SLIVER Lecture Series 2018/19
“IN THEORY,
...”
IoA Institute of Architecture
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Generalised Chromaticism: Theory’s
Sense and Sensibility
Andrej Radman, Delft University
of Technology
Thanks to the neo-materialist
turn, architects have been equipped for breaking with the bad habit of
hylomorphic moulding in favour of immanent ontopowerful modulation. To meet the
challenges of today – be they economic, social, political or ethical – the architect’s
role needs to undergo a fundamental change from a synoptic visionary – a psychological
subject whose private meanings and public expressions are supposedly crucial
for understanding their work and its effects – to a more humble
clinical/critical cartographer of unlimited finity. Traditionally, architects
are known to have difficulties understanding order and contingency as
co-constitutive. After all, the better part of our technological and aesthetic
traditions has been oriented towards structure as stable and homeostatic.
However, reality is far more accurately rendered by mapping incorporeal effects
than by tracing the ‘physical substrate’ whose very degrees of freedom come to
depend on the quasi-causality of these events. What is required is a concept of
structure that is not detached from what it structures, a ‘generalised
chromaticism’. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: “Placing elements (…) in continuous variation is an operation that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and
has none in advance.”
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