Monday, January 25, 2016 at 6:30pm
Decafe, Perloff Hall


Michael Osman
Assistant Professor, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
UCLA A.UD Assistant Professor Michael Osman teaches courses in the history and theory of modern architecture. His scholarship focuses on the technological, environmental, and economic aspects of architectural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, relating the infrastructure that undergirds the process of modernization to the historiography of modernist architecture.

This lecture will present recent research on the history of construction materials. The focus will be the standardization of steel, from its chemical composition, to its various shapes, to its performance. The aim is to understand the value of universality for modernist discourse, against the evidence that standards actually proliferated differences in this material.