Page 15 - Are-You-a-Model?

16:45 Eliza Pertigkiozoglou McGill University
Building models of practice:
The OXSYS software for hospital
design, 1969–1974
In 1969, the Oxford Regional Hospital Board approached a newly-form consultancy named Applied Research of Cambridge (ARC) —a spin- off of the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture—asking them to develop soft- ware for their hospital design and construction system known as the Oxford Method. The British authority had spent the past five years outlining this standardized system in numerous handbooks, cataloguing hundreds of building components and plan typologies. ARC’s assignment was to trans- late an already-rationalized building system into the computational descriptions of the OXSYS software. However, this translation task soon became a problem of structuring information’s access and retrieval in ways that conform with the state governance and the monitoring of building construction. That is, OXSYS encoded a system of construction — a model of building — and pro- posed an information system —it built a model. In this paper, I focus on the OXSYS’s database structure, documented in research reports and user manuals, as the element that enabled the integration, both pragmatically and conceptually, of building and information systems into a single computational model. By looking at the OXSYS software through its data structures, I rehearse a novel historiographic approach to software as models of practices. Such an approach means attending to how computational systems produce operational representations of existing practic- es, embedding their directives and assumptions. Ultimately, this paper argues that computerizing a model of building such as Oxford’s system for hos- pital design is, in fact, an attempt to operationalize a model of practice.
Eliza Pertigkiozoglou is a PhD candidate in Architecture at McGill University and a Vanier Scholar. Her research exam- ines how building design software has historically encoded and enacted architectural practices. Before her PhD, Eliza worked at Gehry Technologies, developing custom software for complex architectural projects. Eliza holds an MDes from Harvard University and an MArch from the National Techni- cal University of Athens.
19:30 – 21:00
○· Keynote
Annabel Jane Wharton Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Duke University
Am I good?
The title of this conference, Are You a Model? assumes the agency of models. Am I good? reinforces that assumption by
probing its ethical implications. Through an investigation of a model
prisons, the paper argues that models are, indeed, ethical agents and that they should be held accountable for their acts.
Location: Max-Guther Saal, L3|01 Architektur, El-Lissitzky-Straße 1, Darmstadt
ARE YOU A MODEL? WEDNESDAY, 2.11.22 15
Annabel Jane Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, Duke University, has also taught as the Harry Porter Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the School of Architecture of the University of Virginia and as a Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale University School of Architecture. Her most recent publica- tions include Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings and Models and World Making: Bodies, Buildings, Black Boxes.