Publisher's Synopsis
This is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after World War II. 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.;In-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 & 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.;Parallel 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.
