Larry D Busbea

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Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Busbea, L. D. (2021). Proxemics: Social Construction/Environmental Design. Columbia University Books on Architecture and the City.
• Busbea, L. D. (2020). The Responsive Environment: Aesthetics, Design, and the Human in the 1970s. University of Minnesota Press.
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  monograph
• Busbea, L. D. (2020). The Responsive Environment. University of Minnesota Press.
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  In The Responsive Environment, Larry D. Busbea takes up the concept of environment as an object and method of design at the height of its aesthetic, technical, and discursive elaboration. Exploring emerging paradigms of environmental perception, patterning, and control, he shows how living space itself was reimagined as a domain capable of modification through input from its newly sensitized inhabitants.
• Busbea, L. D. (2007). Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France. MIT Press.

Chapters

• Busbea, L. D. (2019). Geometries of Thinking. In The Situationist Times. Torpedo Press, Oslo.
• Busbea, L. D. (2019). Pattern Watchers. In The Culture of Nature in Design. Routledge.
• Busbea, L. D. (2017). Arcoconsciousness. In Paolo Soleri: The City is Nature. Scottsdale: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
• Busbea, L. D. (2011). "The Neo-Constructivist Environment". In Revisiting the Rhetorical Masters of the Neo-Avant-Garde(pp n/a). Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
• Busbea, L. D. (2011). Paolo Soleri and the Nonorganic Life of Architecture. In Making a Geologic Turn. Metropolis/DAP.
• Busbea, L. D. (2010). "Arcosanti vs. Onecity". In In Print. Columbia University.
• Busbea, L. D. (2010). "The Neo-Constructivist Environment". In Revisiting the Rhetorical Masters of the Neo-Avant-Garde(pp n/a). Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
• Busbea, L. D. (2009). "Arcosanti vs. Onecity". In In Print. Columbia University.
• Busbea, L. D. (2009). "The Neo-Constructivist Environment". In Revisiting the Rhetorical Masters of the Neo-Avant-Garde(pp n/a). Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
• Busbea, L. D. (2007). "Toward Superland". In Architecture + Art: New Visions, New Strategies(p. 159). Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Academy.

Journals/Publications

• Busbea, L. (2017). A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War. The Journal of Architecture, 22(7), 1257-1261. doi:10.1080/13602365.2017.1378409
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  Modern architecture‘s engagement with the epistemo-ecological category of environment is gradually coming to be seen by historians, not as a digression from its avant-garde agenda, or a dilation of...
• Busbea, L. (2017). Soft Control Material: Environment and design c. 1970. Journal of Design History, 30(2). doi:10.1093/jdh/epw033
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  This article explores the conception and development of Soft Control Material (SCM) (1968-1974) as a key case in the mutually inflected development of post-war design and the emergence of the concept of environment. Designed by Warren M. Brodey and Avery R. Johnson, SCM was a suite of interdependent technologies-high and low, digital and analog-comprising a sponge-like material made from foam and/or Freonfilled plastic bladders, special types of valves, and various articulated cladding surfaces. According to its inventors, SCM was not a finite object with a distinct form but was ultimately conceived of as a self-organizing, biomimetic metastructure (both tool and toy) for facilitating new types of human-environment communication; a 'medium' that might, in Brodey's words, 'provide instantaneous feedback and thereby allow infolding with time, memory, energy, [and] relation.' These, in turn, would effect for the subject a virtuous topology of environmental discovery, new types of ecological and 'interspecies' relationships and, ultimately, a conscious evolution of humanity.
• Busbea, L. D. (2016). Soft Control Material: Environment and Design, c. 1970. Journal of Design History, 30(1), 1-18.
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  This article explores the conception and development of Soft Control Material (SCM) (1968–1974) as a key case in the mutually in ected development of post-war design and the emergence of the concept of environment. Designed by Warren M. Brodey and Avery R. Johnson, SCM was a suite of interdependent technologies—high and low, digital and analog—comprising a sponge-like material made from foam and/or Freon- lled plastic bladders, special types of valves, and various articulated cladding surfaces. According to its inventors, SCM was not a nite object with a distinct form but was ultimately conceived of as a self-organizing, biomimetic metastructure (both tool and toy) for facilitating new types of human-environment communication; a ‘medium’ that might, in Brodey’s words, ‘provide instantaneous feedback and thereby allow infolding with time, memory, energy, [and] relation.’ These, in turn, would effect for the subject a virtuous topology of environmental discovery, new types of ecological and ‘inter- species’ relationships and, ultimately, a conscious evolution of humanity.Keywords: design—design culture—ecological design—history of technology—environmental design—cybernetics
• Busbea, L. (2015). Review: A Topology of Everyday Constellations by Georges Teyssot. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 74(1), 110-112. doi:10.1525/jsah.2015.74.1.110
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  Georges Teyssot A Topology of Everyday Constellations Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013, 360 pp., 89 b/w illus. $26.95, ISBN 9780262518321 Georges Teyssot’s A Topology of Everyday Constellations is a genealogy of domestic space in its many guises, from the bourgeois sitting room of nineteenth-century Paris to the phenomenal Umwelten of today’s smartphone-carrying, networked subjects. The book situates itself firmly within the context of many other studies of (architectural, artistic, cultural) modernity that stress that historical period as a time of radical reversals—of object and subject, of center and periphery, of interior and exterior. Teyssot, however, does not see these binaries as being in strict opposition. Rather, he understands them as moving points along the twisting surfaces of discourses, design objects, and lived experience itself. Thus he adopts the role of what Peter Sloterdijk has described as an “intimo-topologist”—a sensitive observer of, in Teyssot’s own words, “the means of generating regimes of cultural and social practices, the hermeneutics of the intimacy of interior spaces, the topo-analyses of the secret and the hidden, the stylistic classifications of built form, and the cartography of the connections and linkages that the body must practice in this large family of spaces” (11).1 Teyssot does not embark on this ambitious project on his own, but does so accompanied, methodologically, by Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. These figures and their authoritative discourses do not, however, simply preside over the “case studies” chosen by Teyssot. They do not emerge unscathed after being run through the architectural figures the author evokes. Nor are they alone; Teyssot marshals the work of an incredible number of theoreticians, poets, anthropologists, and critics of art and architecture in his study. As he states, “The sources of such a history are extraordinarily vast and necessarily hybrid. The material is heterogeneous, concerning as it does aspects of the histories of taste, mentality, culture, technology, and ‘lifestyle,’ as well as more specific aspects …
• Busbea, L. D. (2015). McLuhan's Environment: The End (and The Beginnings) of Architecture. Aggregate Online Platform.
• Busbea, L. D. (2015). McLuhan's Environment: The End (and The Beginnings) of Architecture. We-Aggregate.org.
• Busbea, L. D. (2013). Kineticism-Spectacle-Environment. October, 92-114.
• Busbea, L. D. (2013). Paolo Soleri and the Aesthetics of Irreversibility. Royal Institute of British Architects Journal of Architecture, 18(6), 781-808.
• Busbea, L. (2012). Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967—1978 and French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980. The Journal of Architecture, 17(6), 1049-1055. doi:10.1080/13602365.2012.724882
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  Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967—1978 Eds, Craig Buckley, Jean-Louis Violeau Trsl. Jean-Marie Clarke Cambridge, Mass., 2011 ISBN-10: 1-58435-095-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-095-8 Hb/Pb, pp. 264, 250 ill...
• Busbea, L. D. (2012). The Minor Installation of Luca Frei. The Minor Installation of Luca Frei.
• Busbea, L. D. (2011). The Minor Installation of Luca Frei. The Minor Installation of Luca Frei.
• Busbea, L. D. (2009). "Metadesign: Object and Environment in France, c. 1970". Design Issues, 103 - 119.
• Busbea, L. D. (2007). "Les Arcitectes et mai 68" book review. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Dec., 2005), 123-125.
• Busbea, L. D. (2006). "Yves Klein's Air Architecture" exhibition review. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Dec., 2005), 1500.
• Busbea, L. (2005). Review: Yves Klein: Air Architecture by Yves Klein. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 64(4), 552-553. doi:10.2307/25068204

Presentations

• Busbea, L. D. (2015, June 2015). Soft Control Material. Ecological Histories of Design. Rachel Carson Center, Munich Germany: Rachel Carson Center & University of Oslo.
• Busbea, L. D. (2013, November). Environment as Material. Futures Past: Design and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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  Major symposium inspired by the work of Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT.
• Busbea, L. D. (2012, Spring). Video Environments and the Subjects of Modern Architecture. College Art Association Annual Conference. Los Angeles.
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  Panel Speaker
• Busbea, L. D. (2012, Summer). Consciousness Design. European Architectural History Network Conference. Brussels.
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  Panel Speaker
• Busbea, L. D. (2010, Fall). Luca Frei's So-called Utopias. South Eastern College Art Conference. Richmond, VA.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2010, Spring). Arcosanti vs. ONECITY. In Print: The Buell Conference in the History of Architecture. Columbia University.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2009, Fall). "The Environmental Conditions of Neo-Constructivism". Abstracion in the Public Sphere: New Approaches. Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2008, Fall). The Neo-Constructivist Envrironment. Lecture Series. Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2008, Spring). From the Synthesis of the Arts to the Activated Spectator. College Art Association Annual Conference. Dallas, TX.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2008, Spring). The Neo-Constructivist Envrironment. Lecture Series. Oberlin College.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2007, April, 2007). Architecture and Mass Culture, International Responses, 1955-1975. Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. Pittsburgh, PA.
• Busbea, L. D. (2007, Fall). "From Mythologies to Metadesign". 50 years of Mythologies: Barthes, Design and Popular Culture. Pratt Institute, NY.
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  Individual Presenter
• Busbea, L. D. (2007, Spring). Chair, "Architecture and Mass Culture". Society of Architectural Historians Annual meeting. Pittsburgh, PA.

Reviews

• Busbea, L. D. (2017. A House in the Sun Book Review(pp 1257-1261). Journal of Architecture.
• Busbea, L. D. (2015. The Robotic Touch: How Robots Change Architecture.
• Busbea, L. D. (2014. Paolo Soleri: Mesa City to Arcosanti. CAA Reviews.
• Busbea, L. D. (2014. Spatial Ecologies, by Verena Andermat-Conley. H-France Reviews.
• Busbea, L. D. (2012. Caroline Maniaque-Benton, French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960-1980.(pp 1 - 3). H-France.net.
• Busbea, L. D. (2012. Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967—1978 and French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980(pp 1049 - 1055). Royal Institute of British Architects Journal of Architecture.
• Busbea, L. D. (2007. “Les architectes et mai 68 by Jean-Louis Violeau”. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Others

• Busbea, L. D. (2019, January). "Maldonado's Environment," foreward to Design, Nature, & Revolution. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/design-nature-and-revolution
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  new foreward to a reprint of a classic text.