Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image

Modernists of the early twentieth century were transfixed by the X-ray—a means of seeing through skin into systems of bones and tissue. What, nearly a century later, can X-rays reveal about the systems of modernism itself? Modern Management Methods asks how the value of a building is produced through instruments of expertise, management ideologies, and historical narratives. Through unorthodox survey practices, the project uses the imaging techniques of conservation and the documentary detritus of heritage preservation to show how scientific methods attempt to produce stable notions of history and value. Deploying the medium of the X-ray, Caitlin Blanchfield and Farzin Lotfi-Jam tell two related histories of building conservation, internationalism, and the making of modernist meaning through the architect Le Corbusier’s building Stuttgart’s Weissenhofsiedlung and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of U.S. empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Blanchfield is a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation, "Contesting Landscapes: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and the Architecture of Big Science." Other work includes collaborative investigations into the impacts of border infrastructures on Indigenous lands and multimedia projects on the management of architectural value.

Blanchfield is a founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture, her coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She holds an M.S. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University and a B.A. in history from Oberlin College.

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualize and simulate how algorithms, models, and notions of ''real time'' govern urban life.  He is also director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation, and media. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research based and multimediatic. Lotfi-Jam's work has been collected by The Centre Pompidou and the Sharjah Art Foundation, and he is a recipient of the 2022 Architecture League of New York League Prize, as well as recent grants and support for his research from the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, M+/Design Trust, and The Shed, where he was an inaugural Open Call Artist. He has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture, MAXXI, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Seoul Architecture Biennial, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and elsewhere. His coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press.

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