The Intelligence of Computational Design

Luciana Parisi in her chapter goes on to discuss the creative act towards novelty that comes from the nonhuman computational synthesis of logics and granular calculation of variations away from human cognition and perception based on given premises. The essay proposes an instrumental approach to design as a technology or a cognitive activity able to transform the environment by inducing new correlations of vast amounts of varied data flows. This chapter addresses the emergence of this neo-materialist approach as a symptom of a new conceptualisation of nature that no longer corresponds to the cybernetic view of an artificial system of feedback relations. It further suggests that there are some important inconsistencies between the computational conception of nature and the new rationality of the natural. Computational materiality implies a naturalisation of design intended as techne, or instrumentality, and defined not by logical aims, but operations, procedures and means that cut across strata, rules, forms and go beyond the specific constraints of each and any form.

Machine-oriented Architecture: Oikos and Ecology

In this chapter, following his ontology that focuses on what it means to give an account of something, Levi R. Bryant not only defines building as a machine, but building as a void and an enclosure where architecture operates in, through and on it. After elaborating on his argument that all of being is composed of machines, calling this metaphysics or ontology ‘machine-oriented ontology’, he goes onto sketching the outlines of a machine-oriented architecture and the ways in which distributions of space operate on bodies, create subjectivities and form communities. He concludes by asking what a revolutionary enclosure would be to connect it with our ability to create enclosures that act upon us and potentially enhance our becoming and movement.

A Vital, Architectural Materialism: A House-person’s Escape from the Anthropocentric

In this chapter Pia Ednie Brown takes a vitally materialist approach to discussing the nonhuman creativity that comes from the house which, like any creative project, is like a living creature whose personality changes in time and whose vitality of matter is wild. Architecture as assemblages of forces, humans as a force that becomes part of a tangled ecology and the house, acting like any personality, perpetually evolving and being discovered, while in relation to us humans, it is yet another responsibility for which we are never utterly in control of. The chapter attempts to approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. As the author suggests, new forms of value can be generated if things can be thought of as persons. That way we may manage to usher their activity to attention.

Internalising Continuous Variation

The chapter engages with the idea that nonhuman creativity is fostering a new architecture based on continuous variation both in its theoretical and in its technical and material dimension. The chapter depicts the trajectory of ONL, the author’s practice, and how with this mission it has moved to the third industrial revolution that has altogether revolutionised architecture as a whole. In this chapter Kas Oosterhuis redefines the fundamentals in three phases; phase A: mass production, phase B: mass customisation - in which phase ONL’s built projects are positioned - and moving into the upbeat of phase C: distributed robotic design, production, assembly and operation, in which phase the achievements of Hyperbody’s interactive architecture are positioned. He concludes by challenging the traditional role of the architect that has shifted, nowadays, to that of an expert.

Transmythologies

Maria Voyatzaki begins by dwelling on the question: if technical, material objects are inorganic, organised beings, possessing their own dynamics that give to matter the hallmark of vital activity with a strong claim on human experience, behaviour and perception, then what is happening with architecture? The chapter elaborates on the new speculative, but not dogmatic, axioms and mythologies that are expressed with machinic parrhesia; the world, and therefore architecture, become a challenging project. Digitising the analogue, once again, but, this time, with aspirations towards a new earth, the returning Gaia, by experimenting with its dust we can construct new perspectives on matter. It is experimentation with the ‛other’, the ‛xenon’ that aims at proposing a new way of forming an innovative view on earth by redefining its geopolitics and territorial disputes from polluted waters that travel through nations to micro particles in the air. Architecture is working on ‛xenomateriality’ to define new polities, new spatiotemporal assemblages with specific demands.

Architectures of Air: Media Ecologies of Smart Cities and Pollution1

In this chapter Jussi Parikka discusses air pollution and waste as media, data and environmental art created in the contemporary smart city. The way these, otherwise unwanted, elements are sensed and perceived unveil the political subjectivity in an urban context and as data feedback from various readings, understandings and governance of the city. This sort of a materiality is one that is about folds between architectures, data and the chemistry of the air -a sort of a media ecology of multiple materialities. The creative power of smog that intertwines old computational infrastructures of urban pollution and new infrastructures such as monitors, programming and data storage is explained. The chapter focuses on urban environments as defined by the emergence of new forms of measurement of the city -and its airborne pollution - through smog sensors. The smart, modern city as defined through its unwanted elements, in this case, pollution and waste, are further discussed.

Grothendieck Topoi: Architectural and Plastic Imagination beyond Material Number and Space

Fernando Zalamea begins with an emphatic argument that from mathematics to its plastic influence, Grothendieck topoi are used to understand the human and the nonhuman creativity in three variously relevant and yet different disciplines; that of cinema through the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, architecture through the work of Frank Gehry and art through the work of Anselm Hiefer. The chapter starts by introducing the work of Alexandre Grothendieck from a conceptual standpoint, focusing on his topos theory (1962), a general setting which encompasses both arithmetic (number) and geometry (space) under a common abstract perspective (sheaves: a far-reaching tool which helps to glue the local and the global). Grothendieck's revolution, wider than Einstein's interlacing of space and time, has radically changed mathematics, but its plastic influence beyond the specialty has yet to be developed.

Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity

Maria Voyatzaki’s chapter examines how contemporary speculations on matter shift materiality into the epicentre of architectural contemplation and affect its ethos and praxis. By encountering the emergence of a new paradigm for which the establishment of an overall orthodoxy is impossible, the chapter, following the contemporary quest for a better understanding of this model of reality, offers a profound insight into contemporary thinking and creating architecture in this new framework defined as posthuman. As architecture throughout its history has always been defined on the basis of a certain worldview and in reference to a certain conception of the human, what will architecture become in the posthuman turn or even more in the nonhuman? How are its broad spectrum of established ideas, values and practices problematised by this new philosophical debate on architectural thinking and practicing in our globalised and technologically mediated world? The chapter examines these questions in terms of three main issues: the new conceptions of architecture that could emerge from the contemporary materialisms, the new understandings of the material outcome of architectural creative work and the influences of the above conceptions and understandings on the development of the creative process.

Vicarious Architectonics, Strange Objects, Chance-bound: Michel Serres’s Exodus from Methodical Reason

Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.

Performing Bitumen, Materialising Desiré

Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.