Page 14 - META

14
ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
1 Architecture and the new
The ongoing repair of the old ship of Theseus, the wooden monumen- tal object Athenians preserved to remember Theseus’s great achieve- ment to exterminate the Minotaur, raised a long-lasting philosophi- cal debate about identity and persistence in changes through time 2 The question if the replacement of the parts of an object retains its identity and uniqueness was tackled by many philosophers such as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch all the way to contemporary philosophical contemplation. How can the question be answered if, instead of changing the parts to preserve identity, one changes the parts to transform the object into something ‘other,’ creating the new, the different, something that would follow, a ‘meta’? Furthermore, if to transform in order to change creates the new, then how could this new jettison its oldness?
To be the same or to be different are profoundly rooted values in the human intellect.
To be different from what has preceded has always been the cor- nerstone of the edifice of architecture as a discipline since the Re- naissance. Even though the value to be different from the obsolete conventional was always utterly important for Architecture, the defi- nition of this value in architectural discourses is somewhat obscure. Prefixes like post-, de-, re-, neo-, appeared as typical signifiers of the spirit of novelty representing the different shifts that shape the his- tory of architecture and could be broadly summarized by the term ‘meta.’ Even if ‘meta’ is an ontological reference to newness implying its definition about what preceded, it has always been polysemic and, for this reason, ambivalent, diffused into the ideas encompassed by the broader term ‘avant-garde’, labeling practices for longer or short- er transitional periods. Architectural design has always been the lab- oratory where experimentation with ideas about the newness of this ‘meta,’ and elaboration of forms and spatial arrangements take place towards architectural creations. Design is always acting between the existing and the upcoming, the established and the expected, the fa- miliar and the xenon, antipathy and empathy. It is driven by the quest for a ‘meta,’ known (or not) that since its appearance, it will lose its newness and will become commonplace. The meta stands for a new condition to be, formulated, structured, and completed. The pursuit of the new empowers architectural design to perform between the old and the meta, in an in-between state, a metaxu state, a fertile ground for change and continuous variation, an interregnum 3 A place to investigate the becoming.
What is new in architecture? Why is architecture preoccupied with longing for the new. 4 Michael North (2013), in his studies of the history of the new, distinguishes two long traditions ruling our as-
1. Robert Smithson, ‘Ultra- moderne’, Arts, XLII/1 (1967), p. 31.
2. The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalere- us, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, inso- much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the log- ical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
3 Interregnum was the term used in ancient Rome to refer to the moment of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of the sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his succes- sor.
4. Theodor Adorno (2002:32) shifts the definition of the new to the desire for the new from its outcome. “The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from.”
//
Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki