ABSTRACT
In Part One, we introduced the idea that architectural judgment would benefit by relying, not only on lenses forged in art studies, but also on those forged in technology studies. In this effort to broaden the basis of interpretation, codes of technology, in addition to codes of taste, would also become standards of public goodness. In mundane terms, this is, of course, already the case—no building can be constructed without complying with hundreds if not thousands of technical codes. The problem is, however, that we moderns—meaning those of us who assume technology will automatically make our lives better—imagine our technical codes to be simple matters of safety and efficiency, not substantive matters of ontology or politics. The potential benefit of elevating public talk concerning technology is twofold: First, judgment would focus on the nonvisual as well as the visual competency and consequences of design, and, second, the criteria for judgment could more readily be held accountable to democratic processes. In support of this shift, we argued that existing technical codes, whether we intend them to be or not, are both an index of emergent social values and a strategy to enforce those values. This is to hold that the conscious move to include technical codes in judgment criteria, not only aesthetic ones, will make architectural production and its consequences more transparent.
