Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and chair of the PhD program in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. In addition to his activities in Boston, he is closely connected to Tallinn and the Estonian Academy of Arts, where Antoine Picon supervises PhD students and advises the Faculty of Architecture. Recently, the university awarded him an honorary doctoral degree—Doctor Honoris Causa—for your achievements and support.
These days, to be is to be connected. Electricity, heat, road and street networks, internet connections, and water supply—it is as if all these intersecting and sometimes overlapping networks have become basic human rights. If these networks function well, our dependence on them goes unnoticed—we rarely take a moment to acknowledge the energy that travels across the sky, through underground and underwater pipelines, through wall cables, into millions of devices. On the other hand, when something disrupts the functioning of these networks, be it military aggression by a tyrannical neighbour, a sharp rise in prices, or catastrophic weather events, the political, economic, ethical, and often also spatial dimensions of these structures suddenly become apparent.
The top-level conference held at the Estonian Academy of Arts during the Tallinn Architecture Biennale dealt with the effect of digitality on architecture, production processes and society.
The translation of human thinking and machine thinking in architectural design is ambiguous, their mediation requires the architect to ask the questions “How come?” and “What for?” over and over again in the process.
