Antoine Picon & Guests - online lecture

Antoine PICON (*1957) is a French professor of the history of architecture and technology focusing mainly on the 20th century and contemporary period. He is also a co-founder of doctoral programs (PhD & DDes) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He teaches the history of architectural theory in the context of the conditions of general technical development of humanity. He is a member of the scientific committee of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles-ÉNSA-V

In 1979, he graduated from École Polytechnique and completed ENCP (Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées) in 1981, earning a degree in general engineering for roads and bridges. From 1981 to 1984, he acted as a special advisor to the minister's office for architectural research. After 1984, he began to intensively focus on the research of transport construction and became the director of ENCP in 1994. He held this position until 1997, when it gained the status of professor. He became a professor of the history of architecture and technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2002 and has also been a research fellow at ENPC since 2008.

As a trained engineer, architect, and historian of science and art, Antoine Picon has comprehensively studied the history of architectural and urban development from the 18th century to the present day and is the author of nearly two dozen professional publications. For his contributions in this field, he has received many awards, including the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
For the past ten years, he has dedicated himself to the issue of digitalization in the field of architecture and has focused on theories dedicated to the future of cities (“Smart Cities: a spatialised Intelligence”, Wiley, 2015, “Smart Cities: Théorie et critique d'un idéal auto-réalisateur”, Paris Editions B2, 2013, “Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity”, Wiley, 2013, “Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession”, Birkhäuser Architecture, 2010).

Since 2013, he has held the position of president of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, a private institution focused on preserving and promoting the creative legacy of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Grise.

This current online meeting could be included in the program of the 12th International Festival of Architecture, Design, and Art ARCHIKULTURA 2020 thanks to the kind permission of Odile Decq, with whom the Cabinet of Architecture has been collaborating since 2017. It is the final event within the May lecture series, curated by the students of the Confluence Institute for a period marked by involuntary isolation due to epidemiological measures, and included meetings with
such remarkable figures as Didier Faustino, :MentalKlinik (Yasemin Baydar + Birol Demir), and Doriana Mandrelli Fuksas and Massimiliano Fuksas.

Zoom conference >