ABSTRACT
PERFORMANCE DESIGN (AGAIN) In 1967 Progressive Architecture magazine published a special issue on “performance design,” explaining it as a set of practices that had emerged from general systems theory, operations research and cybernetics thirty years earlier, at the end of the World War II.1 The editors described its practitioners as “systems analysts, systems engineers, operations researchers” and argued that it was a more “scientific method of analyzing functional requirements,” which involved “psychological and aesthetic needs” as well as physical measures of performance. The interest in performance clearly draws on the long history of determinism and functionalism in architecture, understood in large part through the mechanical and organic analogies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is perhaps fitting at the outset to recall that Le Corbusier’s famous description of a house as “machine for living” was his adaptation of the phrase that he and Ozenfant had earlier used to describe painting, a machine a émouvoir — a machine for moving emotions. All the objectivity of functional methods depends on the assessment of subjective needs, of quantified and temporarily stabilized desires.
