Antoine Picon

Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD where he is also Chair of the PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the relationships between architectural and urban space, technology, and society, from the eighteenth century to the present.

His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary deep structures of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d’un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s by focusing on the changes experienced by the engineering profession.

Picon has also worked on the relations between space, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. His interest in utopian thought is actually traceable from his early work to his more recent publications such as his book on cities and nature.

A series of Picon’s books offer a comprehensive overview of the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture as well as to the planning and experience of the city. He has published in particular Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: Théorie et Critique d’un Idéal Autoréalisateur (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).

At the intersection of an enduring interest for the history of construction and his research on digital culture in architecture, Picon has developed a theoretical and historical approach to the question of materiality that has led to his book The Materiality of Architecture (2021). How is the digital, the recent rise of artificial intelligence in particular, transforming the materiality of architecture is among his current topics of investigation.

It is almost impossible to work on the history of technology without encountering the question of nature or rather of the relationship between the natural and the artificial. This question is at the core of Picon’s latest book, a history of urban natures from the seventeenth century to the present. Natures Urbaines: Une Histoire Technique et Sociale (2024) follows two main threads: the technological component of the presence of nature in cities as well as its social and political dimension.

Picon has received a number of awards for his writings, including the Médaille de la Ville de Paris, and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la Ville de Briey, a well as the Georges Sarton Medal of the University of Gand. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies. In 2015, he became a member of the French Académie d’Architecture. He is Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He was Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier from 2013 to 2024.

Picon received science and engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, a PhD in history and a Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Full Text Articles