The Socio-Temporary in Architecture: Territories of Second-Order Cybernetics

Abstract

The temporary in architecture is a state of territorial instability that emerges out of interactions between transdisciplinary narratives and architectural theory and its practice. This article extends this notion to the socio-temporary, which is a state arising from constant synergies between the social context and worldmaking. Such narratives were originally influenced by the field of cybernetics and later on by second-order cybernetics reflected in the emergent participatory art practice of the mid-twentieth century through transdisciplinary research. Derived from the theoretical underpinning of this article a simulation is exhibited, which illustrates theoretically elements of Varela and Maturana’s autopoietic system behaviour and its close relation to temporality in the worldmaking of architecture. This is a theoretical article – with an element of practice – that seeks to highlight the temporality of the process of worldmaking in architecture.