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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
tations of the last twenty-five years. Similarly, model-based thinking is associated with all the utopias accompanying modernity, but also with its request for models, standards, ergonomics, as well as with interest in the typology advocated by the early post-modernity.
If the new, incremental or recombinatory is always based upon the old, then is the ‘meta’ a really new condition? Is what humans appre- ciate as new or else revolutionary or radical, finally an inventive reviv- al or reconsideration and reformulation of the old? Is it possible for the new to exist when the future is circumscribed in the conscious- ness of the present? Is finally the human intellect what draws us to- wards predefined possibilities, and is the ‘meta’ nothing more than an alibi humans abuse to declare even more boldly their dominance on planet Earth?
2 Spatio-temporalities of the new
If what we have created as humans constitutes the so-called Anthro- pocene, a new geological époque characterised by the human’s im- pact on earth’s geology, and ecosystems, then design plays a vital role in this rapport. Design, the way we use it today, that is to say, a professional practice that elaborates the form and the materiality be- fore their construction is a pure creation of a human-centered appre- ciation of the world. Design is the most essential human outcome of post-Renaissance anthropocentrism. It is a stratagem through which human superiority was manifested on Earth. Design is the ‘laborato- ry’ where the new is created, tested, and offered to become old. Nov- elty was, has been, and always be the ultimate aim of design.
Architecture, as the ultimate inventor of design, is the protagonist in the accomplishment of this aim. Its social project was not only through design to glorify and manifest the superiority of the human intellect spatially but also to change the humans by making them believe in this superiority. To achieve this objective Architecture had to define itself as a design discipline and to produce its own toolkit in a way that both its disciplinary foundations and practices would be compatible and complementary with the under-construction new social, intellectual order. As disciplinary foundations, we mean the ways in which Architecture defines itself as a discipline according to a particular worldview and to a conception of the human into this world. Changes in the contents of the disciplinary fundamentals af- fect the design and how it is spatially manifested.
Always claiming to respond to the needs of the human, the ultimate aim of Architecture was to design the human 7 In the Renaissance, Architecture promoted the human figure that observed the world to appreciate its truths. The human was the curious observer, creative, eager, and thirsty for new knowledge and experiences. Hence, the
7. Cf. Colomina, B. Wigley, M. (2017:9)
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki