Utopia Computer. The “New” in Architecture?Forum Architekturwissenschaft,Bd. 6Hg. von Nathalie Bredella, Chris Dähne, Frederike LauschUniversitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2023ISBN 978-3-7983-3271-3 (online)Gesamtpublikation auf dem Repositorium der TU Berlin LinkISBN 978-3-7983-3270-6 (print)Die Druckpublikation kann direkt im Webshop des Universitätsverlages der TU Berlin bestellt werden Link
Contents and Introduction
Hélène FrichotA Dirty Theory for a New Materialism. From Gilles Deleuze to Jennifer Bloomer+This essay returns to the 1990s when architecture was about to launch into a period of experimentation with computational procedures and form-finding adventures. At the same historical juncture an architectural thinker-practitioner, whose work has maintained an undercurrent of influence amongst feminist architectural theorists and practitioners, was unsettling architecture’s status quo. Cognizant of the digital turn, Jennifer Bloomer sought to disturb the allegorical house of architecture by venturing questions about disciplinary assumptions. A return to the work of Bloomer directs us toward the importance of critically assessing the material and socio-technical implications of computationally informed architectures. To reclaim this other story, I conclude by introducing a dirty theory for a new materialism.Paper Link
Grayson Daniel BaileyPrerequisites for Self-Organization. The Re-emergence of Colin Ward+Underneath specific examples of cybernetic policies in built space, the ideological positioning of “system” and “agent” affects how architectural production in general is organized. Building from an initial connection between cybernetic and anarchist theory in the writing of Colin Ward, this essay uses the two orientations toward non-hierarchical systems to examine a reconstituted architectural field. The conditions of Ward’s system-oriented anarchism, and its unprivileged arrangement of system goals, help to examine how architectural subject positions can transition from cybernetic other-organization to anarchic self-organization.Paper Link
Marcus BernardoUnmanageable Utopias+This essay proposes, through a case study, a utopian project based on cybernetic reasoning. The case involves self-organized families trying to solve their housing problems by occupying idle land in a large Brazilian city. The essay will analyse three cybernetic strategies thought to alleviate the groups’ problems: Stafford Beer’s Team Syntegrity, the use of analogically-computed interactive topological models and self-organization strategies. Three cybernetic concepts will be introduced to analyse and discuss self-organization, collective control and the use of indeterminate models in design.Paper Link
Juan Almarza Anwandter About the Current (and Future) Implications of the Process of Digitalization in Our Everyday Experience. A Fourfold Critical Approach+The current development of interactive and ubiquitous technologies such as Augmented Reality, the Internet of Things and domotics has tended to close the perceptual gap between the analogue and the digital through a radical process of merging both domains. The distinction seems to be definitely blurred. The following text explores the implications of this process through a model of interpretation based on four main points which allows me to critically conceptualize this paradigmatic shift from a broader metahistorical perspective. It addresses some of its potential consequences in social, cultural, and political terms, referring also to specific implications in the domain of architecture from a phenomenological perspective.Paper Link
Joseph L. ClarkeThe Art of Work “Bürolandschaft” and the Aesthetics of Computation+Early architectural exploration of computational aesthetics in West Germany had surprising links with the “Bürolandschaft” approach to office design, which repudiated conventional spatial hierarchies and instead strove to reflect the workflow of the client organization. Bürolandschaft designer Kurd Alsleben elaborated cybernetic theories of form, creativity, and “information aesthetics” that laid the groundwork for the later celebration of complex formal systems in digital architecture. Yet, ironically, when desktop computers were introduced in offices, the metaphor of the Bürolandschaft as a giant computer broke down, undermining its utopian claims for the architecture of intellectual labour.Paper Link
Erik HerrmannHouses of Ice. Raster Utopias and Architecture’s Liquid Turn+This paper proposes the utopian visions of Italian architects Leonardo Mosso and Laura Castagno Mosso as prescient models for architecture in the age of statistical thinking. Orthography has dominated architecture since the renaissance, but digitalization has ushered in an epoch of the mutable, addressable, and liquid image. This epistemological shift was anticipated in the late 1960s by the Mossos as they envisaged another inherently dynamic medium: the city. The paper interrogates the techno-cultural and political contexts of the Mossos and how this unique environment contributed to their radical architectural visions that presciently suggested architecture’s impending liquid turn.Paper Link
Kurd Alsleben, Antje Eske and Corinna StudierExtracts from an Interview with Kurd Alsleben and Antje Eske+Hamburg, August 2019 – Interview Link
Frieder Nake and Arianna Borrelli, Nathalie Bredella, Mads Frandsen, Julius WincklerExtracts from an Interview with Frieder Nake+Berlin, December 2017 – Interview Link
Cezara NicolaVirtual Artistic Spaces. Roy Ascott’s “LPDT2,” Cybernetics and Beyond+This paper examines a seminal cybernetic artwork that integrates aesthetic and architectural principles together with digital technology. Essentially considered an artistic endeavour, Roy Ascott’s “La Plissure du Texte 2” (“LPDT2”) is a unique artefact not necessarily because of the popular platform that supports it, but because of the interaction between its avatars and the spaces that surround them. Exploring notions of “distributed authorship” and “moist media” introduced by Ascott, as well as concepts such as “cyberception” and “cyberscapes,” this paper reflects on the relevance of virtual space in contemporary art. It contributes to a critical discourse on the role of material culture in digital artefacts, and the impact of virtual architecture design on contemporary artistic production.Paper Link
Pablo Miranda CarranzaMaking Sense without Meaning. Christopher Alexander and the Automation of Design+In his contribution to the influential “Architecture and the Computer” conference in 1964, Christopher Alexander summarised the reorganisation of intellectual labour that, beginning in the 19th century, became finally concretised in the technologies of the computer. In his opinion, computers should be regarded as nothing else than huge armies of clerks, stupid and without initiative, but able to follow to the letter millions of precisely written instructions. This essay examines how architectural design began being digitally transcribed so it would conform to the logics of these armies of clerks, through a close reading of the programs and computer code written by Alexander.Paper Link
Gregory Elias CartelliMachines, Fabrics, and Models. ARTORGA and Biology’s Cybernetic Utopia+In the mid-1950s, the investment banker Oliver Wells, the operations researcher Stafford Beer, and the cybernetician Gordon Pask collaborated on an experimental publication, ARTORGA. ARTORGA was a series of experiments that sought to revise cybernetics’ disciplinary history, claiming its origins in biology rather than information theory and operations research. The project represented an effort to retain both biological complexity and organic matter in the conception and construction of organizational structures. ARTORGA’s proposition of a textile logic of “fabric” can be read as a moment of resistance that prompts a reconsideration of how architecture’s attention to the biotic was translated into the computational.Paper Link
Kaman LamC. H. Waddington’s Biological Science of Human Settlements. 1963–1978+It is impossible to approach urban development without considering biology—such was biologist C. H. Waddington’s provocative gift to ekistics, the endeavour to found a science of human settlements. Despite being historically overlooked, his efforts to rethink urban development through developmental biology (and epigenetics), its reasoning, methods, and models remain further pointers to the alignment of architecture practices with biological sciences and technologies. This paper presents an array of biological premises he posited to help advance hypotheses to which a pluralistic-scientific attitude towards utopianism can contribute.Paper Link
Nathalie KerschenTowards a New Understanding of the Animal+Drawing from the phenomenological tradition in architecture, this paper critically engages with the Cartesian concept of the “animal-machine,” embedded in contemporary bio-inspired approaches to computation. The translation of animals’ morphological properties and behaviour into algorithms, or the use of living animals during the fabrication design process, created innovative design and “new materials.” This paper will contextualize these developments alongside the history of architectural computation and cybernetics. Yet it will also challenge the assumptions underlying these new methods. Using phenomenology and recent advances in embodied cognition, I will present an alternate account of the animal, one that conceives of the animal as a living being within its Umwelt [milieu].Paper Link
Donal LallyAll that Is Solid Melts into the Cloud+The data centre is the infrastructural backbone of Cloud computing. By 2027 data centres will come to consume 31% of Ireland’s total electricity demand. However, the Cloud metaphor draws the public’s attention away from the fossil-fuel derived energy used to operate and maintain their environmental controls and from the vast quantities of resources that make this kind of architecture. This article attempts to dispel the techno-utopian fantasy that is the Cloud by typologically connecting the data centre to historic fire-burning infrastructural typologies.Paper Link
Authors
