The Instruments Project, launched and co-directed by Assistant Professors Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John J. May, has engaged eight scholars over the past three years in a series of meditations around a set of gerunds — rendering, modeling, specifying, sensing, among others. The scholars will continue the discussion at the Princeton School of Architecture on Saturday, November 22, 2014, from 9 AM to 6 PM. The Princeton Conversation is an event hosted and organized by Lucia Allais, which brings the Project's eight core contributors together for a series of conversations with designers, on the one hand, and historians of science and technology on the other.

Caught between technophilia and technophobia, the fields of architecture, landscape, and urbanism are unable to articulate the material and epistemic conditions under which they labor today. Architectural techniques and tools remain consigned to the celebratory rhetoric of scientific discovery and technical innovation, whose principles now govern design practice and pedagogy simply by way of theoretical exhaustion. Speed, exactitude, acumen, efficacy, expertise, efficiency, and other trusted axioms of modern life can no longer conceal the political silence that resides at their core.

The Instruments Project is an excavation of that silence: its continuities and divisions, its hidden historical impulses, and the forms of reasoning and representation resident within it. Through sustained attention to instrumental processes that are — by design — both material and metaphysical, the project works towards establishing the technical dimension of architecture, landscape, and urbanism as a legitimate site for historical inquiry and philosophical reflection.

This event is made possible through support from the Princeton School of Architecture, the SSHRC and the University of Toronto.