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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
pirations towards the new that have their origin in the beginnings of Western philosophy. The one starts from Parmenides and is further refined by Aristotle, who appreciates the new as the outcome of cy- cles of recurrence in which incremental changes happen to adjust, adapt or improve the development of these cycles. The underlying assumption on which this understanding is based is that “nothing is coming from nothing,” which transgresses all the history of Western philosophy and finds its more contemporary version in Wittgenstein’s statement “the effect is implicit in its cause 5 ” The second tradition starts from the atomist philosophers like Democritus, Epicurus Her- aclitus, and Lucretius, who understood the change as the outcome of recombination of the eternal minute and invisible elements that in their perpetual movement recombine themselves in various con- figurations. As everything flows (τα πάντα ρει), these elements are exposed to various random recombinations that stimulate changes in the existent. Lucretius used language as a reference when he ar- gued that a small number of elements could provide a wide variety of recombinations 6
Through the years, these two traditions formed different variations of how the new becomes a subject of contemplation in the sciences and the arts. Signs of these two traditions could be traced as coexist- ing or even combined, in the history of human-centered contempla- tions about the new and the transitional, from Darwin to Kuhn and from Wiener to the more recent debates on aesthetics and the arts. As opposed to the combinatory approach, the tendency to incre- mental repetition shifts the focus on being rather than on becoming, on unity than on multiplicity, on the similar rather than the different, the constant rather than the mutable, the purposeful rather than the random.
Similar signs of these traditions can be found in Architectural dis- courses and practices. Françoise Choay (1980) suggests two types of discourses as the foundation of architecture as a discipline after the humanism of the Renaissance. The one embracing the rule is in- troduced by Alberti. The other focuses on the model, introduced by Thomas More. The first advocates architectural novelty as a creative articulation of predefined rules, the implementation of which would establish the order of the new, while the other advocates novelty as the almost revolutionary implementation of ideal models defined as utopias. We can easily distinguish the attachment of the former to the incremental cycle tradition, as opposed to the alignment of the latter to the recombination one. Choay detects the coexistence of both of these two types of foundation discourses in the texts about archi- tecture and the city produced by modernity after the 18th century. Extensions of the logic of the rule can be traced back to the participa- tory practices, the syntactic rules of the 1970s, the architectural de- constructivist approaches of the 1980s, or the parametric experimen-
5. Cited by Michael North (2013: 21)
6. ”Therefore, the supposi- tion that, as there are many letters common to many words, so there are many elements common to many things, is preferable to the view that anything can come into being without ultimate particles.” Cited by Michael North (2013: 32)
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki