Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

SAGETRACK

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Social Studies of Science
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Web of Science (1)
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Yaneva, A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Scaling Up and Down

Extraction Trials in Architectural Design

Albena Yaneva

The Gallery of Research (Galerie der Forschung), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wollzeile 17, 1010 Vienna, Austria; Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; Department of the History of Science at Harvard UniversityAlbena.Yaneva{at}oeaw.ac.at

How do architects imagine, see and define a distant object that is meant to become a building? How does it become knowable, real? To answer these questions, I follow architects as they fabricate models and scale them up and down at different rates of speed. Instead of being a logical, linear procedure for generating a new object that becomes progressively more knowable, ascending from the abstract to the concrete, scaling is a versatile rhythm, relying on surges, ‘jumps’ and returns. By focusing on the most frequently repeated moves such as ‘scaling up’, ‘jumping the scale’, ‘scaling down’, and describing their cognitive implications, I depict how architects involve themselves in a comprehensive dialogue with materials and shapes. Their material dialogue takes into account dispositions, resistance, stability and other properties that change proportionally with scale. In the scaling venture, two alternative states of the building are simultaneously achieved and maintained: a state of being ‘less-known’, abstract and comprehensive; and a state of being ‘more-known’, concrete and detailed. After multiple up and down transitions between small- and large-scale models, the building emerges, becomes visible, material and real. These scaling trials bring the building into existence.

Key Words: architecture • building • design process • ethnography • models • reality • scaling

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 35, No. 6, 867-894 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0306312705053053
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Theory Culture SocietyHome page
D. Stark and V. Paravel
PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration
Theory Culture Society, September 1, 2008; 25(5): 30 - 55.
[Abstract] [PDF]

Home page
 Social Studies of ScienceHome page
N. Myers
Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography
Social Studies of Science, April 1, 2008; 38(2): 163 - 199.
[Abstract] [PDF]