Page 22 - META

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are encountering nowadays is that even if tremendous changes happen in the sphere of the in- tellect, the sciences, the technological advances, and the geopolitical developments, we cannot ‘see’ either with our human eyes or with our mediated eyes, evident signs of an architectural pro- duction reflecting a radical and distinguishable novelty, or else the contemporary architectural ‘meta.’
Architecture cannot yet produce its post-human face, while it is busy constructing its own intel- lectual tectonics. As we tried to make it clear in the first part of this essay, design as a creative discipline is a definite ‘product’ of anthropocentrism. We attempted to circumscribe design’s in- tellectual framework briefly by relating its processes and tools with the worldviews at different historical periods, accompanied by the conceptions for the human and the appreciation of the nature of architectural creations and the social project that architecture undertook to accom- plish. We curated these design directives in two different periods of architectural history: One characterized by the change of the dominance in human thinking (from God to the Human) and the other by the establishment of a different understanding of the dominant human. In both cas- es, the history of architecture suggests that architecture is always agile enough to offer in each period its Palladio’s Villas or its Crystal Palaces as signs of a revolutionary recombinatory novelty. In a world identified not only by the importance of changes but mainly by their speed, the silence of architecture is at least bizarre.
Architectural design is made to serve the human and to redesign it. If there is a post-human era, the human in it is no longer, its dominant character, the prima donna. Gaia replaces it, and it is only a part of it alongside other material and organic substances, but certainly no longer the dominant transformer and reformer of Earth. This becomes a profound contradiction in the foun- dations of the established by anthropocentrism, architectural intellect.
Architectural design was registered as the glorification of the human intellect. It was the domain where human ingenuity manifested itself by creating either the ultimate beauty as the outcome of the thoughtful observer or the perfect spatial arrangement as the achievement of the rational scientist. It was tailored to create the beautiful body or the perfect machine. However, today a significant part of this architectural intellect is co-creating with machines or nonhuman entities, not as in the eighties and the nineties architect’s assistant specialized in space representations, but as a competent collaborator participating in the decision making and often demonstrating unprecedented creativity. The skeptics could argue that the more the machine absorbs parts of architectural thinking, the more the architect thinks less, and the more the intellectual part of architectural creation loses its social and economic value. As artificial intelligence is very close to creating designing machines, a severe threat of the established profession is sensed. Signs of this fears are sites, which offer online low-cost architectural services from around the globe if the clients would request an open competition on their project.
In order for architectural design to celebrate the human intellect, humans organized its process- es in a top-down logic. The ‘Idea,’ this almost metaphysical term, the definition of which troubles architects and educators, is an absolute outcome of the human mind dominating the creative process, organising the formal arrangements, and their discursive legitimization. Designing for the Gaia cannot follow any ‘Idea’ as geocentric thinking demands a re-composition of its parts piece by piece. 25 The ideological background of the design Idea is the prerogative that the de- signer, as a human, can predict to plan the future.
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki