{"product_id":"the-organizational-complex-isbn-9780262633260","title":"The Organizational Complex","description":"\u003cb\u003eA historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings \u0026amp; Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a \"humanization\" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new \"pattern-seeing.\" Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.\u003c\/p\u003eThe breadth of Martin's research...offers a contemporary rereading of mid-century corporate office building architecture...—\u003cb\u003eAshley Schafer\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarvard Design Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is an excellent contribution to the field.\u003c\/p\u003e—\u003cb\u003eEdward Robbins\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Architectural Review\u003c\/i\u003e—Reinhold Martin is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, and a partner in the firm of Martin\/Baxi Architects.","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300264693989,"sku":"NP9780262633260","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262633260.jpg?v=1767740816","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-organizational-complex-isbn-9780262633260","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}