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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
bring about, but are, in fact, putting us under threat, in peril of our species, nearing extinction.
The second-order cybernetics elaborated those capacities of a sys- tem of information transmission, which give it the capacity to process information empowering machines to develop artificial intelligence, artificial life, self-organizing systems, learning, and other forms of cognition 22. The acceleration of information technology and com- putation highly supported modernity’s project to artificialize the liv- ing environment and life itself, as a sign of human superiority and sovereignty. Intelligent machines, digital devices, and applications formed a new artificial environment in which it becomes difficult to define the line of demarcation between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic, or the human and the non-human. Absorbed by a broad spectrum of human mental and practical ac- tivities and senses to make them faster and more effective but in the same time detached them from the body, affecting its capacities di- rectly as it has now to remember, to calculate, to write, to see, and finally, to think exclusively alongside media 23.
The breadth of questioning anthropocentric thought concerns not only other than the human species but also or perhaps above all, the sustainability of our planet entangled with its political and econom- ic dimensions. It seems that we are already in post-anthropocentric times, in the so-called post-human era. In this transition, the emerg- ing thinking dispenses the human from the center of intellectual pre- occupations and replaces it with Gaia (planet Earth) conceived as a living organism. The concept of Gaia advocates the reconciliation of old polarities founded in anthropocentrism, as we have mentioned before, such as life versus matter, given versus constructed, mind versus body, human versus nature, immaterial versus material, hu- manities versus sciences. Gaia is appreciated as the declaration of the existence of permanent and necessary symbiotic relationships be- tween these polarities which due to these symbioses, blur their lines and falsify their established identities. The human is no longer con- ceived as the dominant agent and controller of natural elements and artefacts. The human is now located within the natural and artificial environments it created, no longer acknowledged as the unique en- tity that can safely form and transform them (Voyatzaki, 2018, p.12).
Architecture is undergoing a long period of crisis and discerns as our world is progressively relocated from what takes time to die into what is not ready to be born as yet. What architecture is created in this particular interregnum, to use the famous phrase of Gramsci 24? What type of novelty will it advocate through its creations, and what will be the main formal or material traits able to offer an identity to the new and to clearly distinguish it from the old? The paradox we
22. Cf. Hayles (1999), How we became posthuman, p. 243.
23. Cf. Hayles (2012), How we think. Digital Media and Con- temporary Technogenesis. pp. 18, 60-62.
24. In his ‘Prison Notebooks’ Gramsci wrote in 1933 that “The crisis consists precise- ly in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki