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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
affirming what is true in the life of a human, namely the biological needs of the species. Designers no longer perceive but arrange and organise.
This new priority renders the arrangement and organization of the inner part of the building the starting point and the generator and the reflector of this organization in the built form’s appearance, its elevations. This is entirely different from the eye-centered approach. This shift renders perspective a pointless and obsolete drawing tool 16 and alludes towards drawing techniques freed from the eye and its numerous practical and ideological deviations based on projective and descriptive geometry 17. The Euclidian visual cone is replaced by the geometric beam of parallel lines that depersonalize representa- tion but also moves the human eye from the experienced world to the infinite, with all its insightful connotations and symbolisms 18.
The appreciation of the act of ‘becoming’ is based upon the appreci- ation of the state of ‘being.’ If there is a genuine intention to debunk the latter, then the design practice, even if it pretends to be looking forward, cannot avoid looking back to take the maximum possible distance from the past. This is the ground on which Bruno Latour (1993) argues that we have never been modern: In their effort to distance themselves from their past, the humans, almost religiously, believed that they had to abandon any connection and association to subjectivity, history, interpretations, towards establishing reliable objectivity, that is to say, to separate the Cartesian ‘res extensa’ from the ‘res cogitans’. Under the labels of reason and causality, progress and, more recently, innovation, appearing as the motivators of what North (2013:16-19) presents as ‘the pathos for the new,’ the human ‘produced’ and created artifacts and conditions, the dominant value of which was that they would not be what they used to be 19.
Divisions imposed in the spirit of the Enlightenment opened up ave- nues for the development of a human, radically different from what it was before, as it was progressively detached from nature to create an englobing artificiality to live in. The lifecycle of this pursuit, how- ever, was underestimated and ignored. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this artificiality was founded on a false appreciation of nature conceived as a passive and stable res extensa, without any agency attributed to its constituting parts. From the moment that the laws that govern nature became known by physics, humans be- lieved that they could totally control it. As Bruno Latour (2010) states, humans designed their future but not their prospect on Earth, a friv- olous choice that threatens their very existence as species.
3 The emergent newness
16. The Perspective could offer a reliable view of the building before its existence, but it was not equally effi- cient to assure measurability in the construction process. For this, architects had to do their drawings in projection so that measurements could be taken from them (Acker- man, 2001, p.29). The coex- istence of these two ways to represent space indicates the need or the wish to combine, in the new profile of the ar- chitect, the artistic with the technical and to expose the creative work to aesthetic and rational judgments.
17. Architect Jean-Nico- las-Louis Durand, Professor at École Polytechnique in Paris, a prestigious institution founded by Gaspar Monge, founder of the descriptive geometry, just after the French Revolution, embed- ded principles of Descriptive Geometry into his architec- tural teaching. For a detailed description of the shift from perspective to descriptive geometry cf. Savignat 1981.
18. Cf. Spiridonidis 2018:23
19. Niklas Luhmann (2000: 199) characterizes novelty as ‘ontological nonsense. Something is, although and because it is not what was before’.
Since the mid-sixties, the philosophical, epistemological, scientific,
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki