Professor Christine Boyer of Princeton University was recently in Delft as a follow to her term as a visiting professor in 2005. With a host of influential books to her name, Boyer is regarded as the ‘grand dame’ in the field of architecture urbanism.
And she now also revels in the nickname ‘Evergreen’ given to her by her colleagues at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture.
“TU Delft is doing quite well in attracting talented and motivated foreign students,” says Professor Christine Boyer. “In the PhD group I was lecturing, the majority of researchers were non-Dutch, and many of them joined almost all of our discussions quite fanatically. But in terms of atmosphere, it’s difficult to compare this with my own faculty in Princeton, where we have about 50 mostly native students.”
Of her time spent as a visiting professor at TU Delft, Boyer says: “Besides the hospitality of my friends in the Netherlands, the intellectual stimulation certainly is one of my favorite memories.” What she didn’t miss about Holland back home in New York? “That national Dutch dish, which I can’t remember the name of now,” she says, laughing.
In an interview in the ‘The Architecture Annual’, TU Delft’s architecture faculty yearbook, Boyer fondly recalled her term as a visiting professor at the Delft School of Design. And her TU Delft colleagues were also proud to have her here, even giving Boyer the nickname ‘Evergreen’, both for her omnipresent appearances at lectures, debates and projects, as well as for her lively and warm personality.
All-round scholar
As a female scientist, Boyer already had a special place in my memory. When first reading her famous books The City of Collective Memory (1994) and CyberCities (1996) as a student in architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, I recall how pleasantly surprised I was to discover that it really was possible for a woman to enter the male-dominated world of both practitioners and theoreticians of architecture.
After reading her books, I still remember my first words when presenting her works in class: “Friends, be careful. It is not Christian, but Christine. This author is not a male!”
Not only for female architecture students, but for every engineering candidate out there, Boyer is a potential source of inspiration. Not least of all because of her broad view on both technological as well as social issues, and her unique ability to bring these two worlds together.
Boyer’s academic career has been a long and fascinating one. After completing a B.A. in mathematics and a MSc. Degree in science, computer and information sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, Boyer ended up being a special student in computational linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She followed this with a Master’s degree and a PhD degree in city planning at MIT and a post-doc research position in social psychology at Harvard University. One could say that Boyer truly is modern day throwback to the kind of all-round scholars that used to exist in medieval Europe!
Chomsky
Boyer says that especially crucial to her distinguished academic career was the opportunity she had to be a special student at MIT in 1965/1966. “That year I took the choice and the chance of learning and reading more about society, rather than taking those technical and abstract courses. At that time, the Vietnam War was also going on. And I must admit that my linguistics professor Noam Chomsky had been an influential figure in that decision.”
Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War at that time, Chomsky has become widely known for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be the leading left-wing intellectual in the United States. And Boyer certainly ‘inherited’ some of Chomsky’s social-critical views.
In CyberCities, for example, which is required reading for anyone interested in the modern city, electronic technologies, or politics, Boyer issues a clarion call to reinstall a social agenda in the midst of all these technological innovations, such as the computer, Internet and virtual reality. Also within the field of architecture and urbanism, again and again she refers to this ‘social agenda’, or rather the lack of it.
“Too often urban processes are considered a ‘natural development’. Design practice for sure can be of influence,” Boyer says. She is also critical of the dominating emphasis on aesthetics. Referring to one of the final architectural proposals for replacing the Twin Towers at Ground Zero in New York City, Boyer says questioningly: “These products are too beautiful to be true. Do we really need towers with tilted diamond-shaped tops?”
Data-diagramming
“Comparing Dutch architects with their American colleagues, I find it positive that those in the Netherlands at least turn more to urbanism,” Boyer says. Indeed, there are many research oriented projects in the Netherlands that try to address the interconnections between architectural acts or interventions and the city, compared to the United States where the market is the dominating force in most cases.
Architectural agencies like MVRDV (Rotterdam) and UN Studio (Amsterdam) are developing so-called scapes of information, confronting architecture with data-diagramming. “A promising approach in architecture as a response to the contemporary social and technical changes,” says Boyer, who is a currently a professor at Princeton.
Getting to know more about these developments was only one of the many useful and interesting experiences during her stay in Delft, which she describes as “a very dynamic half year”: Seminars, lectures at DSD, the Stylos workshop about Politics and Architecture, working with Team Max, and more.
“As always, I would have loved to make even more new contacts and connections with other research groups in the faculty,” Boyer says. “But its enormous scale can lead to misunderstandings or lack of communication. The trick is to find effective and useful interactions, for example between the architecture and urbanism departments. That is however not a specific question of TU Delft, but rather a general problem of our discipline.”
Christine Boyer (Photo: Sam Rentmeester/FMAX)
Professor Christine Boyer of Princeton University was recently in Delft as a follow to her term as a visiting professor in 2005. With a host of influential books to her name, Boyer is regarded as the ‘grand dame’ in the field of architecture urbanism. And she now also revels in the nickname ‘Evergreen’ given to her by her colleagues at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture.
“TU Delft is doing quite well in attracting talented and motivated foreign students,” says Professor Christine Boyer. “In the PhD group I was lecturing, the majority of researchers were non-Dutch, and many of them joined almost all of our discussions quite fanatically. But in terms of atmosphere, it’s difficult to compare this with my own faculty in Princeton, where we have about 50 mostly native students.”
Of her time spent as a visiting professor at TU Delft, Boyer says: “Besides the hospitality of my friends in the Netherlands, the intellectual stimulation certainly is one of my favorite memories.” What she didn’t miss about Holland back home in New York? “That national Dutch dish, which I can’t remember the name of now,” she says, laughing.
In an interview in the ‘The Architecture Annual’, TU Delft’s architecture faculty yearbook, Boyer fondly recalled her term as a visiting professor at the Delft School of Design. And her TU Delft colleagues were also proud to have her here, even giving Boyer the nickname ‘Evergreen’, both for her omnipresent appearances at lectures, debates and projects, as well as for her lively and warm personality.
All-round scholar
As a female scientist, Boyer already had a special place in my memory. When first reading her famous books The City of Collective Memory (1994) and CyberCities (1996) as a student in architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, I recall how pleasantly surprised I was to discover that it really was possible for a woman to enter the male-dominated world of both practitioners and theoreticians of architecture.
After reading her books, I still remember my first words when presenting her works in class: “Friends, be careful. It is not Christian, but Christine. This author is not a male!”
Not only for female architecture students, but for every engineering candidate out there, Boyer is a potential source of inspiration. Not least of all because of her broad view on both technological as well as social issues, and her unique ability to bring these two worlds together.
Boyer’s academic career has been a long and fascinating one. After completing a B.A. in mathematics and a MSc. Degree in science, computer and information sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, Boyer ended up being a special student in computational linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She followed this with a Master’s degree and a PhD degree in city planning at MIT and a post-doc research position in social psychology at Harvard University. One could say that Boyer truly is modern day throwback to the kind of all-round scholars that used to exist in medieval Europe!
Chomsky
Boyer says that especially crucial to her distinguished academic career was the opportunity she had to be a special student at MIT in 1965/1966. “That year I took the choice and the chance of learning and reading more about society, rather than taking those technical and abstract courses. At that time, the Vietnam War was also going on. And I must admit that my linguistics professor Noam Chomsky had been an influential figure in that decision.”
Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War at that time, Chomsky has become widely known for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be the leading left-wing intellectual in the United States. And Boyer certainly ‘inherited’ some of Chomsky’s social-critical views.
In CyberCities, for example, which is required reading for anyone interested in the modern city, electronic technologies, or politics, Boyer issues a clarion call to reinstall a social agenda in the midst of all these technological innovations, such as the computer, Internet and virtual reality. Also within the field of architecture and urbanism, again and again she refers to this ‘social agenda’, or rather the lack of it.
“Too often urban processes are considered a ‘natural development’. Design practice for sure can be of influence,” Boyer says. She is also critical of the dominating emphasis on aesthetics. Referring to one of the final architectural proposals for replacing the Twin Towers at Ground Zero in New York City, Boyer says questioningly: “These products are too beautiful to be true. Do we really need towers with tilted diamond-shaped tops?”
Data-diagramming
“Comparing Dutch architects with their American colleagues, I find it positive that those in the Netherlands at least turn more to urbanism,” Boyer says. Indeed, there are many research oriented projects in the Netherlands that try to address the interconnections between architectural acts or interventions and the city, compared to the United States where the market is the dominating force in most cases.
Architectural agencies like MVRDV (Rotterdam) and UN Studio (Amsterdam) are developing so-called scapes of information, confronting architecture with data-diagramming. “A promising approach in architecture as a response to the contemporary social and technical changes,” says Boyer, who is a currently a professor at Princeton.
Getting to know more about these developments was only one of the many useful and interesting experiences during her stay in Delft, which she describes as “a very dynamic half year”: Seminars, lectures at DSD, the Stylos workshop about Politics and Architecture, working with Team Max, and more.
“As always, I would have loved to make even more new contacts and connections with other research groups in the faculty,” Boyer says. “But its enormous scale can lead to misunderstandings or lack of communication. The trick is to find effective and useful interactions, for example between the architecture and urbanism departments. That is however not a specific question of TU Delft, but rather a general problem of our discipline.”
Christine Boyer (Photo: Sam Rentmeester/FMAX)
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