Antoine Picon

G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Graduate School of Design
Director of Doctoral Programs, Graduate School of Design
Photo Antoine Picon

An engineer, architect, and historian, Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology and the French Academy of Architecture. He works on the history of the relations between the built environment and technologies, with a special accent put on the imaginary and utopian dimensions. He has published extensively on this subject. He is amongst others the author of French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1992), Claude Perrault (1988), L'Invention de l'ingénieur moderne (1992), La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Les Saint-Simoniens (2002), Digital Culture in Architecture (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015), The Materiality of Architecture (2021), and Natures Urbaines: Une Histoire Technique et Sociale, 1600-2030 (2024).