Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? Sequences and Genealogies in between Architecture and Design for a Global History

Some among the early “classics” of the history of projects, such as Giedion or Pevsner, united architecture and de- sign leaning towards anonymity and industrialism and eliminating the division between the two disciplines. They were related with an ideological notion of style: the “Mod- ern”. Afterwards other approaches suggested another use of sequences of objects in a larger continuum instead of the use of notions of “style” (Kubler, Bloch and Foucault). Joining these different starting points together with the latest contribution (Margolin, 2015) the paper aims to explore the possibilities given by compiling timelines and sequences that mix different approaches in a larger vision of project disciplines to obtain the web for a glob- al history, implementable and queryable at different levels and using a broader range of design studies. The goal is to outline and schematically show a continuous conversation throughout time and space, maintaining the speci cities of historical research and an inclusive and broader view on the ow of time. To inform a re ection on this opportunity the pa- per will consider the ways to organize sequences on speci c or general topics using tools for the managing of data ows and their representations.