EKA 105 open lecture: Reinhold Martin

The new honorary doctor of Estonian Academy of Arts, prof Reinhold Martin (Columbia University) will give an open lecture “Order and Disorder: On Knowledge, Society, and Architecture.”

Reinhold Martin about the lecture:
This talk will consider the interplay of order and disorder, mediated by architecture. Order, in the sense we will explore, makes the world knowable and governable, through the suppression, management, or containment of disorder, which includes entropy or breakdown as well as willful disruption. Architecture, as one of many media, rather than simply a representation or an instrument, operates topologically and epistemologically, arranging and rearranging insides and outsides, drawing and redrawing lines. The lines we will consider distribute forms of knowledge, and the things they seek to know and govern, simultaneously joining what they distinguish. To trace this, the talk will sketch one particular genealogical sequence through the design of campuses, both corporate and academic, beginning on the US side of the Cold War. The larger aim will be to rethink the problem of order and disorder at the intersection of knowledge, society, and architecture, with specific reference to the political economy of design as a will-to-order of its own.