Page 74 - META

74
ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
The beginning of this kind of thinking in architecture can be traced in the aftermath of WWII as the events that took place did not tolerate the modernist vision of formal abstraction as architecture along with the arts and the sciences had to take a stance against the historical events. It was part of this turn that architecture started to examine ideas of context and how to relate to specific situations. In other words, architectural thinking started to look for a common ground, a body of information to share with other discourses and practices. This immediately meant an opening of the architectural language in order to communicate in a way that it is understood outside it and a turn towards what we could call an exteriority. This exteriority was nether then nor now something specific, but it changed following the trends that gained importance from time to time; social and cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, cybernetics, biology, sys- tems and complexity theories... the list is vast. The important issue is the demand for hetero-referentiality that signified a rethinking (if not loss) of absolute authority in the finished object. Architectural rep- resentations were rethought in this prospect and, therefore, re-ap- preciated. The notion of collage was an early reflex as it graphically contested purism, the psychogeographic maps of the Situationists inserted randomness in the conception of cities along with subjec- tive issues. Archigram and archizoom introduced a re-thinking of the medium of standardized representation by opening up to mediums as the pamphlet, the magazine or the video. These experiments re- main symbolic in nature while the very first breakthrough towards a rethinking of the relations in which architecture contributes came with cybernetics and the realization that architecture should be able to be in-formed and not simulate a detached environment but “rath- er the organism itself and its psychological, historical, and sensorim- otor experience within that environment” (Roche, 2014). By embed- ding real time changing information architecture is embedded into context ecologies .
This constitutes a meta-presence as a return or exaggeration of pres- ence that was further enabled with the advent of the digital revolu- tion 3. that in architecture is realized through Building Information Modeling and File to Factory protocols to name a few. BIM enables real time monitoring of different aspects and infrastructures of a building while f2f protocols enable negotiation between design and product, engagement and a continuum (Voyatzaki, 2010) between the design process and construction. Architecture can become spe- cific, customized and contextually aware if architecture manages to monitor information and channel it in directions that contest its sense of object. The metarepresentational scheme that architecture falls in is that of a mind monitoring an informational network where cognition is always situated in a specific environment that is both technical and subjective (Roche, 2014) where space is a trope of in- formation. Contextual aware metarepresentations do not represent
3. As Mario Carpo writes “Sys- tems theory, complexity sci- ence and the so-called theo- ry of self-organising systems were part of the legacy that early cybernetics had be- queathed to contemporary digital design”. Mario Carpo, Introduction in Mario Car- po (editor) The Digital Turn in Architecture. 1992-2012. ISBN 978-1-119-95174-2. Wi- ley 2013
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Meta(re)presentations
Antonis Moras