51/ Ecologies of Architecture PhD Seminar MMXIV

ecologies of architecture

ABE 008 Advanced Architectural Theory Research Seminar

Dr.ir. Andrej Radman / TU Delft / Spring MMXIV

 

Course Data

• Course Code: ABE 008
• Name of Course: Advanced Architectural Theory Research Seminars
• Course Type: Advanced courses on a range of topics involving architectural / urban theory, philosophy, cultural analysis and science
• Number of Participants: 10-12 participants
• Course Load: Active period: 18 hours contact (seminar) plus 30 hours self-study (preparation)
• Credits (Graduate School credits): 3
• Course Dates and Times: Mondays, 14:00-16:30 hrs.

Session 1: March 17, 2014

Session 2: March 31, 2014

Session 3: April 07, 2014

Session 4: April 28, 2014

Session 5: May 12, 2014

Session 6: May 26, 2014

Session 7: June 02, 2014

Session 8: June 23, 2014

• Name of Lecturer: Dr.ir. Andrej Radman (Theory Section)
• E-mail Lecturer: a.radman@tudelft.nl
• Name of Coordinator: Dr.ir. Heidi Sohn

Enrolment: please send an email with your intention to participate in the seminar to a.radman@tudelft.nl and h.sohn@tudelft.nl including a short bio-blurb no later than March 03, 2014.

This seminar is open to all PhD candidates of the Faculty of Architecture and its academic staff members.

About the Lecturer(s)/Coach(es):

Andrej Radman has been teaching design studios and theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment since 2004. In 2008 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture and joined the teaching and research staff of the Delft School of Design (DSD). As a graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, Radman received a Master's Degree with Honours and a Doctoral Degree from Delft University of Technology. His current research focuses on new materialism in general and radical empiricism in particular. Radman is a member of the National Committee on Deleuze Scholarship, and production editor and member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint. He is also a licensed architect with a string of awards from national competitions, including the Croatian Association of Architects annual award for housing architecture in Croatia in 2002.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

General Description Advanced Research Seminars

The Theory Section (formerly DSD) of the Architecture Department is offering a new doctoral seminar, entitled ‘Advanced Architecture Theory Research Seminars’, to PhD candidates and advanced researchers affiliated with the Graduate School whose research topics relate to architectural and urban theory, philosophy, and contemporary concerns of spatial, social. cultural and scientific relevance to the disciplines of design.

The course is framed within a fortnightly seminar structure in which participants will engage in guided readings and group-discussions on the thematic of each individual session. Ultimately the aim is to generate an intense research environment in which all participants will not only gain knowledge on a specific topic, but will also develop a set of useful methodological and research skills.

The course will be launched in Spring 2014 with the pilot seminar “Ecologies of Architecture” under the guidance of Andrej Radman (Theory Section).

Description Pilot Seminar (Spring 2014)

Advanced Research Seminar “Ecologies of Architecture”

 

 

This is why the ‘becoming-animal’ is not ‘becoming an animal’: the first is an arrangement; the second is a form, which can do nothing but freeze becoming.

(C. Malabu, 2012)

Introduction: Collapse of Vertical Ontology

It is no coincidence that both Nietzsche and Deleuze are for their anti-idealist stance referred to as radically 'horizontal thinkers'. Horizontal thought is the thought of difference, not of identity. Nietzsche has been the focal point of departure of the refusal to accept the necessity of a stable subject-object relation. Throughout his work the conventional idea of equality figures as exemplary of the order of the Same. Any essentialism and organicism, as versions of idealism, have to deny one or more aspects of life in order to be coherent. This is why idealism is taken to be life-denying to the extent of eventually producing pathological consequences in modern life. Life is always irreducible. It is a ‘totality’ of differences and not an identity. An identity can be represented and put on a scale with a common measure. By contrast, horizontality refers to the impossibility of ever finding a scale that is adequate to difference. As inaugurated by Nietzsche and subsequently taken up by Deleuze and Guattari, horizontal thought paves the way to thought as a creative undertaking. 'Subject', 'actor', and 'cause' remain metaphysical notions characteristic of the vertical axis. The vertical axis thus embodies what is static and relatively unchanging, whereas the horizontal axis is always in movement, pragmatic and immanent.

How does horizontality impact architecture? Architects tend to speak in absolutes, ignoring the centrality of socio-cultural change and the condition where “there is no outside." Belonging to the profession that has its own inbred oppositions, evaluative criteria and hierarchies makes architects particularly attracted to the vertical. It is high time we got our hands dirty. There are no simple rules or methodologies to follow. The only way to proceed is to create, while avoiding the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of determinism. An architect's job is to produce possibilities – to play with the virtual without actualising it - and this can be done only through the singular, that is, through material or matter both corporeal and incorporeal. Only this way can we hope to stumble upon the emancipatory potential. This is the crux of Guattari’s Ethico-Aesthetics. As Scott Lash suggests, Walter Benjamin's 'double edged' work proves to be insightful in this respect. On the one hand he embraced the age of mechanical reproduction, aware that there was no going back, “but Benjamin's angel of history, while being dragged forward at a tremendous speed was at the same time facing backwards." By contrast to thinkers such as Heidegger, Guattari shares Benjamin's anti-Luddite stance. The machine is not something which turns us away from being. Quite the opposite, the ‘machinic phyla’ are agents productive of being. They make us enter into what Guattari calls an ontological heterogenesis.

PhD Seminar: Ecologies of Architecture

Building upon the legacy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), the PhD seminar Ecologies of Architecture will reposition the discipline within the transdiciplinary framework. Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (2000), where he postulates the necessity of founding an ‘ecosophy’ that would link environmental ecology to social ecology (socius) and to mental ecology (psyche), will provide the basis for surveying the ‘speculative’ neo-materialist project. Its strong post-humanist and anti-reductionist flavour will offer a strong ‘ethico-aesthetic’ alternative to any guise of 'correlationalism' including the latest of PoMo.

With his seminal After Finitude; An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008) Quentin Meillassoux revamped Deleuze’s critique of representationalism. Both Deleuze and Meillassoux consider the enlightenment thinker Kant responsible for the instantiation of ‘correlationism’. Under correlationism one only ever has access to the correlation between thinking and being and never to either term considered apart. But if the idea of the world independent of our access seems unintelligible, as Ray Brassier cautions, perhaps the fault lies more with our notion of intelligibility than with the world. Alfred North Whitehead named this tendency the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.

Meillassoux thus rightly asks whether the self-proclaimed Copernican revolution of the Kantian Critical turn was not in fact a ‘Ptolemaic counter revolution’. Throughout his oeuvre, Deleuze consistently fought against the parochialism of any anthropocentrism. In her book Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (2010), Claire Colebrook convincingly argues how this ‘bad habit’ might even turn out to be suicidal (in the long run). It is essential to start thinking the ‘nonorganic’ duration where the neologism stands for both the organic and inorganic. This is the watershed of ‘flat ontology’.

Neo-Kantians have famously given up the metaphysical ambition. They have happily traded the question of creation for the (all-too-human) question of foundation, i.e. conditions of possible experience. Shying away from the conditions of real experience (becoming) is fatal for the discipline of architecture whose loyalty remains divided between science's Copernicanism and philosophy's Ptolemaism. The choice thus seems to boil down to either the naïveté of techno-utopian positivism or the solipsism of 'poetic' phenomenology. No wonder that the claimants for the title of the current architectural avant-garde should be split along this exact line: Zahaesque 'topological' Parametricism vs. Sejimaesque 'Euclidean' Minimalism. But what if these two (op)positions are not mutually exclusive? What if you can have a cake and eat it too?

Learning Objectives

In a desperate attempt to catch up with forms of contemporary image culture, architects tend to forget where their strength lies. 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 judgement for experience, with epistemology for ontology, and finally to break with a certain type of cognition for living. While accepting multiple scales of reality the Ecologies of Architecture opposes the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world discovered by physics. By contrast, it posits that what we have to perceive and cope with is the world considered as the environment. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence which returns the body to a process field of exteriority. The ultimate goal of the Ecologies of Architecture is to debunk hylomorphism - where form is imposed upon inert matter from without and where the architect is seen as a god-given, inspired creator and genius – and to promote the alternative morphogenetic approach that is at once more humble and ambitious.

Action and perception are inseparable at the 'mesoscale' which is commensurate with life. In other words, if the objects of knowledge are separated from the objects of existence, we end up with a duality of mental and physical objects that leads to an ontologically indirect perception. By contrast, the premise of the Ecologies of Architecture is that perceptual systems resonate to information. This ‘direct realism’ is grounded on the premise that, from the outset, real experience is a relation of potential structure – distribution of the sensible - 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 are acquired in the actualisation of different agential virtualities. Following Deleuze's argument, it is possible to assert that the genetic principles of sensation are thus at the same time the principles of composition of the work of art(efact).

To account for creation (change), the virtual realm (elbow-room) needs to be introduced. This is by no means a transcendental Platonic realm. It is the manifold, a 'phase portrait' of any dynamic system which is real through and through, albeit not as yet actual. Its indeterminacy is the very precondition of novelty. The actualisation of the virtual is thus a morphogenetic (intensive) process, whereas the realisation of the possible is merely a retroactive hypostatisation. Brian Massumi explains the distinction between these 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.

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 in return. The affect becomes the very interface between implicate and explicate orders. It is the hinge between the virtual and the actual.

At the conclusion of each seminar / course the participants will have:

• gained knowledge and understanding on the specific thematic and context of each seminar (content-based)
• associated the contents of the seminar to his or her own research topic, expressing this relationship in concrete, relevant ways (argument-based)
• developed skills relevant to carrying out advanced research: from following intensive readings and discussing them in a peer work-group, to preparing an academic research paper for publication (method-based)

Teaching Method

This course will follow a seminar structure and advanced research methods. Depending on the individual seminar leaders, the seminar will follow a series of formats, but generally will be based on fortnigtly research output presentations, followed by a discussion on sources, references and bibliographies, which will involve the creation of an information nexus for the seminar discussions. The ultimate goal of each seminar is to assist the participants to develop reasoned and convincing argument, as well as to develop scholarly research papers for publication.

References

Ayache, Elie, Blank Swan: End of Probability (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2010).

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke UP, 2007).

Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1972).

Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010).

Braidotti, Rosi, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).

Brassier, Ray, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Cache, Bernard, Projectiles (London: AA Publications, 2011).

Colebrook, Claire, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010).

DeLanda, Manuel, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

DeLanda, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, [1991] 1994).

Deleuze, Gilles, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London and New York: Continuum, [1981] 2003).

Deleuze, Gilles, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, [1981] 1988).

Evans, Robin, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995).

Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Critique, 282 (1970), pp. 885-908.

Gibson, James Jerome, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979).

Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Guattari, Félix, Schizoanalytic Cartographies (New York: Continuum, [1989] 2013).

Guattari, Félix, The Three Ecologies (New York: Continuum, [1989] 2008).

Harman, Graham and Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011).

James, William, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. One and Two (New York: Dover Publications, 1950).

Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin Books, 2011).

Kipnis, Jeffrey, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

Kwinter, Sanford, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Kwinter, Sanford, Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Barcelona: Actar. 2008)

Mackay, Robin, The Medium of Contingency (Falmouth: Urbanomis, 2011).

Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

Massumi, Brian, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011).

Meillasoux, Quentin, After Finitude; An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London, New York, Continuum, [2006] 2008).

Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).

Noë, Alva, Out of Our Heads; Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons... (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State; How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008).

Shapiro, Lawrence, Embodied Cognition (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

Spuybroek, Lars, The Architecture of Continuity; Essays and Conversations (Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 2008).

Thelen, Esther and Linda B. Smith, A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

Varela, Francesco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991).

Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free, 1978).