Bertrand Gille: Engineers of the Renaissance (1964–) [French, English]

“In his reconstruction of Renaissance technology informed by research into little-known manuscripts from libraries across Europe, Bertrand Gille emphasises the close continuity of technical invention from antiquity (in particular, the Alexandrian Greeks), through the mediaeval period (in particular, the Germans), to its brief but brilliant high flaring among the Italians of the fifteenth century. The engineers were conscious of embodying the Archimedean tradition, the tradition of “give me a place to stand and I can move the world.” It was an age marked by a close and natural mutuality between the technical and the fine arts, and by the first real union of science and technology, whose issue was a permanent enrichment of both. Science gave to engineering a new sophistication of mathematical precision, and the working models constructed for mechanical inventions prepared the way for a truly experimental science, as later developed by the generation of Galileo.

As might be expected, the figure of Leonardo da Vinci looms large in this book. It is the author’s contention, based on the documents he has uncovered, that Leonardo’s originality as an engineer has been greatly overestimated, that in fact he borrowed and adapted freely from the work of this anonymous and little-known contemporaries, that many of his ideas are already prefigured in the mediaeval period. Nevertheless, although he rests on the foothills leading up to him, he still towers above them as the consummate technical artist.”

Publisher Hermann, Paris, 1964
239 pages

English edition
Publisher MIT Press, 1966
256 pages

Reviews: Alex Keller (Technology and Culture, 1965), Harry Woolf (Science, 1968), M. Daumas (Revue d’Histoire des sciences et de leurs application, 1964, FR).

Wikipedia (FR)

Les ingénieurs de la Renaissance (French, 1964, 8 MB, added on 2018-12-27)
Engineers of the Renaissance (English, 1966, 8 MB, updated on 2018-12-27)

Lewis Mumford: Art and Technics (1952–) [English, Greek]

Lewis Mumford — architectural critic, theorist of technology, urbanist, cultural critic, historian, biographer, and philosopher — was the author of almost thirty books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with “technics.”

In these lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1951, Mumford explores “the ethical problems that drove all of his writings on art, technology and urbanism: the severing of the bonds of fellowship and community in advanced industrial society; the waning sense of a public good and the resulting moral crisis of modern life; the cultural divide separating an instrumental language of technique from the symbolic language of aesthetic experience; and the plight of ‘personality’ in a bureaucratic age.” (from the introduction to the 2000 edition)

Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 1952
Bampton Lectures in America, 4
162 pages

Review (R. L. A., Philosophy of Science, 1953)

Publisher

Art and Technics (English, 1952, removed on 2019-10-3 upon request from publisher)
Τέχνη και τεχνική (Greek, trans. Βασίλης Τομανάς, 1997)

Douglas Kahn: Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013)

“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2013
ISBN 0520956834, 9780520956834
343 pages

Reviews: Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Christopher Haworth (Organised Sound, 2015), Adam Trainer (Continuum, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2014-3-19 upon request of the publisher)