{"title":"Machine-oriented Architecture: Oikos and Ecology","authors":"Levi R. Bryant","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121317835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Architectures of Air: Media Ecologies of Smart Cities and Pollution1","authors":"J. Parikka","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124313739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Internalising Continuous Variation","authors":"K. Oosterhuis","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115370256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Grothendieck Topoi: Architectural and Plastic Imagination beyond Material Number and Space","authors":"Fernando Zalamea","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124175568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transmythologies","authors":"M. Voyatzaki","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"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?\u0000The 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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"81 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121208268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the Middle","authors":"L. Spuybroek","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In his chapter, Lars Spuybroek criticises the doctrine of emergence for hindering the reversal that allows wholes to connect to parts of other wholes and only done with beauty; beauty as inherent of things without which they cannot exist make a claim on their environment only by being beautiful. The chapter tries to deal with the question of how beauty constructs this intersection between the two states. He calls this intersection the middle and goes on to sketching its historical transformations and its subsequent variations, combining the two main agents of variability, smoothness and roughness. Things and feelings are both constructed in the same system. That forces subjectivism out of the scene and materialism prevailing as matter is simply what matters. For Whitehead beauty is about both mutual adaptation and patterned contrasts, about massiveness and intensity, about smoothness and roughness. These things have a consciousness of their own, a nonhuman thought. The essay develops a bi-axial structure into a genuine fourfold, and from there into a circular system where aesthetic feelings are equated with material objects.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125156461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Causality and Meaning in the New Materialism","authors":"Manuel Delanda","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Though at first glance antithetical, these two concepts can be brought together by making changes to their traditional usage. Causality must cease to be thought as being linear, so that the same cause always produces the same effect and conceived as nonlinear and catalytic, hence, unable to bring novelty about. This, according to Manuel DeLanda, the author of the chapter, involves considering not only the capacity to affect the entity acting as a cause, but also the capacity to be affected by the one in which the effect is produced. Meaning also needs reconceptualisation. Specifically, two different senses of the word must be distinguished: semantic content or signification, and relevance or significance. Once these distinctions are made, the two concepts are connected using the ecological theory of perception: animals and humans perceive the opportunities and risks afforded by the environment, that is, the capacities to affect and be affected that are significant to them.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131870894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Paramateriality: Novel Biodigital Manifolds","authors":"Marcos Cruz","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter Marcos Cruz suggests a new way of biointegrated design which explores non-building, unthinkable novel materials that are products of in-vivo research on living organisms and forms that are physically built and yield new aesthetics, resulting from novel hybrid techniques of production. Nonhuman creativity comes from this new aesthetics and from the in-vitro mathematical systems and material computation that run parallel. Not only a new aesthetics is put forward, but also a new way of dealing with environmental issues, critical to future living. The chapter dwells on the shift from the performance of materials to their performativity, as a way of explaining the interactivity between materials and their broader ecology. Moreover, through his work as teacher and as practising architect, the author illustrates how nature itself is potentially programmable matter.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124900044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vicarious Architectonics, Strange Objects, Chance-bound: Michel Serres’s Exodus from Methodical Reason","authors":"V. Bühlmann","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123110309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing Bitumen, Materialising Desiré","authors":"J. Preston, J. Archer-Martin","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"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’.","PeriodicalId":250750,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Materialisms","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134122759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}