About

Michael Osman is an Associate Professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. His research in architectural history focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on buildings and cities in the United States. He seeks connections between the infrastructure that undergirds the processes of modernization and the historiography of modernist architecture. His work explores topics such as the influence of ecological science on theories of city growth, early instruments for remote sensing, and the architectural profession’s relation to modern construction processes. Osman is the author of Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America, a book on the role buildings have played in developing systems for environmental and economic regulation. He also works on critical problems in modernism’s historiography, including examining Reyner Banham’s use of the term “ecology,” analyzing the metaphysical aspirations in twentieth-century writings on concrete, and co-editing Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century. As a founding member of Aggregate: The Architectural History Collaborative, he explores new methods in architectural history. Osman co-curated a portion of the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” at the Museum of Modern Art. His research has been supported by fellowships from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. He currently directs the Department’s MA and PhD programs.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art
• World Wide Web
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics
• History
• Art history
• Literature

Selected publications

• Review: <i>The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s</i>

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art history
  • Computer Science

  Book Review| December 01 2022 Review: The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s Larry D. Busbea The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 344 pp., 10 color and 116 b/w illus. $120 (cloth), ISBN 9781517907099; $30 (paper), ISBN 9781517907105 Michael Osman Michael Osman University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (4): 528–529. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.4.528 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Osman; Review: The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2022; 81 (4): 528–529. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.4.528 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search The term “responsive environment” captures a vast territory of design dating from the 1970s. It is not a neologism invented to explain a trend in this period, but, as Larry D. Busbea shows, it was a recurrent concern of the protagonists collected in his book, who used either that exact formulation or some variation of it. The term calls upon cybernetic thinking from the time, a by-product of managerial techniques developed for industry around midcentury. Cyberneticians who had focused on the flow of information to control production appropriated that thinking also to describe the behavior of organisms through feedback loops. An organism’s action was a response to changes in its surroundings, they explained, but when the surroundings were altered by the organism’s action, that set off another response in the organism. The ecological loop thus formed between actions and reactions could, in turn, be represented as an electrical circuit, such... You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century

  2021 · 3 citations

  • History
  • Visual arts
  • Aesthetics
  Publisher

• SPECIFYING:

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Evidence + Narrative in Architectural History

  2018-08-15

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America

  2018-04-10 · 7 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival resources, Michael Osman examines the increasing role of environmental technologies in building design from the late nineteenth century... from cold storage and scientific laboratories to factories. Osman broadens our conception of how industrial capitalism shaped the built environment as well as the role of design in dealing with ecological crises today"...

  Publisher

• Applying different abstraction pattern to achieve better water management

  Alexandria Engineering Journal · 2018-12-26 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper introduces a technique of water management by managing water abstraction along a branch canal. The selected study area is Awlad Sakr District, Sharkia Governorate, Egypt and the selected canal is Dafan canal. The paper introduces suitable tools to reduce the gap between demand and supply by managing water abstraction along the branch canals. Different approaches of storage water are applied during this research in order to overcome the shortage of water at the end of the main canal and its branches.The results of this study are summarized that SOBEK program is a good tool to estimate the hydraulic characteristics in open channel under different scenarios. Another result is that Awlad Sakr District, Sharkia Governorate, Egypt is an example of farmers depending on drainage water in agricultural irrigation. For management, it is found that case 16.7% storage is the best, for 25% storage the banks in some location needed to be raise, while 33.3% has shortage of water in some locations along the canal, which means that controlling water abstraction can manage the water shortage. Keywords: Water management, SOBEK program, Reuse water

  PublisherDOI

• Evidence and Narrative

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2017-11-27 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research Article| December 01 2017 Evidence and Narrative Michael Osman, Michael Osman University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Daniel M. Abramson Daniel M. Abramson Boston University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2017) 76 (4): 443–445. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.4.443 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Osman, Daniel M. Abramson; Evidence and Narrative. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2017; 76 (4): 443–445. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.4.443 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search At the seventieth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held in Glasgow, we cochaired a session titled “Evidence and Narrative in Architectural History.”1 The purpose of this session was to discover some of the practices widely used in the discipline, especially those employed to manage two interrelated problems of particular interest: choosing evidence with which to make arguments and developing structures for telling stories. From the SAH session, as well as in future conferences and workshops on these topics, we hope to seed a conversation on writing history that will help the field become more self-conscious about its use of evidence and narrative. Ultimately, reconsideration of evidence and narrative will produce new and different histories of architecture as well as reimagined agencies for ourselves as writers, readers, teachers, and students. Issues of evidence and narrative have always been part of architectural history discursively, despite architectural historians’ general... You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Excerpts from Goverening By Design

  2014-01-08

  article
  Publisher

• Excerpts from Goverening By Design

  Aggregate · 2014-01-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Subnature: Architecture's other Environments; the Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and New Geographies 02: Landscapes of Energy

  Journal of Architectural Education · 2010-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  (2010). Subnature: Architecture's other Environments; the Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and New Geographies 02: Landscapes of Energy. Journal of Architectural Education: Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 154-156.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel M. Abramson

  5 shared

• M. Ijlal Muzaffar

  3 shared

• Meredith TenHoor

  3 shared

• Lucía Allais

  3 shared

• Arindam Dutta

  2 shared

• Samah H. Abd El Ghany

  2 shared

• Zeynep Çelik Alexander

  2 shared

• Timothy Hyde

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Graham Foundation Award, New Media with Aggregate Architectu…
• UCLA Faculty Career Development Award (2011)
• UC President’s Research Fellowship (2010)
• Doctoral Research Grant, National Science Foundation (2006)
• Fulbright Fellowship, Institute of International Education (…