English Title: Architecture "Resolutely" Digital: Paradigm Shift vs. Albertian Paradigm.
Contribution to the online peer-reviewed architectural publication dnarchi.fr, October 2015.
Full text in French.
Abstract:
Brussels, January 1998, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture. As a final-year architecture student, I attended a lecture by Greg Lynn, a young American architect and a flag-bearer for the architectural trend of the decade. This trend was emerging as the unavoidable avant-garde for anyone still dreaming of “heroic” architecture: the so-called digital architecture, also known as procedural architecture, or even architecture of the Cyberspace, to borrow the term from a famous issue of the British magazine Architectural Design fully committed to this cause. For over an hour, Lynn immersed his audience in a biomorphic universe. Gravures of entities from the animal or plant world, Étienne-Jules Marey’s motion decompositions, and series of round, scaleless, smooth, translucent forms consistently detached from any context against a black background followed one another. The recurring words in his discourse were “Blob,” “spline,” and “curve.” The seduction was effortless: the universe inspired by science fiction, novelty, and complete liberation of form were captivating. Lynn’s intervention coincided with an installation by the architect in an old hangar in Brussels. During his lecture, the American architect will extensively discuss the digital manipulations that led to the scenography of this installation. A few days later, I visit the exhibition. In this former industrial space spanning two levels, four pairs of metal bars connect the floor to the ceiling. Twisted successively to express the decomposition of movement, they serve as supports for stretched canvases, which in turn serve as surfaces for projecting images from the architect’s universe. On the floor, a mound approximately two meters high is indicated solely by blue blades, parallel and regularly spaced, suggesting the form.
With the benefit of hindsight, and especially considering the theoretical and historical emptiness to which the so-called digital, parametric, or computational style is often subjected, I realize that this charming, innovative, and spontaneous bricolage merely posed working hypotheses. Ultimately, it became one of the most interesting forms that this architecture with transgressive virtues could take. Lynn had an ambitious yet epistemologically and historically coherent proposition: following in the footsteps of Peter Eisenman, he sought a theoretical continuation of Postmodernism and Deconstruction. The fluid and round forms were meant to reconcile two forms of contextualism—the homogeneity of the postmodern and the heterogeneity of the deconstructed—into a single formal system. However, during my visit, I desperately sought immersion, a loss of reference points, and the inherent sensations promised by Lynn’s new space. The stark contrast between the abstract and delicate perfection of digital images and the sometimes rough and clumsy materiality of the built instance clearly highlighted a gap—an Albertian differentiation between conception and realization—that had likely reached an unprecedented peak.
Link to the full text (part I)
Link to the full text (part II)
Link to the full text (part III)