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Larry Busbea
Responsive Environments
Today is a conversation with Larry Busbea and we’re discussing his book ‘The Responsive Environment, Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970’s’.
The Responsive Environment, Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970’s, By Larry D. Busbea
The book covers aspects of Cybernetics and the material control of environmental variables that one might expect from a book on this subject matter but it also delves into the overlaps of multiple other disciplines including of art, architecture, psychology as well as anthropology. Specifically the work of anthropologists Edward Hall who worked with architects including Eero Saarinen, Bertrand Goldberg and landscape architects like Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halpern.
The book and this discussion also covers surrounding discourse of consciousness and subjectivity that was emerging when exploring so called ‘inward’ / ‘outward’ relationships of ourselves as we become more aware of our control and influence on our environments.
Larry Busbea
Larry Busbea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (MIT Press, 2007), The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction (forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City).
