ABSTRACT
In the early 2000s, after semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction’s flirt with Derridean
philosophy and Deleuzian redefinitions of folds and diagrams, the impact of the digital in
architecture seemed to have vanquished the ‘need’ for architecture to refer to discourses
from the humanities. Issues and questions of architecture seemed to look elsewhere,
while the concerns of the humanities began to converge with the sciences. Today, in an
age of extreme specialization and thus far inconceivable intersections of strands of
knowledge, architecture needs to reinvent itself. As architecture reconsiders its status
as a discipline in relation to digital technologies, material sciences, biology and
environmental transformations, it continues to introject thoughts and practices
developed ‘outside’ architecture. It is indeed the very openness and connectedness of
architecture that can offer a line of continuity in the process of self-definition and
reinvention that has always characterised it as a practice of the multiple and of the
critical. As a discipline that never simply makes physical environments, architecture acts
in and through all its intersections with its ‘other’ as a critical and cultural agent.
