The Threefold Logic Of Advanced Architecture

During the last 30 years, Advanced Architecture has consolidated an interactive and informational logic that differs from that of Modernity and Postmodernity. This logic is threefold; it is modulated through three coexisting protocols -modes of action- whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Western experimental areas of knowledge and practice since the end of the last century. A transformative process constituted by a constellation of transdisciplinary manifestations, accelerations, turns, shortcuts and clusterizations that by no means can be read under one single epistemological umbrella. In this sense, rather than approaching the practice of architecture focusing on its disciplinary inner specificity, this book approaches the research of experimental architecture focusing on its extra-disciplinary entanglements. It argues that a vast multiplicity of fields of knowledge participates in a cultural endeavour modulated through three protocols -forms of action- that singularize three decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). These three periods shouldn’t be read as three hermetic and concatenated monades, but as three different modulations of the same narrative, that is, as three overlapping and coexisting systems whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades. However, the main purpose of this book is not limited to unveiling the ethos of these three conjugations. It also aims at using this framework as a “time-field”, a narrative map that moves from the classificatory to the cartographical in order to vectorize the last 30 years of experimental architecture. In this sense, this book argues that this threefold set of protocols represents the progressive attempt to constitute critical interiorities “looking for” and “produced through” interactions that are increasingly more intimate and whose agents are increasingly more diverse. A tendency oriented towards the consolidation of an “intimacy between strangers” that highly resonates with the cultural and technological landscape in which experimental architecture operates.

Limit-Space is an architectural speculation. It constitutes a spatial logic resonating with the ontological subjectlessness embraced by the 21st century and its myriad of multi-specie agencies, human and non-human, organic and non-organic, natural and artificial. Conceived, built and inhabited by a myriad of xenos emancipated from the absolute subject of modernity and the relational subject of postmodernity, Limit-Space is driven by a primary vocation: that of defying both the Promethean flatness of the Platonic chora and the baroque fluctuations of the Aristotelian topos by fiercely opposing their 20th century common architectural condition: that of being measurable, that of being sistematizable, that of being homogeneous, that of being modern.Liminal in its mismatched interplay of pressures, limited in its massive figurative determination, and limitrophe in its foliated consistency, Limit-Space capitalizes on the Roman territorial notion of limes. Its spatial nature as differential sameness and auto-referential difference particularly impacts on the conception of the floor as an architectural element: it reformulates its continuous and discrete attributes by formal and performative differentiation, recovering some of the morphological traces characteristic of pre-modern architecture while marking a definitive departure from the architectural gestures associated with the 20th century.

The digital intelligence that is inevitably starting to penetrate every aspect of our previously analogue systems of living, working or social interacting calls for new models of designing our city and opens new territories of experimentation in the processes related to urban design. While the idea of intelligent machines that simulate “cognitive functions” such as “learning” or “problem solving” is not new, its extensive use, in recent years, in the urban design discipline opens up a series of new possibilities – as well as plenty of cultural, ethical or even aesthetic hesitations and risks. How do our cities learn? Can machines design and what? Is crowd intelligence appropriately harvested in our evolutionary and generative design processes? And has our current big data analysis approach reached the limit of human and computational intelligence? Learning Cities explores the “intelligence” applied in the processes and outcomes of designing our urban environments. From a variety of applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning for urban planning to co-creation processes that merge crowd intelligence with digital technologies, Learning Cities highlights that “intelligence” in the built environment should be understood beyond human, object or machinic intelligence alone. Through a variety of contributions from experts in different fields the current IAAC Bits Journal Issue explores novel collective intelligence design processes in which designers, users, the built environment, and digital codes all play a fundamental role in a unique resonance that takes place among them. With Contributions of Areti Markopoulou, Manuel Gausa, Jordi Vivaldi, Benjamin Bratton, John Frazer, Molly Wright Steenson, Stanislas Chaillou, Sarah Williams, Theodora Vardouli, Neil Leach, Angelos Chronis, José Sánchez, Mathilde Marengo, Aldo Sollazzo, Aleksandra Sojka, Matias del Campo, Chiara Farinea, Rodrigo Delso, Sandra Maninger, Javier Argota, Cobus Bothma and others.

Visionary proposals for a mythic and strange architecture—or anarchitecture—through which we can imagine other and better worlds. Lurking under the surface of our modern world lies an unseen architecture—or anarchitecture. It is a possible architecture, an analogous architecture, an architecture of anarchy, which haunts in the form of monsters that are humans and machines and cities all at once; or takes the form of explosions, veils, queer, playful spaces, or visions from artwork and video games. In The Monster Leviathan, Aaron Betsky traces anarchitecture through texts, design, and art of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, and suggests that these ephemeral evocations are concrete proposals in and of themselves. Neither working models nor suggestions for new forms, they are scenes just believable enough to convince us they exist, or just fantastical enough to open our eyes. The Monster Leviathan gives students and lovers of architecture, as well as those hoping to construct a better, more sustainable, and socially just future, a set of tools through which they can imagine that such other worlds are possible. As Betsky eloquently articulates, anarchitecture already exists and does not exist at all. It is the myth of building, and all we have to do is find it.

During the last 30 years, Advanced Architecture has consolidated an interactive and informational logic that differs from that of Modernity and Postmodernity. This logic is threefold; it is modulated through three coexisting protocols -modes of action- whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Western experimental areas of knowledge and practice since the end of the last century. A transformative process constituted by a constellation of transdisciplinary manifestations, accelerations, turns, shortcuts and clusterizations that by no means can be read under one single epistemological umbrella. In this sense, rather than approaching the practice of architecture focusing on its disciplinary inner specificity, this book approaches the research of experimental architecture focusing on its extra-disciplinary entanglements. It argues that a vast multiplicity of fields of knowledge participates in a cultural endeavour modulated through three protocols -forms of action- that singularize three decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). These three periods shouldn't be read as three hermetic and concatenated monades, but as three different modulations of the same narrative, that is, as three overlapping and coexisting systems whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades. However, the main purpose of this book is not limited to unveiling the ethos of these three conjugations. It also aims at using this framework as a "time-field", a narrative map that moves from the classificatory to the cartographical in order to vectorize the last 30 years of experimental architecture. In this sense, this book argues that this threefold set of protocols represents the progressive attempt to constitute critical interiorities "looking for" and "produced through" interactions that are increasingly more intimate and whose agents are increasingly more diverse. A tendency oriented towards the consolidation of an "intimacy between strangers" that highly resonates with the cultural and technological landscape in which experimental architecture operates.

Development of the material-technological base in the field of architecture and construction is progressing faster than in the previous periods. Based on the potential of new materials and technologies, it is possible to create advanced architecture and engineering building systems. Integration of advanced materials, technologies and construction systems creates a high-quality architectural construction with optimum performance in the presence as well as in the future. Nevertheless, improper application of high quality materials in the wrong environment may cause a defect.

Dissects the construction ecology, material geographies, and world-systems of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.0In doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design.00The enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A ?beautiful? building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework.00Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects will?to our collective and professional peril?continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.

Aldo Rossi was a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza and one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.