Allagmatics of Architecture

Abstract

The non-apodictic culture of architecture is often at cross-purposes with the techno-deterministic nature of engineering. From the scientific point of view, the modus operandi of architecture is often (mis)perceived as vague or indeterminate. It is a bias that has tangible consequences for disciplinary research and pedagogy alike. However, this perceived weakness in architecture could turn out to be its greatest strength, a result of the symbiosis between its Beaux-Arts and Polytechnic traditions (aberrant nuptials). It is possible to be both inexact and rigorous. What distinguishes architecture from other disciplines and makes it the material-discursive practice par excellence is the interplay between the abstract means and concrete ends. Architecture requires both conceptual and practical tools to work effectively in a paradoxical milieu: immersed in the incorporeal world of images and abstract notations while intimately connected to the corporeality of material and forces. Architecture neither houses nor represents culture. It is the mechanism of transindividuation whose primary ethico-aesthetic role is to modulate modes of existence. The established idea of a variably deformable object in a complex vector field, as the main principle of architectural design, needs rethinking. Only an action can be related to another action. Action-on-action, not action-on-object, is the secret of ethological metastability that this chapter will tease out.