Coursework_California College of the Arts_Fall 2015
Instructor_Irene Cheng

 

Autonomy and Technology: Seeking a Healthy Control

“Architects – we who change the world,”¹ or as I may assert, we who control the world, find ourselves caught between two avant-garde agendas. On one hand, the autonomous theories of recent past that obsessively reflect inward at architectural mediums of form, tectonics and annotation; and on the other, an ever futuristic digital revolution calling designers to data manipulation and a hacker sensibility. Can we continue to control the world – or even less, the profession we have fought so hard to establish – with such opposing visions for our societal and professional relevance? Autonomous modes have elevated the discipline, and its products, far above the reach of our daily lives and into the complete control of the architect. This attitude risks revolving the designed world around the minds of its creators rather than wrapping it around the bodies living within. And with the rise of engineering and coding in the most forward-thinking design practices, today’s technology and data boom threatens to rob any creative control from the architect. Zeynep Celik Alexander exerts that, “the eyes of the design disciplines are no longer on such fields as philosophy, literary criticism, or comparative literature. Rather, they are on the other side of the humanities divide: on biology, ecology, neuroscience, computer science etc. – that is, on fields of knowledge whose disciplinary projects are informed by the model of the natural sciences and quantitative data.”² Continuing along this path projects the architect into dilution among the computer sciences. The dialectic of control, then, between the autonomists and the digital revolution is one to be explored as a restorative opportunity. Creating a dialogue between these avant-garde practices can reinstate a balanced, productive control where order and form are returned to human relevance, and are imagined through our infatuation for tomorrow’s digital mediums.

Assuming Control

Aldo Rossi says in his essay The Architecture of the City that, “architecture gives concrete form to society and is intimately connected with it and nature.”³ There is a one to one relationship between the being of a civilization and the structures imposed upon it, and this understanding of architecture’s deep impact on humanity infers that its designer assumes great control over the living world, and we visionary architects toy with our love of and need for that control. From the ancient world up through the project of modernity, this trend ebbs and flows to define the cultural status of humanity. Now, we reflect back on a shift of all control away from the humanist ideals presented by modernism, while simultaneously looking forward to technology with an utter lack of control “that explores hitherto unknown territory, exposes itself to the risk of sudden and shocking encounters, conquers an as yet undetermined future, and must therefore find a path for itself in previously uncharted domains.”⁴

Jürgen Habermas discusses this understanding of control in his article “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” when he speaks of the introduction of a “consciousness of time.” He explains that the avant-garde, the “cult of the New” is developed by a consciousness of time and “expresses precisely the yearning for a lasting and immaculate present.”⁵ Therefore, Habermas is injecting the innate desire for avant-garde practices to gain control of time. In light of an understanding that time exists—that we are part of a timeline, having a reflection of the past and an unforeseeable future—the present must be controlled through mobilization, always striving for a vision into the future as a response to the past.

Considering the value of control in the profession of architecture—that we assume control by very the nature of our work, and that our desires lay in a control of the present movements—one can continue to analyze two moments in time that expose our flaws in gaining and attaining that control. Upon the induction of an autonomous architecture, we witness a tyrant; and with the promise of technological architecture, we fear the forfeiture of the vocation.

Autonomous Tyranny

In his editorial, “Post-Functionalist,” Peter Eisenman sets the stage for a new level of control in architecture. Adopted from Enlightenment era developments in the sciences and arts, Eisenman proposes an “autonomous or purely self-referential architecture”⁶ in pressured response to the various endeavors of a post-modern age. He criticizes the various responses to his generation’s consciousness of time for their unnecessary need to reference a bygone understanding of function and form. Eisenman’s consciousness of time brings a conviction to gain control of the profession, mobilizing it away from the past. Where the past was concerned with “humanist” notions of program and type, understanding architecture as being “characterized by a dialectical opposition: an oscillation between a concern for internal accommodation—the program and the way it is materialized—and a concern for articulation of ideal themes in form—for example, as manifested in the configurational significance of the plan.”⁷ Eisenman observes in the post-industrial present that an inherent disjunction between program and form exists, and asserts that as architectural “functions became more complex, the ability to manifest the pure type-form eroded.”⁸

This observation set in motion a rebellion against the “oversimplified form-follows-function formula,”⁹ and a search for a new avant-garde. That avant-garde could gain traction, in Eisenman’s sight, by removing half of the equation. Where program—this unpredictable external factor of the human presence—has begun to disrupt the flow of architectural legibility, Eisenman campaigns for tyrannical control by simply negating a need to address the human presence in designed space. And he makes a compelling case, blaming a mere failure to see the true intentions of modernism to displace man “away from the center of the world.”¹⁰ In turn, Eisenman’s truncation of the form-function formula places the architect comfortably within that new gaping hole, where a new “consciousness in architecture”¹¹ can gain limitless control—undoubtedly stemming from a convicting consciousness of time.

Technological Attenuation

In contrast to reflections on the complete control of Eisenman’s autonomous theories, we must address the other end of control’s spectrum—that is a complete lack thereof. Mario Carpo, in his essay “Revolutions: Some New Technologies in Search of an Author,” questions the motives of today’s technological craze.  He posits that “for the first time in modern history a wave of technological change unfolded in the absence of any underpinning or related ideology of progress; and the digital revolution in architecture may well have been the first self-defined revolution in recent times to occur in a historicist vacuum.”¹² The digital revolution appears to merely be a response to the pressures of relevancy from the tech boom upon the design profession, rather than prescribing to our previous understandings of theoretical development as a motion for progress away from the errors of the past. Viewing this revolution in light of Habermas’ conversation of a consciousness of time presents the digital uprising as lacking any control. Attaining no obvious consciousness of its purpose in the timeline of history, technology is let loose to barrel wildly into the future. And this inherent lack of control risks diving design practices head first into a sub-folder of engineering and coding. With the overwhelming upsurge of cutting edge CAD, BIM, and parametric software paired with CNC manufacturing and 3D printing innovations within today’s practices, keeping our eye on the prize is nearly impossible as we easily find ourselves face down in how-to manuals and web tutorials.

Carpo explains our intrinsic obsession with these new annotative techniques in reference to Leon Battista Alberti who “famously claimed that architects should stop making things, and that they should design things instead.” Carpo continues, “It was with Alberti’s theory that architecture first formally acquired the status of notational, or allographic, art, which architecture has retained ever since.”¹³ Using Alberti’s authorial paradigm to analyze the effects of technology on our control of the profession, one can understand architects’ interests in new forms of annotation. The issue here is that with daily advances in annotative and design software/hardware we develop a tunnel vision for the coding and problem-solving skills required to manipulate our new authorial tools, and this blind vision for the effects of technology on architectural space paired with a lack of historic reference for the digital revolution leaves us on a slippery slope to lose control of the discipline.

Autonomous and Technological Authorship

To continue with Carpo’s fascination of Alberti, the theories of autonomy and technology as they relate to the control of architecture create a dialogue with his model of the single author-designer. Where Alberti proposed the architect as a single designer of a building, realized via documentation and annotation, autonomous theory grabs hold of the unyielding control given to the architect. And, as Carpo believes the digital revolution removes authorship from the architect and releases it to anonymity, technological exploration finds itself without control as an architectural artifact.

Eisenman meets Alberti within the purity of drawing. The drawing represents complete authorial control. It is the direct work of man’s sleight of hand. It does not carry a responsibility to the functions of human presence—to the limiting factors of human intervention. The drawing is autonomous, self-referential, sovereign. Alberti’s fixation on the drawing could even define it as the architecture itself. Carpo, in an excerpt from his book The Alphabet and the Algorithm, explains that “in the Albertian, allographic way of building the only work truly made by the author is the design of the building—not the building itself, which is by definition made by others.”¹⁴ Therefore, Eisenman’s exertion of control via autonomous architecture is perfectly enacted through the drawing as it is produced by a single author, refusing outsider intervention. However, where Alberti’s authorship is disrupted by the errors of implementing physical form to an earthly site, Eisenman’s control is disrupted by the variable effects of human occupation to his built works. Thus, as the control of autonomous architecture gains traction with authorial theory, we see its innate flaws as a true architectural practice.

Technology, on the other hand, as explained by Mario Carpo ushers us in to a pre-Albertian mode where control shifts to multiple contributors and begins to loosen from the architect’s singular grip. Control is released, now, to a “horizontal integration of all actors that may intervene in the design process – technical actors, machines, and human and social actors alike.”¹⁵ And, Carpo affirms that “participatory design processes inevitably imply some reduction or diminution of the authorial role of the architect.”¹⁶ With the collaboration of various team members, engineers, planners, managers, clients, and contractors, in addition to the integration of new technologies of manufacturing—those that translate between authored design and computational data—one loses the hierarchy of control and the significance of any one entity. Total anonymity in today’s tech-based interdisciplinary process relinquishes our control of the architectural project, posing the potential loss of the architect’s relevance in architecture. While Carpo is optimistic about the effects of digitalization and authorial ambiguity on architectural theory, he even admits that, “to some extent, we shall always need authors, and hopefully we will manage to maintain some standards.”¹⁷

Alternative Dialogues

Another lens through which to view these two theories in relation to control is explored by Habermas and his concerns for radical autonomous theory. He explains, regarding l’art pour l’art, that, “the quality of work is…determined quite independently of any connections it might have with our practical relations to life.”¹⁸ While this has been the immediate concern around autonomous architecture, is it not also a concern for digital architecture? Losing control of our role as architects could also mean losing control of our work’s practical relation to life. When we look up from our computers, from our collaborative digital meetings, do we still realize a deployment of design for use in every-day life by every-day people? Or does our authorial irrelevance (ironically initiated by an unquenchable thirst for relevance in the digital age) pull us back to a completely autonomous state, where robots create architecture for robots? These questions call to order a mobilization of change, and a new understanding around avant-garde discourse.

Considering the common denominator of control seen from autonomous and technological practices—that is, the possibility of casting our profession away from the human race and into oblivion—Jürgen Habermas poses an important question that can provide hope for the architectural profession to maintain a healthy level of control and relevance in today’s society. He asks if we can create more successful and quality projects by bridging the gaps between radically different theories. More specifically to Habermas, he addresses the dynamics of modernity, the concerns of surrealism, and the autonomous response as he says, “I believe that we should learn from the aberrations which have accompanied the project of modernity and from the mistakes of those extravagant proposals of sublation, rather than abandoning modernity and its project.” He continues, “This sharply defined separation and the exclusive concentration on a single dimension breaks down, however, as soon as aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of an individual life history, or into a collective form of life.”¹⁹ Habermas’ belief translates to this issue of control relative to autonomy and technology by questioning the opportunity to learn from and explore the values of each theory as a process to find balanced control in avant-garde practices.

Creating a dialogue between these avant-garde practices can restore a balanced, productive control where order and form are returned to focus, yet imagined through new relevant digital mediums. Mario Carpo closes his essay on the digital revolution by prophesying that “a new, digital postmodernity may rise after the end of the end of history – the end of history as it was proclaimed almost a generation ago. History, in short, should be restarted, and should re-assume its historical role as an interpretive tool and as an agent of change. Even, when necessary, as an agent of revolution.”²⁰ Re-calibrating today’s avant-garde ideals to a historical frame of reference, and creating a dialogue between the most radical of theories, could provide a catalyst for resetting history with the intentions of controlling the present. And, such a productive control of the present—one focused on the future, and responsive to the past—could be the mode for reconciling architecture back to the people by engaging in tomorrow’s topic of technology and data, while holding a focus on the forms of architecture that we intimately relate and respond to in our daily lives.

 

Notes:

1. Koolhaas, Rem (2011) “CRONOCAOS.” Log 21: 110.
2. Celik, Zeynep (2014) “Neo-Naturalism.” Log 31: 24.
3. Rossi, Aldo (1966) Extracts from The Architecture of the City in Krista Sykes, ed. The Architecture Reader: Essential Readings from Vitruvius to the Present. NY: Braziller: 200.
4. Habermas, Jürgen (1981) “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” Kleine Politische Schriften I-IV. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 40.
5. Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” 40.
6. Eisenman, Peter (1976) “Post-Functionalism.” Krista Sykes, ed. The Architecture Reader: Essential Readings from Vitruvius to the Present. NY: Braziller: 223.
7. , 224-225.
8. , 225.
9. , 226.
10. , 228.
11. , 229.
12. Carpo, Mario (2009) “Revolutions: Some New Technologies in Search of an Author.” Log 15: 49.
13. Carpo, “Revolutions,”
14. Carpo, Mario (2011) “Variable, Identical, Differential.” In The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 22.
15. Carpo, “Revolutions,”
16. , 52
17. , 53
18. Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” 47.
19. , 51
20. Carpo, “Revolutions,”