Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Director of Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on this subject.
Four of his books are devoted to the transition from early-modern societies to the industrial era.
With La Ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), Picon began to investigate the changes brought to cities and architecture by the development of digital tools and digital culture.
His three most recent books are dealing extensively with this question. Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010) offers a comprehensive overview of this important transition. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013) focuses on the "return" of ornament in digital architecture to further the investigation. Finally, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015) discusses its impact on cities.
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/antoine-picon/

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