Technoscience is the com-position of science and technology, meaning that science submits to the constraints involved in becoming the technology that formulates the systematic conditions of its evolution.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3
Not a global Being, but a Being-Global. The first word points to an ontological fixity—or at least the artifice or aspiration for fixity, a worldview born for the most part in the agrocivilizational mind-set—and the second word to a deontological anywhere, born for the most part in a world of airplanes, ships, electronics, and PowerBars.
Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
Le Corbusier met with Albert Einstein in Princeton, NJ, and took a picture together under a tree. Seeking ‘scientific’ validation for his Modulor from Einstein, Le Corbusier’s pursuit represents Architecture’s eternal desire to be bound to Science. It is through ‘scientific metrics’ that normativities in architecture – from ADA to the stability of structure, from light distribution and acoustics to indoor air quality – are defined, measured and legitimized. While Architecture employs science for assembling material realities, it also embodies its scientific thought processes in form. For example, in their Electronic Poem Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier captured the dynamic physics of sound in ruled surface-structures; Gaudi’s hanging chain models informed his catenary masonry arches; and Frei Otto used the material reactions between wool and water as a ‘model’ to form-find and to design structure. Furthermore, notions of space, time, form, architecture, atmosphere, and so on – matrices of objectivity that architectural historians inevitably employ – are also legitimized by allusions to Science.
Empiricism, objectivity,and rationalism in architectural history are indebted to methods and discourses in the Sciences. The History of Architecture is thus analogous with the History of Science.
Theories and projects of urbanization that emerged in the nineteenth century were profoundly affected by the scientific epistemes of the time. They aimed to deal both with the expansion of capital and those of diseases… Nietzsche already saw the earth as a body without organs infected by man. What form should the modern city and its architecture take? Not a particular one, because for modernity “form is nothing,” to quote Ildefons Cerdà, the great theorist of urbanization. Theform should be rather general, that of the organism. Such was the question Cerdà, Camillo Sitte,Hilberseimer, and Le Corbusier asked. Yet those epistemologies of extension and self-generation that made possible such questioning in the first place were already laid out by enlightenment,scientific theories and critical philosophy in the eighteenth century. The question of form will undoubtedly be revisited again in our new, irreversibly changing world. Yet the relationship between form, organism, ecology, science, technology and the city may be taken less for granted and become less obvious, given the fact that our expectations and anticipations, our retentions and protentions, to echo Husserl, are more uncertain than ever.
How is the relationship among science, technology, architecture and the city trans-figured or reconfigured in the context of technoscience? Our reality today is not only mediated but steadily trans-formed, re-produced and re invented through technoscience both at a macro and microlevel. The “com-position” of increasingly miniaturized hardware with increasingly personalized and personalizing software implicates scientific knowledge at every scale and moment of our “beingglobal.” Such com-position points to spatio-temporal realities that can hardly be accounted for through the traditional concepts of composition, geometry, boundary, or threshold. If we agree with Fredrick Jameson’s hypothesis that postmodernism is a “force field” that affects a wide spectrum of cultural, economic and social practices, then what form will architecture and the city take under such technoscientific dominance? Are the ‘archipelagoes’ of gated communities with smart homes amid a chaotic sprawl and non-normativity in the margins the only form that the contemporary city can take? How does architecture figure in the com-position of techno science and being-global?
Such questions only become more tangible and urgent during crisis such as these pandemic times. The world resembles a complex web where everything is entangled in a knot: technoscience, politics, economy, health care, media, morality, popular myths, conspiracy theories, history, education, as well as urbanism and architecture. As often happens in postmodernity, the high and the low come dangerously close to one another. On the one hand, we hear complex scientific arguments on the probability of virus’s dispersal and effectivity; on the other hand, we are told to drink a lot of water and maintain distance of 1.5-2 meters with others. On the one hand, we have a lot of information; on the other hand, we don’t have a clue what and how to deal with it. At the same time digital technologies shows us as graphically as possible how powerless and fragile we are. The city is the empty stage where this crisis of the being-global body without organs, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze, is played out. It seems that in these difficult and unusual times architecture has recovered one of its most primitive functions: that of division and separation.
The 23rd issue of Forum A+P, following Tirana Architecture Week 2020, invites scientific, speculative and critical inquiries on the com-position of techno-science, architecture and the city. Contributions may relate (but are not limited) to six topics, questions or areas of inquiry:
Techno-science and the modeling of architecture: How does digital design and modeling technologies influence and figure in the design process of architecture and the city?
The techno-science of building: How do the technological and scientific methods, product and applications figure in the construction and occupation of buildings, and how they bear on the social experience of architecture and the city?
Architecture and the city as (an object of) scientific research: How do the disciplines of architecture and urban planning define and frame their object of research, and how does technoscience influence the way we research architecture and the city.
Architecture, the city and the History of Science: What are the epistemological intersections between science and architecture and how they are mediated through technics and technology?
Housing and Informal Dwelling: How does techno-science relate to the housing rights for a Security of tenure, Affordability, Habitability and Accessibility?
Post-pandemic landscapes: In line with Nietzsche’s dictum that there is no such thing as aneternal return, and Bruno Latour’s argument that we should not “go back to the pre-crisis production model,” what things should we forever change or not change, do or not do, in architectural practice and education?
Submission Guidelines
FORUM A+P invites submissions of original research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students to be considered for the upcoming OPEN issue. From theoretical and empirical research, to research methodologies, critical reviews, and case studies, this OPEN call welcomes all work that seeks to establish critical areas of research, development, and reflections towards the topic of Uncertainty and Non-Normativity.
The Journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meets the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence. After the abstract acceptance by the Editorial Committee, all articles will be single-blind peer-reviewed by the International Scientific Committee.
By submitting your article, the author agrees to any necessary originality checks your contribution may have to undergo during the peer-review and production processes. FORUM A+P will not accept for review any text or design that has been previously published, in whole or in part. Nor will we consider for publication any work concurrently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
For further specification concerning the authors’ guidelines, you can consult the dedicated page on our website.
Important Dates
Deadline for first submissions: 15 December 2020
Deadline for submissions after peer-review process: 15 January 2021
Paper Guidelines
All the submitted papers must contain the following information
- Submitter’s contact details (Full first and family name(s), email, phone number, country)
- Presenting author’s and co-Authors’ details (Full first and family name(s), postal address, mail)
- Affiliation details: Institution/Company/
University, city, country; - Paper title
- Paper Subtitle
- Abstract text: abstract must not exceed 300 words
- Full paper text: papers must be within 7.000/10.000 words excluding references
- Keywords: up to 5 keywords may be provided
- Reference style: APA
Every author should provide an anonymized copy of his submission to be included in the peer-review process. Further information regarding this can be found in the
authors’ guidelines document.
At the following address, you can find a Guidelines to Submit your
paper (link)
https://drive.google.com/open?
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