or How to Overcome the Allographic Curse
ABSTRACT
It has been stated that in order to grasp the (postmodern) condition one has to turn to Lynch. David, not Kevin. In order to unlock the (post-postmodern) virtual, a Gibson is in order. Not William and his virtual reality, but the psychologist James Jerome and his real virtuality. These ideas are not isolated. It can be argued that Gibson's approach is germane to contemporary science and philosophy which are concerned with the broader context of evolutionary-dynamic systems. This paper addresses Gibson's ecological approach to perception based on the complementarity of the perceiver and the environment. Gibson argues that, if the objects of knowledge are separated from the objects of existence, we end up with the duality of mental and physical objects leading to an ontologically indirect perception. Perceptual systems resonate to information. This direct realism is grounded on the premise that, from the outset, experience is a relation of potential structure rather than a formless chaotic swirl onto which structure must be imposed by cognitive process. The world is seen as an ongoing open process of mattering where meaning and form is acquired in the actualisation of different agential virtualities. Gibson's neologism affordance resonates with Deluzean (posthumanist) expressionism, undermining Cartesian dualisms (body/mind, action/perception, plan/section) and fostering the logic of sensation/relation as elaborated by Massumi and DeLanda. Žižek has recently discussed the apparent paradox of the (new) materialism as a formalist project (!). Formalism here is seen as Kwinter would have it: diagrammatic, Foucauldian. Architecture as an allographic practice cannot escape representation. However, Gibson can be regarded as the beacon of the new materialist topological approach to design rescuing it from the 'linguistic turn' and its damaging legacy. After all: It is not about the world of design; it is about the design of the world.
Real Virtuality of J.J. Gibson:
or How to Overcome the Allographic Curse
Andrej Radman
I also have a belief that first comes pattern, then configuration, and only after that comes material, and after that structure.
(Cecil Balmond)
Learning becomes the education of attention.
(Gibson, 1966)
SPATIAL TURN
Peter Sloterdijk observed that until recently there prevailed a voluntary spatial blindness. Temporal problems were seen as progressive and cool, unlike "the old-fashioned and conservative questions of space, a matter for old men and shabby imperialists." According to the sphereologist, even the fascinating novel chapters on space in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus couldn't change the situation, since "they arrived too early for the chronophilic, or time-worshipping, zeitgeist of those days. (...) The same goes for programmatic propositions in late Foucault - according to whom we are again entering an age of space." [1]
BIFURCATION
Very few would challenge the view that architecture is a material practice and yet it is only in the past decade that the "new materialism" [2] has started to penetrate the architectural discourse. It took no less than complete disenchantment with the logocentric theories for an alternative to be considered. There must be a lot of fellow reconvalescents out there traumatised by questions such as: "What does this building denotate/connotate?" Many were happy to indulge in this gratifying intellectual contemplation. Yet the fact that it lent itself - all too easily - to grafting onto any practice across the board (including architecture) should have made one suspicious.
Neither does matter determine the form of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose its form on matter, nor have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain at least a common form.
(Bergson, Creative Evolution, 206)
DIRECT REALISM
Indeed, how does one account for the universally acclaimed architectural masterpieces whose authors remain utterly ignorant of all the sophisticated theories. Take for example Rudolfsky's Architecture Without Architects (1964). It demonstrates a breathtaking architectural ingenuity matching the creativity of nature itself. American psychologist J.J. Gibson, the founder of the ecological approach to perception, would have credited it to co-evolution of the human (animal) and its environment. [3] The perfect symmetry between the counterparts - where the beholder resonates to the information provided by the environment – has also been brought into the artificial (built) realm. The lesson about the potential risks and opportunities offered by the environment has been learnt and perfected.
The environment is navigated through affordances. This neologism of Gibson's is related to the encounter where experience is seen as an emergence. It returns the body to a process field of exteriority, as opposed to phenomenology with experience as a form of interiority. [4] It is no coincidence that the School of Ecological Perception describes perceiving as tuning in - as in radio frequency – in contrast to the computational metaphor (with the brain as a computer, eye as a camera, etc). [5]
EXPRESSIVITY
The world, after all, "does not exist outside of its expression". Deleuze & Guattari were explicit about this - often misunderstood – maxim. It has become somewhat common for their epigones to favour the virtual on behalf of the expression. But the fact of the matter is that you cannot have one without the other. Their determination is reciprocal. Smooth and striated. Matter is but a confluence of forces. Furthermore, one could argue that this "reification" is necessary for the expression to start "migrating".
First we have left a four-dimensional Lebenswelt, and we stepped into culture, which produces manufactured objects in three-dimensions. Then we stepped back into the imagination, to make images of objects. Then we stepped back from imagination into contextual texts, and texts are to images what images are to objects. Then we stepped back from description and culture and conception into calculation. Into zero-dimension. And I think that numbers are to texts what texts are to images, and what images are to objects. So that we have come to absolute abstraction: nothing is describable any longer, nothing is concept, can be conceptive, nothing can be imagined. And now we can take the numbers, we can take the bytes, and we can compute them and project them back and make alternative roads.
(Vilém Flusser interviewed by Miklós Peternák 1988, unpublished)
FORMALISM
So far so good. But there is an even stranger paradox with the new materialism which - in comparison to its opposite, i.e., idealism – has, in the words of Žižek, turned out rather formalist as a project. But this formalism is not the pejorative one where the process and the product are conflated. It is the good formalism in the tradition of the "greatest formalists such as Goethe and Foucault" as explained by Kwinter: "The very idea that the figure (...) might enfold within it a resonant, transmissible logic of internal control, one that can be at once dissociated from its material substrate and maintained in communicative tension with it, was once an assertion of great contentiousness. The moment of its rigorous demonstration became one of the watersheds, not only of modern aesthetics, but of modern science and philosophy as well." [6]
This was a crucial step away from naive materialism/realism. In order to account for creation the virtual realm had to be accounted for. This is by no means a transcendent platonic realm. It is the manifold, a "phase portrait" of any dynamic system which is real but not as yet actual. Its indeterminacy is the very precondition of novelty. The actualisation of the (real) virtual is thus a morphogenetic (intensive) process, whereas the realisation of the possible is subject to predicate logic. [7] Brian Massumi explains the distinction between the implicate and explicate orders as follows:
Implicit form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time-extension as actualisation; actualisation as expression. It is in expression that the fade-out occurs. The limits of the field of emergence are in its actual expression. Implicit form may be thought of as the effective presence of the sum total of a thing's interaction minus the thing.
NO META-FORM
The shift from the generic to the genetic take on the form should be good news for architects given that they are good at handling form(ation). However, once we appropriate the radically new logic of sensation [8] (and consequently relation) we also have to acknowledge that there exists both the form of content and the form of expression. The bad news is that there is no form of forms to bridge the gap. What connects them is the very process of progressive differentiation. This intricate interdependency was not properly grasped by some (too) eager proponents of the new paradigm. The race for the first topological building was on. One of the greatest authorities in the field – architect Bernard Cache - expressed his puzzlement over the fact that nobody seemed to notice that the "Mobius house" had already been built. Indeed it had, more than thirty years ago. Moreover, to the surprise of many – entirely out of Euclidian geometry. He was referring to the Pompidou Centre in Paris with a vast hall as the outdoor interior, the small tube as the indoor exterior folding upon itself... [9]
MULTIPLICITY
Approaching the virtual through topology is not to be taken only metaphorically. On the contrary, the topological condition of continuity is as elementary as is discreteness resulting from the process of individuation. Sensation is endoreferential, or self-referential, whereas perception is exoreferential. Despite the risk of oversimplifying, let us first consider the three modes of perceptual legibility as offered by Sarah Whiting during the Projective vs. Critical debate at TU Delft: Applied legibility (metaphor), process legibility (grid/system) and experienced legibility (perspective). [10]
Applied legibility might be related to the example cited by Robert Somol of the Downsview (Green Dot) competition entry by Koolhaas’ OMA. [11] The strategy of producing what is effectively a logo is aimed at rallying public support for the project. The representational (double coding) approach clearly focuses on galvanizing a collective desire. [12] Process legibility is literally systematic, encompassing all the used and abused practices of (cognitive) mapping. Finally, experienced legibility is the closest to what this paper is trying to address – the embodied experience. It is ontogenetic. [13]
The triad may be transposed, though with a pinch of salt, onto the C.S. Peirce’s distinction between the symbol (convention), icon (resemblance) and finally the radically different index (trace). Unlike the first two, the last sign is a product of difference. Let us not forget the Deluzian ‘mantra’: In the field of representation similarities dominate; in the field of ontology differences dominate.
AFFECT
But how to make sense of the virtual which is different not in degree but in kind? [14] It is in the process of individuation and only there (then?) that one might be able to visualise it, as beautifully proposed by the biologist Conrad Waddington and his epigenetic landscape. Bruce Sterling was proven right in claiming that artists (architects) are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas. This two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other, is due to the capacity to affect and be affected. The affect becomes the very interface between implicate and explicate orders.
We are virtual knowers ... long before we were certified to have been actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power.
(William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism)
EX UNO PLURA
In his syncretic approach, the media theorist Roy Ascott argues that we have been stuck with E pluribus unum (maxim) for too long. [15] Out of many, one is a good enough definition of the typological thinking whereby the essential One stands against Many imperfect sensuous incarnations (of the ideal type). The population thinking (legacy of evolutionism) proposes the reverse, namely, variation is regarded as real and type as mere fiction (statistical mean/average).
This is not just another postmodern nominalist caution to avoid totalisation and suchlike. It is much more substantial. It has been proposed that the general vs. particular models and their logical relation should be replaced with the “flat ontology” of "individual and universal singular" instead. To put it simply, any individual is as contingent as species, or genera. What "connects" the two singularities is the (non discursive) process of progressive differentiation. The manifold, as the "phase space" of a dynamic system, contains all the potential trajectories but eventually unfolds (actualises) only one in the extensive realm. It is therefore contingently obligatory but not logically necessary.
Sanford Kwinter has proposed a useful metaphor to explain the difference (that makes all the difference) with respect to the reality of time between the two competing models. [16] In order to highlight the crucial difference between the hylemorphic moulding and creative modulation he posits a simple question: what is the role of time in the morphogenesis of an ice cube as opposed to a snow flake? It is obvious that in the former case time does not have a role to play.
GEOMETRY
In the early days of WWII, German airplanes were allegedly more successful than the British. It has been claimed that the British airborne manoeuvres were more concerned with representational "choreography" based on symmetry and beauty than with efficiency. Their German counterparts, on the other hand, were busy exploring the (phase) space to its full potential. What was achieved was an emergent property of a dynamic system where the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts. This is a purely geometrical problem, according to Reiser and Payne. [17]
In the same vein, Brian Massumi has provocatively countered objections to the appropriateness of abstract geometries with regard to the concrete body: "What if the body space is even more abstract"? Drawing heavily on Peirce, he argues that cognitive mapping might be overrated. The western ocularcentricity has blinded us and prevented from considering other senses. [18] This is especially true of the self-referential sixth sense - that of proprioception - also known as the "joint sense". The revelation requires a radical reversal where movement does not occur in space, rather, space is a product of movement. Indeed, do we not often find ourselves in "autopilot mode" without relying upon cognitive mapping? Gauss' achievement of challenging the necessity to add an extra dimension in order to study space (Cartesian cage), and proposing that it be "localised" instead, becomes indispensable. [19] This is not unrelated to the distinction made by Tschumi/Bataille between the occularcentric architecture of the Pyramid and the kinesthetic experience of the Labyrinth.
SYNESTHESIA
We should not forget that every sensation is not only kinesthetic but also synesthetic. The senses cooperate and fold upon each other intensively cross-referencing disparate planes of experience. They are neither separate nor discrete. Nor are action and perception. Back in 1963 scientists Held and Hein demonstrated in a rather (by today's standards) cruel experiment that if two newly born kittens are exposed to the same visual information, but one can engage in movement while the other may only observe it, then the latter will be effectively blind at the end of the experiment. Physiologically there will be nothing wrong with the unfortunate kitten, but it will not be able to judge distances and will bump into obstacles. The same result is obtained in the case of exposure to the stroboscopic light which "slices" experience into still images. Action and perception thus form a continuum and cannot be treated separately.
MESOSCALE
What is a table, a solid mass made of wood or an aggregate of discrete entities moving in the void? Bernard Cache's answer to the question would presumably be that the table is indeed both, but that, above all, it is an elevated ground. This is the answer that would most certainly please James Jerome Gibson.
The environment has multiple levels of structure with smaller units embedded in larger units and, as such, it cannot be reduced to a single level of description. Traditionally, it is broken down into matter, energy, and the interaction of elementary particles. This is the Newtonian concept of the physical world. If we move to the level of ecological relationships, we encounter substances, media, surfaces, and surface layout. This level is described in Gibson's opaque "solid geometry". The earth is an object relative to astronomy, but it is a surface relative to animate life. There is both a spatial and temporal "nesting" where - or rather when - the events of shorter duration are embedded in those of longer duration.
This view of veridicality calls for a definition of the truth-about-the-environment that is not metaphysical (always and for everyone), but pragmatic (useful for a particular someone on a given occasion). This is akin to the concern recently voiced by Bruno Latour: "…should we show an object with all of the attachments that make it possible? Or should we delineate the object to such an extent that it shines like a brightly lit foreground over a shadowy background? In the first case, we are dealing with things in the old etymological sense of issues, matters of concern, that which forces people to assemble around what they disagree about and what they nevertheless have in common. In the second case, we are dealing with objects – with what is out there, unquestionable, mastered, known, that which can be taken as a matter of fact. This is a choice of philosophy, of politics, but also of art and of design. Thus it’s a problem of civilization." [20]
Surfaces defined as the interface between substance and medium surround animate life and provide rigid support and differentiated structure, making orientation possible. The medium affords room for locomotion, yet it is significant that the medium is adjacent to surfaces (it is not unsupported space), so that animate life moves through the medium across surfaces. The surface differentiation is reflected in the ambient optic array, thus providing information specific to the position and path. Energy reverberates through the differentiated ecosystem, thus surrounding animate life with differentiated energy ambiance. Significantly, the structure within this energy ambiance is a consequence of both the surrounding environment and the surrounded perceiver (surroundings surrounded). [21]
(RE)PRESENTATION
Since the birth of Western architecture in classical Greece, architects have been making mediating artefacts rather than buildings. [22] Architectural representation, as exemplified in Vitruvius' elaboration of the Greek word "idea", consists of orthogonal projections (ichnographia and orthographia) and of what is variously interpreted as the inscription of shadows/the drawing of a building in perspective (sciographia/scaenographia). Myth has it that the art of drawing began with a Corinthian maiden outlining the shadow of her departing lover on the wall. In the case of architectural representation the shadow precedes the object that is supposed to cast it, as it were. Or does it entirely?
Vitruvius' basic scheme is still valid: ichonographia, translated as plan, is the main generator of function and deals with the horizontal, whereas ortographia, translated as elevation, is the main generator of structure dealing with the vertical. However, more "strata" should necessarily be added to address the ever increasing complexity of the so-called "information flows" (statistics, demographics, economic performance, etc.).
As a medium, the diagram performs a double role. It is a mode of notation, analytic and reflexive, and at the same time a thought-generating model, synthetic and productive and, as such, indispensable. It inherently works with reduction, abstraction and representation. It is an overview. It is top-down. It is "objective".
DEPTH
Scaenographia is something completely different. The converging parallels draw it away from the intelligible realm towards the sensible world, acknowledging our necessarily relative point of view. This is where the universal is subsumed by the particular. This is as close as one gets between the nose and the horizon. This is the famous "perspectival hinge". Sure, we are still in the realm of representation, but by giving priority to the relative over the absolute proportions the pendulum inevitably swings to the side of the temporal experience of an embodied observer. Perspective is not a "subjective deformation of things". On the contrary, "nontranscendental perspectivism" reunites humanity with the world. It is immanent. It is about the encounter and the capacity to affect and be affected. It is curious though to note that while our culture questions the Cartesian dualistic concept of reality divided into res cogitans and res extensa, the same concept reemerges where one expects it the least - in cyberspace.
The "mystery of depth" has been exploited by numerous artists. However, the meaning of architectural experience cannot be fully translated into other media. Depth is a dimension of perceptual cohesion and reversibility which allows things to appear mutually dependent through their autonomy and to reciprocally manifest their "objectivity" through mutual concealment. Depth is therefore not a third dimension. [23] If it were any dimension at all, writes Merleau-Ponty, it would be the first.
The shift from an object-based to a relation-based paradigm has a side-effect which is that of the tendency to reduce the meaning of art and architecture to information, thus forgetting that the theory of expression is not concerned with the communication of information but with the genesis of the definite. Architecture can and must embody values of a different order than those rooted in fashion, formal experimentation, or publicity, and can be cast in forms other than seductive gloss characterising the all-present mechanisms of cultural domination.
AFFORDANCES
The values and meanings of things in the environment arise from the perception of what those things provide or offer as potential actions or uses to the perceiver - or rather, in Gibson’s terms, from what their affordances are - and not by universally naming and categorising absolute or objective properties. Gibson emphasises that a theory of meaning must avoid “the philosophical muddle of assuming fixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name. As Ludwig Wittgenstein knew, you cannot specify the necessary and sufficient features of the class of things to which a name is given. [...] You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.” Affordances provide the "connection" between perception and behaviour, because they are perceived, used and adjusted vis-à-vis behaviour. They exist at a level of organisation commensurate with (animate) life.
OCCLUSION
Natural perspective has limitations for it geometrises the world, omitting motion and time. Occlusion (accretion/deletion) is an ecological fact of a cluttered environment with localised observers. Reversible occlusion, due to reversible locomotion and line of sight, provides an explanation for the spatial connectivity of the environment. Meaning is revealed in the environment. Perception is conceived of as an activity and what is perceived cannot be thought of as analogous to a static image or form. Though an observer will view an object from a variety of perspectives (forms), it is the invariants over time that determine the perception and these invariants are not static forms. Gibson points out that images in that sense are not even necessary for thought, or for perception for that matter. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the perception of occlusion, where there is awareness of something in the environment yet there is no qualitative content of "being occluded".
INVARIANTS
Perceptual constancy is a continuing conundrum to empirical research. Traditionally, a shape is thought to be perceived through two instantaneous values (static retinal form and the momentary distance value of depth cues). The shape perceived (a relatively permanent property) is not based on a static property such as form, rather, upon an invariant embedded in change.
According to Gibson, it is the (formless) invariants of optical change that specify an object's integrity, its shape, and its rigidity. [24] Gibson thus distinguishes between perspective and invariant structure in the optic ambience. The former will change as an observer moves about, but the latter will change only where there is some change in the environment. It is important to stress that the invariants specifying salient dimensions of the environment are detected, not computed.
CONCLUSION
Gibson's structural and compositional ecology (opaque solid geometry, substances, etc.) differs considerably from Platonic "objects in space". He can tie a host of animal-related functions to this ecology, for instance, openings afford locomotion, cliffs afford jumping, occluding edges afford concealment, objects afford throwing, holding, plugging, and so on. Affordances are identified with meanings. Structure and function are related. What something "is" is related to what it "means". The gap between matter and mind is bridged.
Perception is not limited to a perpetually vanishing series of instants. It has a temporal extension, necessarily both into the past and into the future, for perception involves a temporal order - constancy and change nested over time. Art and representation are then seen as an extension and elaboration of perception. Therefore, perception is functionally and ontologically continuous with mnemonic, linguistic, imaginative and abstractive processes.
Interestingly enough, cyberspace designers recognise the power and immediacy of navigational rather than symbolic order. Unlike architects, they seem to grasp the potential of Gibson’s affordance, albeit a perceived one. Even the flat digital (Microsoft) "windows" surrender to occlusion.
In a desperate attempt to catch up with forms of contemporary image culture, architects tend to forget where their strength lies. Who is to manipulate the environment? To speak of culture as forms of life, as Scott Lash argues, is to break with earlier notions of culture as representation, as reflection. It is to break with positivism for phenomenology (expressivity), with judgement for experience, with epistemology for ontology, and finally to break with a certain type of cognition for living.
NOTES
[1] Betina Funcke's interview with Peter Sloterdijk: Against Gravity, Bookforum, (2005)
[2] Deleuze's terms for incorporeal materialism are "superior empiricism" or "transcendental empiricism".
[3] The concept of "environment", first used by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1921), represents one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century which would influence the development of ecology.
[4] The gestalt method might also be characterised as an endoreduction of experience.
[5] The animal may change as a consequence of experience, but we view that change not as an accumulation of knowledge, but as a keener ability to detect the affordances of the environment.
[6] Sanford Kwinter: Who's Afraid of Formalism?, Any Magazine 7/8 (1994).
[7] Perceptions and actions are not propositions, nor are they based on a proposition, and cannot, therefore, be either correct or incorrect.
[8] Perception enables quantification while sensation is only ever qualitative. In the perspective advanced here, experience cannot be built up from a linkage or association between discrete elements.
[9] Bernard Cache: A Plea for Euclid, ANY 22, (1999).
[10] The Projective Landscape Conference took place on March 16-17, 2006 at TU Delft.
[11] Robert Somol: Green Dots 101, Hunch 11 (2007) 28-37.
[12] There are claims that Mies is indeed the 'grandfather of photoshopping.' And this seems somewhat related to Somol's issue of two schools of contemporary architecture fostering two distinct orientations towards disciplinarity. That is, “disciplinarity as autonomy” and process, as in the case of Eisenman's reading of the Domino diagram, and “disciplinarity as force and effect”, as in Koolhaas' staging of the Downtown Athletic Club (Rowe's Austin, Texas vs. AA London). This is best exemplified by the Vriesendorp's painting featuring two naked boxers eating oysters (from DNY). Koolhaas is clearly into promoting a lifestyle (mood-setting, atmosphere) rather than architecture per se.
[13] Curiously, this triad reflects Jefrey Kipnis' recent contemplation of the modernist project and its positions (plural) in relation to the ground/land/datum: Le Corbusier - Mies - Wright representing the Conceptual project – Performative project - New Autenticity, respectively. (SCI-Arc Lecture: Jeffrey Kipnis: *@$#*!#!!, 16/01/2008)
[14] The ideas that the world is an interrelation of movements, that stasis is a movement-effect, that there is no object or subject of movement separate from the movement, and that subject-object relations are effective "illusions" arising from "arrests" or "gaps" in movement, form the central theses of the philosophy of Henri Bergson.
[15] Roy Ascot: Sincretic Strategies (2007) http://www.eaf.asn.au/2007/symposium_p_ascott.html
[16] Sanford Kwinter: Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, (2001).
[17] Chum: Computation in a Super-saturated Milieu by Jesse Reiser, Jason Payne (1998)
[18] The tendency to privilege the sight as the sense that gives us access to the truth has been elaborated by Martin Jay: Downcast Eyes; The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994).
[19] The formal apparatus needed to attack the Newtonian "absolute" space in favour of the relative space involving the differential calculus of Newton/Leibniz, Gauss and Rienmann topology, and finally Poincaré's marriage of mathematics with physics, are extensively explained in Manuel DeLanda: Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2005).
[20] Bruno Latour: Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html)
[21] Steven Shaviro in his Simondon on Individuation draws attention to Simondon's theory of becoming that influenced Deleuze: "The individual, as (continually) produced in a process of individuation, is never an isolated Self. It is always coupled or coordinated with a milieu; the individual can only be understood together with its milieu, and cannot subsist as a unity without it. The contact between individual and milieu is mediated by affect. Affectivity comes in between inside and outside, just as it comes in between sensation and action. Just as sensation gets oriented along a series of gradients in order to become perception, so (unconscious or preconscious) affect gets oriented along a series of processes of becoming in order to become (conscious) emotion."
[22] However, for the sake of clarity it is important to acknowledge the impact of the CAD. Lev Manovich is right in claiming that the computer becomes the 'metamedium' literally subsuming all other media. (http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=493).
[23] Geometry of information must be kept independent from the geometry of a receptor surface. The binocular organ does not deal with two things, only one: a transformational invariant. Similarly, three dimensionality is no longer a problem, because the information specifies the three-dimensional character of the world.
[24] Invariants are, quite simply, properties that tolerate certain transformations without undergoing change. Invariants, together with allowable transformations, constitute the geometry for perception or information space. Information space, as structures and transformations, provides the basis for describing events – changes wrought over objects. Structures and transformations can both be invariant. Structural invariants are properties that are constant with respect to certain transformations, while transformational invariants are those styles of change common to a class of transformations that leave certain structures invariant.
or How to Overcome the Allographic Curse
Andrej Radman
I also have a belief that first comes pattern, then configuration, and only after that comes material, and after that structure.
(Cecil Balmond)
Learning becomes the education of attention.
(Gibson, 1966)
SPATIAL TURN
Peter Sloterdijk observed that until recently there prevailed a voluntary spatial blindness. Temporal problems were seen as progressive and cool, unlike "the old-fashioned and conservative questions of space, a matter for old men and shabby imperialists." According to the sphereologist, even the fascinating novel chapters on space in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus couldn't change the situation, since "they arrived too early for the chronophilic, or time-worshipping, zeitgeist of those days. (...) The same goes for programmatic propositions in late Foucault - according to whom we are again entering an age of space." [1]
BIFURCATION
Very few would challenge the view that architecture is a material practice and yet it is only in the past decade that the "new materialism" [2] has started to penetrate the architectural discourse. It took no less than complete disenchantment with the logocentric theories for an alternative to be considered. There must be a lot of fellow reconvalescents out there traumatised by questions such as: "What does this building denotate/connotate?" Many were happy to indulge in this gratifying intellectual contemplation. Yet the fact that it lent itself - all too easily - to grafting onto any practice across the board (including architecture) should have made one suspicious.
Neither does matter determine the form of the intellect, nor does the intellect impose its form on matter, nor have matter and intellect been regulated in regard to one another by we know not what pre-established harmony, but that intellect and matter have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to attain at least a common form.
(Bergson, Creative Evolution, 206)
DIRECT REALISM
Indeed, how does one account for the universally acclaimed architectural masterpieces whose authors remain utterly ignorant of all the sophisticated theories. Take for example Rudolfsky's Architecture Without Architects (1964). It demonstrates a breathtaking architectural ingenuity matching the creativity of nature itself. American psychologist J.J. Gibson, the founder of the ecological approach to perception, would have credited it to co-evolution of the human (animal) and its environment. [3] The perfect symmetry between the counterparts - where the beholder resonates to the information provided by the environment – has also been brought into the artificial (built) realm. The lesson about the potential risks and opportunities offered by the environment has been learnt and perfected.
The environment is navigated through affordances. This neologism of Gibson's is related to the encounter where experience is seen as an emergence. It returns the body to a process field of exteriority, as opposed to phenomenology with experience as a form of interiority. [4] It is no coincidence that the School of Ecological Perception describes perceiving as tuning in - as in radio frequency – in contrast to the computational metaphor (with the brain as a computer, eye as a camera, etc). [5]
EXPRESSIVITY
The world, after all, "does not exist outside of its expression". Deleuze & Guattari were explicit about this - often misunderstood – maxim. It has become somewhat common for their epigones to favour the virtual on behalf of the expression. But the fact of the matter is that you cannot have one without the other. Their determination is reciprocal. Smooth and striated. Matter is but a confluence of forces. Furthermore, one could argue that this "reification" is necessary for the expression to start "migrating".
First we have left a four-dimensional Lebenswelt, and we stepped into culture, which produces manufactured objects in three-dimensions. Then we stepped back into the imagination, to make images of objects. Then we stepped back from imagination into contextual texts, and texts are to images what images are to objects. Then we stepped back from description and culture and conception into calculation. Into zero-dimension. And I think that numbers are to texts what texts are to images, and what images are to objects. So that we have come to absolute abstraction: nothing is describable any longer, nothing is concept, can be conceptive, nothing can be imagined. And now we can take the numbers, we can take the bytes, and we can compute them and project them back and make alternative roads.
(Vilém Flusser interviewed by Miklós Peternák 1988, unpublished)
FORMALISM
So far so good. But there is an even stranger paradox with the new materialism which - in comparison to its opposite, i.e., idealism – has, in the words of Žižek, turned out rather formalist as a project. But this formalism is not the pejorative one where the process and the product are conflated. It is the good formalism in the tradition of the "greatest formalists such as Goethe and Foucault" as explained by Kwinter: "The very idea that the figure (...) might enfold within it a resonant, transmissible logic of internal control, one that can be at once dissociated from its material substrate and maintained in communicative tension with it, was once an assertion of great contentiousness. The moment of its rigorous demonstration became one of the watersheds, not only of modern aesthetics, but of modern science and philosophy as well." [6]
This was a crucial step away from naive materialism/realism. In order to account for creation the virtual realm had to be accounted for. This is by no means a transcendent platonic realm. It is the manifold, a "phase portrait" of any dynamic system which is real but not as yet actual. Its indeterminacy is the very precondition of novelty. The actualisation of the (real) virtual is thus a morphogenetic (intensive) process, whereas the realisation of the possible is subject to predicate logic. [7] Brian Massumi explains the distinction between the implicate and explicate orders as follows:
Implicit form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time-extension as actualisation; actualisation as expression. It is in expression that the fade-out occurs. The limits of the field of emergence are in its actual expression. Implicit form may be thought of as the effective presence of the sum total of a thing's interaction minus the thing.
NO META-FORM
The shift from the generic to the genetic take on the form should be good news for architects given that they are good at handling form(ation). However, once we appropriate the radically new logic of sensation [8] (and consequently relation) we also have to acknowledge that there exists both the form of content and the form of expression. The bad news is that there is no form of forms to bridge the gap. What connects them is the very process of progressive differentiation. This intricate interdependency was not properly grasped by some (too) eager proponents of the new paradigm. The race for the first topological building was on. One of the greatest authorities in the field – architect Bernard Cache - expressed his puzzlement over the fact that nobody seemed to notice that the "Mobius house" had already been built. Indeed it had, more than thirty years ago. Moreover, to the surprise of many – entirely out of Euclidian geometry. He was referring to the Pompidou Centre in Paris with a vast hall as the outdoor interior, the small tube as the indoor exterior folding upon itself... [9]
MULTIPLICITY
Approaching the virtual through topology is not to be taken only metaphorically. On the contrary, the topological condition of continuity is as elementary as is discreteness resulting from the process of individuation. Sensation is endoreferential, or self-referential, whereas perception is exoreferential. Despite the risk of oversimplifying, let us first consider the three modes of perceptual legibility as offered by Sarah Whiting during the Projective vs. Critical debate at TU Delft: Applied legibility (metaphor), process legibility (grid/system) and experienced legibility (perspective). [10]
Applied legibility might be related to the example cited by Robert Somol of the Downsview (Green Dot) competition entry by Koolhaas’ OMA. [11] The strategy of producing what is effectively a logo is aimed at rallying public support for the project. The representational (double coding) approach clearly focuses on galvanizing a collective desire. [12] Process legibility is literally systematic, encompassing all the used and abused practices of (cognitive) mapping. Finally, experienced legibility is the closest to what this paper is trying to address – the embodied experience. It is ontogenetic. [13]
The triad may be transposed, though with a pinch of salt, onto the C.S. Peirce’s distinction between the symbol (convention), icon (resemblance) and finally the radically different index (trace). Unlike the first two, the last sign is a product of difference. Let us not forget the Deluzian ‘mantra’: In the field of representation similarities dominate; in the field of ontology differences dominate.
AFFECT
But how to make sense of the virtual which is different not in degree but in kind? [14] It is in the process of individuation and only there (then?) that one might be able to visualise it, as beautifully proposed by the biologist Conrad Waddington and his epigenetic landscape. Bruce Sterling was proven right in claiming that artists (architects) are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas. This two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other, is due to the capacity to affect and be affected. The affect becomes the very interface between implicate and explicate orders.
We are virtual knowers ... long before we were certified to have been actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power.
(William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism)
EX UNO PLURA
In his syncretic approach, the media theorist Roy Ascott argues that we have been stuck with E pluribus unum (maxim) for too long. [15] Out of many, one is a good enough definition of the typological thinking whereby the essential One stands against Many imperfect sensuous incarnations (of the ideal type). The population thinking (legacy of evolutionism) proposes the reverse, namely, variation is regarded as real and type as mere fiction (statistical mean/average).
This is not just another postmodern nominalist caution to avoid totalisation and suchlike. It is much more substantial. It has been proposed that the general vs. particular models and their logical relation should be replaced with the “flat ontology” of "individual and universal singular" instead. To put it simply, any individual is as contingent as species, or genera. What "connects" the two singularities is the (non discursive) process of progressive differentiation. The manifold, as the "phase space" of a dynamic system, contains all the potential trajectories but eventually unfolds (actualises) only one in the extensive realm. It is therefore contingently obligatory but not logically necessary.
Sanford Kwinter has proposed a useful metaphor to explain the difference (that makes all the difference) with respect to the reality of time between the two competing models. [16] In order to highlight the crucial difference between the hylemorphic moulding and creative modulation he posits a simple question: what is the role of time in the morphogenesis of an ice cube as opposed to a snow flake? It is obvious that in the former case time does not have a role to play.
GEOMETRY
In the early days of WWII, German airplanes were allegedly more successful than the British. It has been claimed that the British airborne manoeuvres were more concerned with representational "choreography" based on symmetry and beauty than with efficiency. Their German counterparts, on the other hand, were busy exploring the (phase) space to its full potential. What was achieved was an emergent property of a dynamic system where the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts. This is a purely geometrical problem, according to Reiser and Payne. [17]
In the same vein, Brian Massumi has provocatively countered objections to the appropriateness of abstract geometries with regard to the concrete body: "What if the body space is even more abstract"? Drawing heavily on Peirce, he argues that cognitive mapping might be overrated. The western ocularcentricity has blinded us and prevented from considering other senses. [18] This is especially true of the self-referential sixth sense - that of proprioception - also known as the "joint sense". The revelation requires a radical reversal where movement does not occur in space, rather, space is a product of movement. Indeed, do we not often find ourselves in "autopilot mode" without relying upon cognitive mapping? Gauss' achievement of challenging the necessity to add an extra dimension in order to study space (Cartesian cage), and proposing that it be "localised" instead, becomes indispensable. [19] This is not unrelated to the distinction made by Tschumi/Bataille between the occularcentric architecture of the Pyramid and the kinesthetic experience of the Labyrinth.
SYNESTHESIA
We should not forget that every sensation is not only kinesthetic but also synesthetic. The senses cooperate and fold upon each other intensively cross-referencing disparate planes of experience. They are neither separate nor discrete. Nor are action and perception. Back in 1963 scientists Held and Hein demonstrated in a rather (by today's standards) cruel experiment that if two newly born kittens are exposed to the same visual information, but one can engage in movement while the other may only observe it, then the latter will be effectively blind at the end of the experiment. Physiologically there will be nothing wrong with the unfortunate kitten, but it will not be able to judge distances and will bump into obstacles. The same result is obtained in the case of exposure to the stroboscopic light which "slices" experience into still images. Action and perception thus form a continuum and cannot be treated separately.
MESOSCALE
What is a table, a solid mass made of wood or an aggregate of discrete entities moving in the void? Bernard Cache's answer to the question would presumably be that the table is indeed both, but that, above all, it is an elevated ground. This is the answer that would most certainly please James Jerome Gibson.
The environment has multiple levels of structure with smaller units embedded in larger units and, as such, it cannot be reduced to a single level of description. Traditionally, it is broken down into matter, energy, and the interaction of elementary particles. This is the Newtonian concept of the physical world. If we move to the level of ecological relationships, we encounter substances, media, surfaces, and surface layout. This level is described in Gibson's opaque "solid geometry". The earth is an object relative to astronomy, but it is a surface relative to animate life. There is both a spatial and temporal "nesting" where - or rather when - the events of shorter duration are embedded in those of longer duration.
This view of veridicality calls for a definition of the truth-about-the-environment that is not metaphysical (always and for everyone), but pragmatic (useful for a particular someone on a given occasion). This is akin to the concern recently voiced by Bruno Latour: "…should we show an object with all of the attachments that make it possible? Or should we delineate the object to such an extent that it shines like a brightly lit foreground over a shadowy background? In the first case, we are dealing with things in the old etymological sense of issues, matters of concern, that which forces people to assemble around what they disagree about and what they nevertheless have in common. In the second case, we are dealing with objects – with what is out there, unquestionable, mastered, known, that which can be taken as a matter of fact. This is a choice of philosophy, of politics, but also of art and of design. Thus it’s a problem of civilization." [20]
Surfaces defined as the interface between substance and medium surround animate life and provide rigid support and differentiated structure, making orientation possible. The medium affords room for locomotion, yet it is significant that the medium is adjacent to surfaces (it is not unsupported space), so that animate life moves through the medium across surfaces. The surface differentiation is reflected in the ambient optic array, thus providing information specific to the position and path. Energy reverberates through the differentiated ecosystem, thus surrounding animate life with differentiated energy ambiance. Significantly, the structure within this energy ambiance is a consequence of both the surrounding environment and the surrounded perceiver (surroundings surrounded). [21]
(RE)PRESENTATION
Since the birth of Western architecture in classical Greece, architects have been making mediating artefacts rather than buildings. [22] Architectural representation, as exemplified in Vitruvius' elaboration of the Greek word "idea", consists of orthogonal projections (ichnographia and orthographia) and of what is variously interpreted as the inscription of shadows/the drawing of a building in perspective (sciographia/scaenographia). Myth has it that the art of drawing began with a Corinthian maiden outlining the shadow of her departing lover on the wall. In the case of architectural representation the shadow precedes the object that is supposed to cast it, as it were. Or does it entirely?
Vitruvius' basic scheme is still valid: ichonographia, translated as plan, is the main generator of function and deals with the horizontal, whereas ortographia, translated as elevation, is the main generator of structure dealing with the vertical. However, more "strata" should necessarily be added to address the ever increasing complexity of the so-called "information flows" (statistics, demographics, economic performance, etc.).
As a medium, the diagram performs a double role. It is a mode of notation, analytic and reflexive, and at the same time a thought-generating model, synthetic and productive and, as such, indispensable. It inherently works with reduction, abstraction and representation. It is an overview. It is top-down. It is "objective".
DEPTH
Scaenographia is something completely different. The converging parallels draw it away from the intelligible realm towards the sensible world, acknowledging our necessarily relative point of view. This is where the universal is subsumed by the particular. This is as close as one gets between the nose and the horizon. This is the famous "perspectival hinge". Sure, we are still in the realm of representation, but by giving priority to the relative over the absolute proportions the pendulum inevitably swings to the side of the temporal experience of an embodied observer. Perspective is not a "subjective deformation of things". On the contrary, "nontranscendental perspectivism" reunites humanity with the world. It is immanent. It is about the encounter and the capacity to affect and be affected. It is curious though to note that while our culture questions the Cartesian dualistic concept of reality divided into res cogitans and res extensa, the same concept reemerges where one expects it the least - in cyberspace.
The "mystery of depth" has been exploited by numerous artists. However, the meaning of architectural experience cannot be fully translated into other media. Depth is a dimension of perceptual cohesion and reversibility which allows things to appear mutually dependent through their autonomy and to reciprocally manifest their "objectivity" through mutual concealment. Depth is therefore not a third dimension. [23] If it were any dimension at all, writes Merleau-Ponty, it would be the first.
The shift from an object-based to a relation-based paradigm has a side-effect which is that of the tendency to reduce the meaning of art and architecture to information, thus forgetting that the theory of expression is not concerned with the communication of information but with the genesis of the definite. Architecture can and must embody values of a different order than those rooted in fashion, formal experimentation, or publicity, and can be cast in forms other than seductive gloss characterising the all-present mechanisms of cultural domination.
AFFORDANCES
The values and meanings of things in the environment arise from the perception of what those things provide or offer as potential actions or uses to the perceiver - or rather, in Gibson’s terms, from what their affordances are - and not by universally naming and categorising absolute or objective properties. Gibson emphasises that a theory of meaning must avoid “the philosophical muddle of assuming fixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name. As Ludwig Wittgenstein knew, you cannot specify the necessary and sufficient features of the class of things to which a name is given. [...] You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.” Affordances provide the "connection" between perception and behaviour, because they are perceived, used and adjusted vis-à-vis behaviour. They exist at a level of organisation commensurate with (animate) life.
OCCLUSION
Natural perspective has limitations for it geometrises the world, omitting motion and time. Occlusion (accretion/deletion) is an ecological fact of a cluttered environment with localised observers. Reversible occlusion, due to reversible locomotion and line of sight, provides an explanation for the spatial connectivity of the environment. Meaning is revealed in the environment. Perception is conceived of as an activity and what is perceived cannot be thought of as analogous to a static image or form. Though an observer will view an object from a variety of perspectives (forms), it is the invariants over time that determine the perception and these invariants are not static forms. Gibson points out that images in that sense are not even necessary for thought, or for perception for that matter. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the perception of occlusion, where there is awareness of something in the environment yet there is no qualitative content of "being occluded".
INVARIANTS
Perceptual constancy is a continuing conundrum to empirical research. Traditionally, a shape is thought to be perceived through two instantaneous values (static retinal form and the momentary distance value of depth cues). The shape perceived (a relatively permanent property) is not based on a static property such as form, rather, upon an invariant embedded in change.
According to Gibson, it is the (formless) invariants of optical change that specify an object's integrity, its shape, and its rigidity. [24] Gibson thus distinguishes between perspective and invariant structure in the optic ambience. The former will change as an observer moves about, but the latter will change only where there is some change in the environment. It is important to stress that the invariants specifying salient dimensions of the environment are detected, not computed.
CONCLUSION
Gibson's structural and compositional ecology (opaque solid geometry, substances, etc.) differs considerably from Platonic "objects in space". He can tie a host of animal-related functions to this ecology, for instance, openings afford locomotion, cliffs afford jumping, occluding edges afford concealment, objects afford throwing, holding, plugging, and so on. Affordances are identified with meanings. Structure and function are related. What something "is" is related to what it "means". The gap between matter and mind is bridged.
Perception is not limited to a perpetually vanishing series of instants. It has a temporal extension, necessarily both into the past and into the future, for perception involves a temporal order - constancy and change nested over time. Art and representation are then seen as an extension and elaboration of perception. Therefore, perception is functionally and ontologically continuous with mnemonic, linguistic, imaginative and abstractive processes.
Interestingly enough, cyberspace designers recognise the power and immediacy of navigational rather than symbolic order. Unlike architects, they seem to grasp the potential of Gibson’s affordance, albeit a perceived one. Even the flat digital (Microsoft) "windows" surrender to occlusion.
In a desperate attempt to catch up with forms of contemporary image culture, architects tend to forget where their strength lies. Who is to manipulate the environment? To speak of culture as forms of life, as Scott Lash argues, is to break with earlier notions of culture as representation, as reflection. It is to break with positivism for phenomenology (expressivity), with judgement for experience, with epistemology for ontology, and finally to break with a certain type of cognition for living.
NOTES
[1] Betina Funcke's interview with Peter Sloterdijk: Against Gravity, Bookforum, (2005)
[2] Deleuze's terms for incorporeal materialism are "superior empiricism" or "transcendental empiricism".
[3] The concept of "environment", first used by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1921), represents one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century which would influence the development of ecology.
[4] The gestalt method might also be characterised as an endoreduction of experience.
[5] The animal may change as a consequence of experience, but we view that change not as an accumulation of knowledge, but as a keener ability to detect the affordances of the environment.
[6] Sanford Kwinter: Who's Afraid of Formalism?, Any Magazine 7/8 (1994).
[7] Perceptions and actions are not propositions, nor are they based on a proposition, and cannot, therefore, be either correct or incorrect.
[8] Perception enables quantification while sensation is only ever qualitative. In the perspective advanced here, experience cannot be built up from a linkage or association between discrete elements.
[9] Bernard Cache: A Plea for Euclid, ANY 22, (1999).
[10] The Projective Landscape Conference took place on March 16-17, 2006 at TU Delft.
[11] Robert Somol: Green Dots 101, Hunch 11 (2007) 28-37.
[12] There are claims that Mies is indeed the 'grandfather of photoshopping.' And this seems somewhat related to Somol's issue of two schools of contemporary architecture fostering two distinct orientations towards disciplinarity. That is, “disciplinarity as autonomy” and process, as in the case of Eisenman's reading of the Domino diagram, and “disciplinarity as force and effect”, as in Koolhaas' staging of the Downtown Athletic Club (Rowe's Austin, Texas vs. AA London). This is best exemplified by the Vriesendorp's painting featuring two naked boxers eating oysters (from DNY). Koolhaas is clearly into promoting a lifestyle (mood-setting, atmosphere) rather than architecture per se.
[13] Curiously, this triad reflects Jefrey Kipnis' recent contemplation of the modernist project and its positions (plural) in relation to the ground/land/datum: Le Corbusier - Mies - Wright representing the Conceptual project – Performative project - New Autenticity, respectively. (SCI-Arc Lecture: Jeffrey Kipnis: *@$#*!#!!, 16/01/2008)
[14] The ideas that the world is an interrelation of movements, that stasis is a movement-effect, that there is no object or subject of movement separate from the movement, and that subject-object relations are effective "illusions" arising from "arrests" or "gaps" in movement, form the central theses of the philosophy of Henri Bergson.
[15] Roy Ascot: Sincretic Strategies (2007) http://www.eaf.asn.au/2007/symposium_p_ascott.html
[16] Sanford Kwinter: Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, (2001).
[17] Chum: Computation in a Super-saturated Milieu by Jesse Reiser, Jason Payne (1998)
[18] The tendency to privilege the sight as the sense that gives us access to the truth has been elaborated by Martin Jay: Downcast Eyes; The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1994).
[19] The formal apparatus needed to attack the Newtonian "absolute" space in favour of the relative space involving the differential calculus of Newton/Leibniz, Gauss and Rienmann topology, and finally Poincaré's marriage of mathematics with physics, are extensively explained in Manuel DeLanda: Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2005).
[20] Bruno Latour: Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html)
[21] Steven Shaviro in his Simondon on Individuation draws attention to Simondon's theory of becoming that influenced Deleuze: "The individual, as (continually) produced in a process of individuation, is never an isolated Self. It is always coupled or coordinated with a milieu; the individual can only be understood together with its milieu, and cannot subsist as a unity without it. The contact between individual and milieu is mediated by affect. Affectivity comes in between inside and outside, just as it comes in between sensation and action. Just as sensation gets oriented along a series of gradients in order to become perception, so (unconscious or preconscious) affect gets oriented along a series of processes of becoming in order to become (conscious) emotion."
[22] However, for the sake of clarity it is important to acknowledge the impact of the CAD. Lev Manovich is right in claiming that the computer becomes the 'metamedium' literally subsuming all other media. (http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=493).
[23] Geometry of information must be kept independent from the geometry of a receptor surface. The binocular organ does not deal with two things, only one: a transformational invariant. Similarly, three dimensionality is no longer a problem, because the information specifies the three-dimensional character of the world.
[24] Invariants are, quite simply, properties that tolerate certain transformations without undergoing change. Invariants, together with allowable transformations, constitute the geometry for perception or information space. Information space, as structures and transformations, provides the basis for describing events – changes wrought over objects. Structures and transformations can both be invariant. Structural invariants are properties that are constant with respect to certain transformations, while transformational invariants are those styles of change common to a class of transformations that leave certain structures invariant.
BIO-BLURB
Andrej Radman (Zagreb, 1968) has been teaching design studios and theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in The Netherlands since 2004. In 2008 he joined the teaching and research staff of the Delft School of Design (DSD) as Assistant Professor of Architecture. A graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, he received a Master's Degree with Honours from the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture. Radman continues to practice architecture and has won a number of awards from national competitions together with architect Igor Vrbanek, including the Croatian Association of Architects Annual Award for the most accomplished housing architecture in Croatia in 2002 for the design of a family residence in Zagreb. Radman's doctoral research focuses on J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception based on the complementarity of the perceiver and the environment.
Andrej Radman (Zagreb, 1968) has been teaching design studios and theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in The Netherlands since 2004. In 2008 he joined the teaching and research staff of the Delft School of Design (DSD) as Assistant Professor of Architecture. A graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, he received a Master's Degree with Honours from the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture. Radman continues to practice architecture and has won a number of awards from national competitions together with architect Igor Vrbanek, including the Croatian Association of Architects Annual Award for the most accomplished housing architecture in Croatia in 2002 for the design of a family residence in Zagreb. Radman's doctoral research focuses on J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception based on the complementarity of the perceiver and the environment.
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