What is it about?
This article attempts to reverse a fallacy often met in architectural theories and practices: that of a supposed input which through processes of what one can broadly call translations generates a built output. The input–output fallacy produces an architectural black box that treats both architectural thinking and doing as a mere process of projecting, representing and annotating ‘properly’ what will later be executed. On the contrary, a manipulative account of architecture as an active process of ecological engineering will pave the way for not only reversing the fallacy but also towards a particular understanding of architectural practices: architectural technicities and their reticular, affective potentials.
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Why is it important?
Drawing on the theories of Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will examine how architecture can be genealogically approached as a reticular technicity which evolves by a reciprocal concretisation of its technical objects and a generalisation of its active practitioners: no longer the application of transcendental design rules, of symbolic deductions or statistical inductions but rather abductive heuristics of affective techniques; no input nor output but practices of sensorial amplification via material manipulation and vice versa.
Perspectives
Most of the times, especially since its digital turn, architectural thinking implies an absolute ‘black box’: one that receives digital inputs and produces spatial outputs. However, how does the input–output fallacy operate? What is happening in that ‘black box’, the one that so readily processes all sorts of inputs and happily produces the outputs we architects desire? Even more, where is that box located and when can one trigger it? Is it at will, is at the click of a button or a mouse gesture? First and foremost, does it exist? To debunk the fallacy, I will attempt to overturn its most basic premise: the one that assumes the primacy of inputs and the necessary, fully linear in terms of causality, almost magical, manifestation of outputs.
Dr. Ir. Stavros Kousoulas
Technische Universiteit Delft
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Shattering the black box: Technicities of architectural manipulation, International Journal of Architectural Computing, November 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1478077118801937.
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