Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Reconfiguring Architectural Agency, Peter Olshavsky

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

This essay, for the exhibition "Steven Holl: Making Architecture,” argues that matter, things, and technologies are increasingly seen as co-constitutive of human agency. Studying this expanded conception of agency in the architecture of Holl reveals three opportunities. It enables us to re-describe the architect’s relation to architectural phenomenology beyond materiality. It reveals architecture’s active comportment in socially embedded settings, and it advances the idea that architecture makes us what we are.