as the production of such seemingly mundane products as the drive-in theater, aluminum foil, and the king-size bed. The result is a vivid snapshot of American culture that still resonates today.
Routledge, 2019
Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, co... more Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century.
Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.
Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.
Book Chapters by AnnMarie Brennan
Do Ho Suh: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia 2022, 2022
Employing the characteristics of phenomenal transparency, Do Ho Suh's fabric artworks emphasize t... more Employing the characteristics of phenomenal transparency, Do Ho Suh's fabric artworks emphasize the different ways in which three-dimensional space has historically been represented in both Eastern and Western cultures. This essay focuses on an aspect of Suh's practice that engages with architecture, its traditions of spatial visual ambiguity in modern painting and architecture 'phenomenal transparency.'
Architecture & Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture, 2020
Rather than surrendering the ideals of the Radical Design movement, the work of the Italian desig... more Rather than surrendering the ideals of the Radical Design movement, the work of the Italian design groups Alchimia and Memphis attempted to radicalize by other means; to continue the battle over cultural and aesthetic values through the design of ugly, kitsch and ironic products for the marketplace. This approach, communicated in the Alchimia manifesto and Mendini’s 1979 essay ‘Per un’architettura banale,’ was influenced by the work of French communication theorist Abraham Moles. This essay revisits these texts and the previous debates in Italian design culture on kitsch and mass media and questions the role of media in formulating the aesthetic of Alchimia and Memphis and their characteristic kitsch style.
Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Past, 2019
This essay revisits a chapter in the history of the design and production of early computers in I... more This essay revisits a chapter in the history of the design and production of early computers in Italy. It looks at the creation of the Olivetti Elea 9003 and the company's manufacturing of numerically-controlled machine tools in order to examine their effect on transforming traditional modes of production. these machines, along with their theorization by writers and artists, brought about a new strategy of design - parametric thinking - to Olivetti designers. With these changes, members of the Workerist movement began to theorize the changing role of the factory worker, and discovered that the design and engineering of Olivetti computers and NC machines generated a new type of worker called 'the technician.' This essay illustrates the connection between the Olivetti designers and engineers who created these machines and the design of the new type of labor these new machines conjured. All of these events and characters converge around one of the major industries in Italy at the time: the Olivetti company.
The concept of dynamic forces shaping form in order to increase performance was the foundation of... more The concept of dynamic forces shaping form in order to increase performance was the foundation of Buckminster Fuller's most noted project, the Dymaxion House. While Fuller is best known for his dome structures, the Dymaxion House is perhaps the most important failed architecture project of the twentieth century. The house's significance, however, lies in the fact that Fuller reimagined the way people would live in the future, and introduced to the architectural profession new criteria by which to judge and assess housing design, which was according to a standard of improved performance, not unlike the manufacturing and performance standards of industrially-engineered objects such as boats, cars, and airplanes.
Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy, 2004
Papers by AnnMarie Brennan
Journal of Design, Business & Society, 2023
This article offers insights for architectural and design educators that teach emerging cinematic... more This article offers insights for architectural and design educators that teach emerging cinematic and filmmaking practices. Due to its interdisciplinary nature and its practice-based methodology, this article presents the research, pedagogy and practice for educators in the field of architecture and spatial design as well as other creative disciplines such as film, animation and digital media. The argument is substantiated by empirical observations and qualitative analysis of student filmmaking projects and first-hand experiments in a design studio environment. Direct observations made from experiments in a design studio environment in which more than 50 students were trained and numerous internationally awarded architectural films and animations were produced. The research outcomes illustrate how traditional orthographic drawing techniques can operate as highly useful instruments in the process of designing narrative pieces of digital media, animation and film about architectural projects. The pedagogical approach has the potential to have implications on the discourse, practice and pedagogy of the emerging common ground between architecture, spatial design principles, digital media and filmmaking. https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/dbs_00044_1
Journal of Design for Resilience in Architecture & Planning, 2022
The 1960 Italian film Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi Fratelli) is one of the greatest exe... more The 1960 Italian film Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi Fratelli) is one of the greatest exemplars of Italian post-war cinema. The film depicts the disintegration and deterritorialization of an immigrant family from Lucania, a southern Italian village in Basilicata, and their relocation to Milan. The director of the film, Luchino Visconti, continuously alludes to the protagonist's fascination with their hometown (paese). This nostalgic and wholesome image of paese contrasts with the ubiquitous alienation and exploitation in the industrial north. The film is replete with signs and metaphors which explicitly and implicitly reinforce the evident tension between the immigrant family and an industrialized metropolis. Based on an interview with Mario Licari, Visconti's assistant who accompanied him on location visits, this article offers an opportunity to revisit significant locations of the film such as Quartiere Fabio Filzi, the Alfa Romeo Factory, Milan Duomo, Ponte Della Ghisolfa, Parco Sempione, Stazione Centrale and Circolo Arci Bellezza. Underpinned by the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Gramsci and Andre Bazin this essay creates a theoretical framework that works in parallel with a detailed analysis of the scenes, original archival material, dialogues, places, and history of architecture of the locations. The article demonstrates how urban and architectural spaces not only accommodated the narrative of the film but shaped, twisted and structured the story of the masterpiece. The paper shows how Visconti succeeded in visualising a 'hidden' Milan that never appeared on the silver screen before Rocco and His Brothers.
RMIT Design Archives Journal, 2022
The article examines three key works by the Italian designer Anna Castelli Ferrieri (1918 – 2006)... more The article examines three key works by the Italian designer Anna Castelli Ferrieri (1918 – 2006), whose career began in urban planning and architecture yet proceeded to gain the most success within the field of industrial design. It foregrounds her interdisciplinary career, traversing professional boundaries between the fields of urban planning, architecture and industrial design through a socio-technical framework of the material objects that she designed. By investigating the commercial success of the Kartell 4970-84 Modular containers, the 4870 Stackable Chair, and the 4822-44 Stool, this research identifies a particular characteristic of Castelli Ferrieri’s design method; an approach which, this article argues, draws upon her education, knowledge, and experience in architecture. It is with these projects that we can see how Castelli Ferrieri attempted to create, with the limitations of manufacturing processes and the characteristics of materials: a tectonics of plastic. https://issuu.com/rmitdesignarchives/docs/rda_journal_26_12.1_issuu
Journal of Architecture, 2021
This article examines the Labyrinth, a multi-screen pavilion created by the National Film Board o... more This article examines the Labyrinth, a multi-screen pavilion created by the National Film Board of Canada for the Montréal World Exposition in 1967. Within the Labyrinth, audiences were corralled through three chambers, each containing immersive multimedia environments that were designed to represent the chapters of an essential human life. The National Film Board envisaged the Labyrinth as a ‘new kind of instrument for communication […] created by the marriage of two ordinarily unrelated fields — the art of cinema and the art of architecture’. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the exact nature of this marriage of mediums. We will specifically focus on assessing the ways by which architectural space curated the phenomenological and epistemological relation that the audience had with the cinematic presentations in each chamber. Based on archival and primary sources, our research traces the design development of the Labyrinth and interprets its significance by employing Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of visual and acoustic space. As such, the article demonstrates how the Labyrinth modulated the balance between meaningful and affective modes of communication within its telling of the human story.
Journal of Design History, 2019
Just as the capabilities of machine tool design influenced the aesthetic form of streamlined indu... more Just as the capabilities of machine tool design influenced the aesthetic form of streamlined industrial design products during the mechanical age, the embedded curves and splines of digital software employed by architects today originated in the offices of automobile and aeroplane manufacturers from the post-war era. The use and reproduction of smooth, curvilinear forms would not appear in the field of architecture until many decades after their development within industrial design. The current relationship between architecture and industrial design is forged through the innovative use of Computer Numerical Control fabrication and the parametric procedures and software invented for its use. This article investigates the history of designing and fabricating complex, curved surfaces in industrial design and architecture in order to establish the technological and theoretical links between these two fields. It involves the transfer of technological knowledge amongst a diverse cast of designers, engineers and architects from multiple continents that took place over a period of 40 years. Moreover, this research claims that the origins of parametric architectural design can be found in this moment of developing and programming numerically controlled machines.
Magazine del Festival dell'Architettura, 2018
The journal that would have the most lasting impact in establishing a coherent movement of Postmo... more The journal that would have the most lasting impact in establishing a coherent movement of Postmodern American architecture was a student-edited journal named 'Perspecta,' no. 9/10, published by the Yale School of Architecture and edited by Robert A.M. Stern, accomplished architect and former Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University, He assembled a cadre of author-architects to contribute to the journal, a group who would go on to shape the U.S. architectural scene for the next 20 years. His editorial objective was to present new emerging 'talent', which consisted of young architects who defined a new American movement in architecture. Three significant contributors of this particular 'Perspecta' issue were 'undiscovered' Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, and, most interestingly, Romaldo Giurgola, who was an Italian architect and academic but had immigrated to the U.S. after receiving the Italian Fulbright scholarships. Looking back at this moment, it is intriguing to discover what defined the work featured in these magazines as 'American,' especially since one of its central figures, Giurgola, established his reputation as an educator teaching architectural history and theory subjects based on Italian precedents and treatises at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Design and Culture The Journal of the Design Studies Forum
This paper revisits the creative wo... more Design and Culture The Journal of the Design Studies Forum
This paper revisits the creative work of the Australian magazine Oz and its founding editors Martin Sharp (1942-2013) and Richard Neville (1941-2016). Established in Sydney on April Fool's Day in 1963 as a satirical magazine, the editors migrated to London in 1967, where the UK version of Oz garnered its status as the underground field guide for enlightened hippies. This paper claims that the visual and rhetorical editorial strategy of Oz, coupled with the technologies employed in its making, transformed the medium of the magazine to be more than simply a cipher for hippie life. In fact, it became a platform for immersive, multimedia experiences.
Journal of Design History, 2015
Contemporary discourse on the changing modes of production by Autonomist Marxist theorists such a... more Contemporary discourse on the changing modes of production by Autonomist Marxist theorists such as Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and Maurizio Lazzarato provides insights into the ongoing shift from an economy based on the material labour of producing physical goods, to one served increasingly by immaterial labour. In light of these texts, this paper revisits a point of origin of Autonomist political thought at the Olivetti factory in Italy during the 1960s, where the problems of a programmed, cybernetic human/machine assembly line were first observed. It endeavours to examine both the objects that were created as a result of immaterial labour practices as well as the machines which may have actually played a key role in forming contemporary modes of immaterial labour. This is accomplished by examining the case studies that demonstrate the various iterations of an idea essential to the concept of immaterial labour – the practice of programming. Featuring a unique constellation of Olivetti products from the 1960s, the purpose of this text is to add historical relevance and theoretical rigour to these seemingly disparate series of objects, and to present a potential genealogy of immaterial labour brought about by the design and making of Olivetti machines.
Candide: the Journal of Architectural Knowledge, Sep 1, 2014
An urban design fiction co-authored with Lasse Kilvaer.
In a time where architects are offering... more An urban design fiction co-authored with Lasse Kilvaer.
In a time where architects are offering the appearance of a naturalized built environment, Melbourne Australia is faced with an uncontrollable organism that reorganizes and re-appropriates the concrete matter of the city. The organism, nicknamed Muronoma by locals, slowly eats its way through living rooms and cubicles, leaving webbed, coral-like tunnels in its wake—spaces which provide habitat for a new wilderness in the heart of the city. American journalist Gabriella Canui travels to Melbourne to write a feature article on the organism and its consequences on the daily lives of Melbournites, but goes missing and never delivers her piece. After her disappearance, the CIA and their local ally the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) suspects Gabriella of joining the Architecture and Urbanism Bio-Terrorist Underground Syndicate, a.k.a. AUBTUS. As UNESCO is conducting a larger investigation on the Muronoma phenomenon, they request the CIA dossier on Gabriella Canui, including printouts of her notes and a series of transcribed interviews. The origin of Chemotaxopolis is told through these documents.
Interstices, Nov 1, 2011
The traumatic disruption of everyday life caused by World War II and the Reconstruction that foll... more The traumatic disruption of everyday life caused by World War II and the Reconstruction that followed reconfigured the relationship between the “inside” and “outside” in post-war Rome. This theme was projected onto the Neorealist screen in different forms, rupturing the connection between centre and periphery, domestic and urban. This paper analyses four Neorealist films for their structure, layered meanings, and discourses to uncover the urban politics at play in post-war Rome. It examines the Neorealist city in these films through the cognitive and temporal theoretical frameworks of Kevin Lynch and Gilles Deleuze.
Inflection: Melbourne School of Design Journal
When the editors of this first issue of Inflection sat down to write a proposal for a new student... more When the editors of this first issue of Inflection sat down to write a proposal for a new student-edited journal, they explained the reasons behind their initiative. The purpose of this publication would be to "harness the multiple meanings and nuances in a moment of change as it exists in the Melbourne School of Design," as well as signify the moment of transition from undergraduate studies to a professional school.
Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X - 197X, 2010
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Books by AnnMarie Brennan
Cold War Hot Houses casts a clear, even playful, eye on this pivotal time in history, examining topics as diverse as the creation of the interstate highway system and the shopping center, and the domestication of the national parks as well as the production of such seemingly mundane products as the drive-in theater, aluminum foil, and the king-size bed. The result is a vivid snapshot of American culture that still resonates today.
Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.
Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.
Book Chapters by AnnMarie Brennan
Papers by AnnMarie Brennan
This paper revisits the creative work of the Australian magazine Oz and its founding editors Martin Sharp (1942-2013) and Richard Neville (1941-2016). Established in Sydney on April Fool's Day in 1963 as a satirical magazine, the editors migrated to London in 1967, where the UK version of Oz garnered its status as the underground field guide for enlightened hippies. This paper claims that the visual and rhetorical editorial strategy of Oz, coupled with the technologies employed in its making, transformed the medium of the magazine to be more than simply a cipher for hippie life. In fact, it became a platform for immersive, multimedia experiences.
In a time where architects are offering the appearance of a naturalized built environment, Melbourne Australia is faced with an uncontrollable organism that reorganizes and re-appropriates the concrete matter of the city. The organism, nicknamed Muronoma by locals, slowly eats its way through living rooms and cubicles, leaving webbed, coral-like tunnels in its wake—spaces which provide habitat for a new wilderness in the heart of the city. American journalist Gabriella Canui travels to Melbourne to write a feature article on the organism and its consequences on the daily lives of Melbournites, but goes missing and never delivers her piece. After her disappearance, the CIA and their local ally the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) suspects Gabriella of joining the Architecture and Urbanism Bio-Terrorist Underground Syndicate, a.k.a. AUBTUS. As UNESCO is conducting a larger investigation on the Muronoma phenomenon, they request the CIA dossier on Gabriella Canui, including printouts of her notes and a series of transcribed interviews. The origin of Chemotaxopolis is told through these documents.
Cold War Hot Houses casts a clear, even playful, eye on this pivotal time in history, examining topics as diverse as the creation of the interstate highway system and the shopping center, and the domestication of the national parks as well as the production of such seemingly mundane products as the drive-in theater, aluminum foil, and the king-size bed. The result is a vivid snapshot of American culture that still resonates today.
Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.
Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.
This paper revisits the creative work of the Australian magazine Oz and its founding editors Martin Sharp (1942-2013) and Richard Neville (1941-2016). Established in Sydney on April Fool's Day in 1963 as a satirical magazine, the editors migrated to London in 1967, where the UK version of Oz garnered its status as the underground field guide for enlightened hippies. This paper claims that the visual and rhetorical editorial strategy of Oz, coupled with the technologies employed in its making, transformed the medium of the magazine to be more than simply a cipher for hippie life. In fact, it became a platform for immersive, multimedia experiences.
In a time where architects are offering the appearance of a naturalized built environment, Melbourne Australia is faced with an uncontrollable organism that reorganizes and re-appropriates the concrete matter of the city. The organism, nicknamed Muronoma by locals, slowly eats its way through living rooms and cubicles, leaving webbed, coral-like tunnels in its wake—spaces which provide habitat for a new wilderness in the heart of the city. American journalist Gabriella Canui travels to Melbourne to write a feature article on the organism and its consequences on the daily lives of Melbournites, but goes missing and never delivers her piece. After her disappearance, the CIA and their local ally the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) suspects Gabriella of joining the Architecture and Urbanism Bio-Terrorist Underground Syndicate, a.k.a. AUBTUS. As UNESCO is conducting a larger investigation on the Muronoma phenomenon, they request the CIA dossier on Gabriella Canui, including printouts of her notes and a series of transcribed interviews. The origin of Chemotaxopolis is told through these documents.
In designing the Synthesis 45 series, Sottsass drew upon his experience designing Italy’s first mainframe computer, the Olivetti Elea 9003. The final result was a modular-based system designed to be like a type of game or kit of interchangeable parts: flexible within a set of parameters, easily assembled, delivered, and then re-assembled and re-configured within a configuration in a client’s laboratory or office basement. This paper presents the history of Sottsass and his collaborators in creating the Olivetti Synthesis 45.
This paper explores three potent sites within the magazine that demonstrate the manner in which the editors were able to counter the status quo through the process of joke making: a modernist building, the medium of the poster, and a magic theatre. These sites are poignant moments that coincidence with a shift within architecture culture, where the built environment was beginning to be 'read' as a text. The emergence of this structuralist evaluation occurs throughout the pages of Oz, suggesting an alternative origin to post-modern approaches in architecture that arose as a consequence of the relationship between the magazine page and the creation of alternative environments to counter conservative hegemonic culture.