New Works Series: José Aragüez in conversation with Rafi Segal, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism
Presented with the Architecture and Urbanism Group
Part of the MIT Spring 2025 Architecture Lecture Series.
After The Building (2016) and Spatial Infrastructure (2022), José Aragüez publishes Dispositional Intelligence in Architecture. Featuring 272 color illustrations, this 400-page volume proposes a contemporary theory of spatial organization in architecture through original research into a particular kind of hybrid design work, one that is inherently architectural yet grounded in diverse modalities of scientific thinking. Three important yet overlooked bodies of work are examined here: those of the Italian architect and artist Vittorio Giorgini (1926–2010), the Israeli architect, engineer, and geometer Michaël Burt (b. 1937), and Sri-Lankan-born, London-based engineer and theorist Cecil Balmond (b. 1943). By combining granular historical analysis of these bodies of work with advanced theoretical investigation, this book expands the distinct dispositional possibilities of architectural space on the basis of the deep scientization of design that unfolded across the West over the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and will not be streamed or recorded.
