The Organizational Complex

The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex in which architecture computers and corporations formed a network of objects images and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen''s work for General Motors IBM and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an imageof the corporation as a flexible integrated systemis seen to correspond with a humanization of corporate life as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively.Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new pattern-seeing. Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex while top-down power dissolves into networked pattern-based control. Architecture as one among many media technologies supplies the patternsimages of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.