Page 18 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
The natural limitations of the observing eye opened up the way to the invention of the microscope and the telescope, principal instru- ments to invent other ‘Kosmoi’ of other scales and other resolutions: the micro-cosmos and the macro-cosmos. The eye stayed tuned with these two entities giving sense to the continuity of scales, the transi- tions, the coexistence, and the resolutions, till the moment it became unreliable, not because of its limited capacities, or because the ap- pearance does not always tell the truth, but primarily because it can- not be detached from the subjectivity, the values, the prejudices and the linguistic limitations that govern the human. This is the most criti- cal point of the Enlightenment that changed the condition of anthro- pocentrism and introduced what Whitehead (1964) in his ‘Concept of Nature’ defined as ‘bifurcation’: The distinction between material nature and non-material minds, objectivity, and subjectivity, reality and appearance. Bachelard (2002) much later similarly defined it as epistemological obstacles and later on Althusser (1969) as an ‘epis- temological break’. Since then, nature became what the Cartesian radical dualist ontology defined as res-extensa, a real and inanimate entity devoid of any meaning or possibility of agency, producing its effects only through the power of its causes, opposite to the res-cog- itans, a subjective and value-based substance but void of any reality 14 . Science becomes the solid ground to reveal the hidden truth by attributing effects to causes, which in turn become new causes for new effects.
Changes in worldviews directly impact architectural design. The proj- ect of Architecture becomes now to design (for) the rational human. Not the polymath human of the Renaissance but the Kantian human of the Enlightenment; To design its material environment capable of hosting the objectively defined-by-science human needs. Designing (for) the rational human is no longer to prioritize aesthetics, memo- ries, or cultural, social, and intellectual references but the needs of that species called human. The human is progressively pushed to the realm of res-extensa, to lose its face, its gender, its identity, and to be- come the human that is legitimized by its dimensions, proportions, anatomy, and ergonomics.
The shift of the conception of the human affects the design process but also the design tools. The building is conceived not to be seen but to function, to arrange spaces ensuring the functional rational- ities of the activities to be hosted, far from any traditional habits, or unreasonable subjectivities. It has to work, just like Isabelle Stengers’s (1997) ‘medieval’ clock 15 All its parts are arranged in a way that the whole will fulfill its ultimate finality, to host (a certain understand- ing of ) the life of the human. This teleological thinking encompasses all parts in a top-down finality, which the genius of the architect has to organize, putting them together in place, com-posing, towards
14. Cf. Bruno Latour (2010: 481)
15. Isabelle Stengers (1997:11-13, 77-82) uses the case of the medieval clock as the efficient weapon against the Aristotelian thought used to metaphorically de- scribe the construction of the Universe as well as later on the formation of the alive. This way, it introduces its ma- chine-based understanding in the Enlightenment and its study through physics.
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki