Essays in Honor of Carl W. Condit

While in an American architecture class at the University of New Mexico, I happened to pick up and read through Carl Condit's Rise of the Skyscraper, the focus and clarity of which made me decide to apply to Northwestern University's graduate school in art history where Condit was chairman. During my first year at Northwestern, in 1978, I registered for part 1 of Condit's three-quarter of Building Techniques. Subsequently, I took two other classes with Condit and wrote my master's and doctoral theses with his guidance. What impressed me most about Condit, and impresses me still, is his wideranging knowledge and enthusiastic curiosity. In one class session on building technology, for example, our discussion would include archaeology, mathematics, physics, engineering, ancient literature, architecture, and, not infrequently, a reference to opera. This diversity gives brilliance to Condit's teaching as well as to his scholarship. His individual embrace of many intellectual areas has helped in the formation of interdisciplinary organizations, too. Condit was a founder of the Society for the History of Technology and its journal. From the start, the organization and its publications were never insular. Hugh G. J. Aitken has offered a definition of the field that supports the enlivening diversity within SHOT: [T]echnology [is] one form of organized information-that which deals with man's capacity to manipulate the natural environment for human ends-and ... the history of technology [is] one branch of intellectual history or of the history of ideas.' At the very least, this approach has broadened the history of technology. It echoes Condit's own exploration of the knowledge behind technological development. To focus one's intellectual life on the history of urban technology and development, as Condit has done, takes extraordinary courage

Art · Art history · CLARITY · Diversity (politics) · Honor · Operating system · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Anthropology · Classics · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Research, Science, and Academia

• Preservation, Polemics, and Power

  Sharon Irish•Technology and Culture•2008

  Add to list