Generalised chromaticism: the ecologisation of architecture

Abstract

This tripartite article is devoted to the role of architectural heritage in the process of exo-somatisation or evolution by means other than life. The first part entitled ‘Politics of Location’ will provide a brief history of the Architecture Philosophy and Theory Group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) to situate my position following the lesson of Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’. 1 The second part entitled ‘Affects Before Subjects’ addresses transdisciplinary architectural research and education, where I will make a case for the kind of learning that starts with ‘leading out’ (educere), in response to Claire Colebrook’s proposition: ‘The word “education” comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. [E]ducation is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul’. 2 After a call to debunk stereotypes, I will turn to concrete evidence of the affordance theory in practice through meta-modelling in the third and last part entitled ‘Two Compasses, One World’. In the words of Reza Negarestani: ‘Conception without praxis is unrealised abstraction and praxis without conception is a hollow impression of concreteness’. 3