Join us for a talk by Sean Keller to launch his new Graham-funded book Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form after Modernism recently published by University of Chicago Press.

Automatic Architecture examines architects’ enthusiasm for autonomic design methods in the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the new science of computing, these architects tried to replace individual intuition with methods that were thought to be objective, logical, or natural. The book closes with an analysis of our contemporary condition, suggesting paths for architectural practice that work through, but also beyond, the merely automatic.

Sean Keller is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture. His writing has been recognized by a Winterhouse Award for Design Writing and Criticism and by a Warhol Foundation Grant. He is the author of Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form After Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2018); and is currently completing a book on the art and architecture of the 1972 Munich Olympics (forthcoming, with Christine Mehring, Yale University Press).

Keller is Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Research, and Director of the MS program at the IIT College of Architecture. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Neubauer Collegium and formerly a Residential Scholar of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, both at the University of Chicago. He is a trustee of the Graham Foundation.

Image: Grid-shell forms determined by hanging chain nets, the Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stuttgart, 1974. Courtesy of ILEK, University of Stuttgart.