1,720,961 research outputs found
An Introduction to Design Commons
No full textThe reasons for a dedicated edition on “design and commoning” are twofold. First, the recent surge of renewed interest in the social conditions of design remains atheoretical. A deeper theoretical and philosophical foundation will help problematize the link between commoning and design, and in doing so define the operative theories, concepts and frameworks that influence design thinking across a series of design contexts and conditions. And secondly, design has become more ubiquitous, expanding both its domain of influence and conditions of praxis. With this expansion, design touches a variety of contested areas. Designers are continuously challenged by conflicts and edge conditions, having to mitigate between both scales of conflict and the vested interests of individuals. In the global climate of population increase and the prevalent reduction of financial resources the question and theorization of shared capacities will remain part and parcel of future of design thinking. The four thematic clusters contained here exploit the theoretical and philosophical themes related to the large commoning “problematique,” providing designers better grounding in the networked context of the twenty-first century. The explicit theorization of design and the commons will explore the implicit relations through each of the collected contributions to show how this philosophical construct can be explicated in the context of network collectives and transdisciplinary approaches that currently inform design practices.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Theory, Territories & Transition
Pings and Hups
No full textEtymologically unattested yet artistically long praised, there is a profound relation between life and light; next to both, the almost self-evident (and scientifically undisputed) relation between light and flow, lux and flux. Would it be correct then to understand life as an issue of perception and manipulation of flows? Surprisingly, this is a question that can only be answered by addressing death. As any lensmaker would claim (and philosophy has always had an affinity with this profession), perception is not a synthesis but an ascesis: it does not connect, it disconnects; or, better said, in order to connect, it needs to disconnect. However, following the radical empiricist dictum, one should never speak of perception alone; ever since William James, perception equals action. In other words, perception is not something that happens to us, it is something we do.5 Strange as it may seem therefore, to live one needs to practice death. This book will examine how styling life means styling death and how architecture (in the broadest possible sense) is involved in this continuous process of stylisation. To do so, architecture and perception, duration and individuation, will all converge in practising how one can die without dying in order to enunciate a life.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Theory, Territories & Transition
A Diagrammatic Cartography of Discourses on Architectures of Life and/or Death
No full textThe built environment exerts an essential effect on life. Over the past decades, it has been greatly reconceptualised through various posthuman, ecosystemic, new materialist, material-discursive approaches, which explored the socio-spatial, technological, cognitive, relational, and affective relations that material arrangements, such as architectural ones, shape. As technē, architecture is intricately intertwined not only with processes of easing and facilitating (human) life, but also the management of dynamic processes involving both living and non-living matters. In view of the latter, architecture is ‘life by means other than life’ (Stiegler), shaping living matters by means of non-living matters. The chapter respectively surveys several streams of recent theoretical discourse that developed from Deleuze and Guattari’s as well as Foucault’s thoroughgoing reframing of the agency of matter on life-constituting processes. In the aim of reconsidering and repositioning architecture as a posthuman technique of existence, this cartography charts – with the help of a central navigational diagram – these co-evolving discursive streams in their differing topical-conceptual starting points, and their various converging and bifurcating lines of thinking, in the aim to elaborate on the novel conceptions they have helped distil in the pursuit of a fuller understanding of those material-discursive practices within the relational ecologies of architecture.Accepted Author ManuscriptSituated Architectur
Exploring Architectural Form: A Configurative Triad
No full textThis issue of Footprint follows a tripartite trajectory regarding formal studies. On the one hand, it includes reflections on the way built form is produced, while, on the other, it gathers studies that examine how architectural form appears in discursive and communicative terms. Finally, it serves as an attractor for multiple inquiries into the different relations that can be established between human actions, understood in the broadest possible terms, and the shape of the built environment. By interrelating these three approaches, the aim is to embrace and braid object-based approaches to form with approaches that examine the reciprocity of formal emergence and studies dealing with in-formation. Emulating Joseph Kosuth’s well-known triptychs, a constant problematisation of architectural form is situated between these three topical interpretations, understood as architecture’s configurative triad. Acting on the threshold of various discursive outlines, the contributions to this issue transverse several kinds of formalisms, highlighting that beyond the limitations of any specific discourse, their heterogeneous assemblage can afford the production of theoretical, methodological and conceptual innovations in the field of contemporary formal studies.ISBN 978-94-90322-98-4Theory, Territories & TransitionsSituated Architectur
All is in Formation: Architecture, Cybernetics, Ecology
No full textFootprint #28 examines the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share: the production, consumption and flow of information, or, in other terms, of meaning. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials.ISBN: 978-94-92852-38-0Theory, Territories & Transition
Shattering the black box: Technicities of architectural manipulation
No full textThis article attempts to reverse a fallacy often met in architectural theories and practices: that of a supposed input which through processes of what one can broadly call translations generates a built output. The input–output fallacy produces an architectural black box that treats both architectural thinking and doing as a mere process of projecting, representing and annotating ‘properly’ what will later be executed. On the contrary, a manipulative account of architecture as an active process of ecological engineering will pave the way for not only reversing the fallacy but also towards a particular understanding of architectural practices: architectural technicities and their reticular, affective potentials. Drawing on the theories of Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will examine how architecture can be genealogically approached as a reticular technicity which evolves by a reciprocal concretisation of its technical objects and a generalisation of its active practitioners: no longer the application of transcendental design rules, of symbolic deductions or statistical inductions but rather abductive heuristics of affective techniques; no input nor output but practices of sensorial amplification via material manipulation and vice versa.OLD Architectural Theor
An Athens yet to Come
No full textThe massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century would meet a radical change that occurred after the Olympic Games of 2004, producing the germ that would transform the Athenian urban ecologies: an absolute retreat to the private, understood not in financial or market terms but in terms of stratification and rigidification. Examined from that point of view, the urban unrests of the past decade can be approached as the gradual formation of a black hole: before the formation of molar fascist assemblages in the Athenian urban ecologies, there is the formation of infinite micro-fascists. The immense proliferation of micro-fascist subjectivities is no other than the emergence of infinite reactive subjects out of the Athenian urban ecologies and their technicities themselves. Precisely for this reason, any attempt to speak of an Athens yet-to-come should not involve the production of yet another narrative (of urban change, social justice or political emancipation) but rather the affirmative production of a futurity through the actual and virtual potentials of an environmental manipulation that occurs here-and-now while aiming at a not-here-and-not-yet.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Theory, Territories & Transition
Ananke's Sway: Architectures of Synaptic Passages
No full textPhilosopher Gilbert Simondon claims that what one perceives is neither outlines nor shapes, but thresholds of intensity. Therefore, Simondon points out that sensation is nothing but intensive and differential; it is the ‘seizure of a direction, not of an object.’ However, the issue is how one can examine the sensation of a direction that does not address the present but rather that which is yet to come. To do so, one can approach it as an issue of synapses. A synapse is a junction, an almost imperceptible gap through which an impulse of intensity passes by. As such, synapses manage to capture both the passage of an intensity (as a synaptic moment) and the formation of an extensity (as a synaptic location). In other words, synapses can be understood as constraints and for this reason, as information; after all, information is nothing but the reduction of potentials.In this paper, I will examine how architecture, in its technicities, operates as a synapse: how it allows for both the formation of an extensive space as well as for the very possibility of intuiting a space yet to come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. To do so, I will focus on how architectural technicities allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy due to their metastability and auto-normativity. With the help of goddess Ananke and her spindle, architecture will be understood as an intensive exercise on the indeterminate, on a figure that is not yet figured out, but does so on the basis of synaptic passages. Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Theory, Territories & Transition
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