Technology and Place
Technology and Place
Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm
Developing "sustainable" architectural and agricultural technologies was the intent behind Blueprint Farm, an experimental agricultural project designed to benefit farm workers displaced by the industrialization of agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Yet, despite its promise, the very institutions that created Blueprint Farm terminated the project after just four years (1987-1991).
In this book, Steven Moore demonstrates how the various stakeholders' competing definitions of "sustainability," "technology," and "place" ultimately doomed Blueprint Farm. He reconstructs the conflicting interests and goals of the founders, including Jim Hightower and the Texas Department of Agriculture, Laredo Junior College, and the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, and shows how, ironically, they unwittingly suppressed the self-determination of the very farm workers the project sought to benefit. From the instructive failure of Blueprint Farm, Moore extracts eight principles for a regenerative architecture, which he calls his "nonmodern manifesto."
I consider this book the most insightful discussion of place and technology I have encountered over the past twenty years of thinking about place and its role in modern society. . . . I think that it will create an intellectual stir and give a significant boost to scholarship bringing together social science and the design professions.
- Foreword by Kenneth Frampton
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1. A Question of Categories
- Modernity, Technology, and Place
- Critical Regionalism
- Toward a Nonmodern Alternative
- Chapter 2. A Reconstruction from the File
- Chapter 3. The Local History of Space
- Place, Technology, and Technological Networks
- La Frontera Chica
- Narrowing Horizons of Spatial Discourse
- Chapter 4. Conflicting Intentions
- The Concept of Intentionality
- Networks of Intention
- Uninhabited Intentions
- Chapter 5. Technological Interventions
- Traditions in Science and Technology Studies
- Making Problems Go Away
- Democracy and Participation
- Chapter 6. Reception
- Reception Theory
- Mixed Receptions
- Received Paradigms
- Chapter 7. Reproduction
- The Production of Facts
- Spreading Claims
- Sublime Reproductions
- Chapter 8. Eight Propositions
- Summary Propositions
- The Nonmodern Thesis
- Eight Points for Regenerative Architecture: A Nonmodern Manifesto
- Appendix. The Things Themselves
- Notes
- References
- Index
