Page 23 - META

23
Architectural design is a tool to elaborate the predictable. The an- thropocentric architect believed that the human mind had the ca- pacity to extrapolate the randomness, the unpredictable, even if this attitude could lead to the imprisonment of the ‘other’ by the ‘famil- iar’. For post-human thinking, the future is not a question with a pre- defined answer but an environment of possibilities and potentialities to emerge through a speculative process 26. This shifts the emphasis from established design practices following predefined methodolo- gies towards making decisions, to unstructured, open-ended, specu- lative approaches to design. The more we appreciate the loss of our assumed capacity to predict, the more we abandon our understand- ing of the present as a stratum to realize possibilities. We are now constructing a new consideration of the present as an environment to initiate possibilities and, to a large extent, uncertain virtualities.
Architectural design was aimed to impose an idea on matter appre- ciating the latter as a passive and obedient entity, prepared to follow commands. This understanding of materiality kept it in the periphery of the design process and, to a large extent, of design thinking over- all. Post-human thinking reinstates materiality as one of its critical points of departure. The no longer debatable vitality of matter ren- ders it as one of the catalytic agents in the formation of Gaia 27 and requests different processes and manipulations towards construct- ing spatialities. Matter possesses morphogenetic capacities in all the spheres of reality: the geological, biological, cultural, social, and eth- ical. The world has to be recomposed as an assemblage of heteroge- neities, through processes that give the possibility to heterogeneous elementary units to be composed.
Architectural design always targeted to create buildings that would exist forever. Even though logically, the life span of a building has been limited, it would conceived as everlasting. This idea is totally in- verted in post-human times. A building is not a machine but has life. It has a limited lifespan, and after that, it has to renegotiate the re- sources used for its materialization. The warnings emitted by all pos- sible sources (scientific, political, and social) about climate change, the sustainable development of the planet, and the reasonable use of existing resources, calls for other design strategies. Buildings have to possess passports and to be part of a perpetual loop of upcycling: their strongest trait must be their ability to compose, decompose and recompose themselves in eternal loops. Design becomes the de- sign of these loops.
The incompatibility of the established architectural design with the intellectual framework of the geocentric understanding of the world flags the emergency to re-design architectural design. Architecture’s perpetual task is to redesign its own substance and ontology in each
25. Cf. for example, the Com- positionist Manifesto of Bru- no Latour (2010).
26. Cf. Manuel Delanda (2016:133).
27. Cf. Maria Vogiatzaki (2016) The Vitality of Matter.
//
Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki