ABSTRACT
In my book Polyphilo or the Dark Forest Revisited (1992), I dealt with these issues in the form of a love story, a story of delayed material fulfilment that celebrates our human condition outside a simple dialectic, a condition characterized as ‘bitter-sweet’ by the Greek poets who invented Eros/Amor, the divinity of love, neither perpetually fulfilled nor perennially lustful. It is a story that celebrates the nomadic condition of modern technological man, caught in the liminal place of a fully carnal body and homogeneous mental space, always in transit, always crossing a threshold, travelling for the sake of the trip, rather than in view of a known destination. This narrative is also a theory of architecture as poetic image, suggesting alternatives to architectural practices based primarily on instrumental
Instrumental theories have been dominant for two centuries. Most recent ones postulate the use of computers with a complete disregard for history and embodied consciousness (with its oriented spatiality). Leaving behind the computer’s utilitarian justification as a tool that might improve the efficiency of architectural production, these theories claim the tool’s capacity to generate ‘new forms’, totally ‘other’ from our traditional ‘orthogonal’ building practices. Indeed, recent powerful software packages are now capable of treating surface as the primary element in design, allowing for unimaginable configurations that are at once structurally sound and open up an infinity of formal possibilities. These instrumental processes are necessarily dependent on mathematical models, themselves designed by computer engineers working with specific economic interests in mind; extrapolated to architecture, they often become an empty exercise in formal manipulation. Fuelled by a host of technological dreams or nightmares, architects soon forget the importance of our spatial engagement (verticality) in this inescapable and particular form of bodily consciousness, with the world that defines our humanity, our historicity and gravity (the ‘real world’ of bodily experience into which we are born, and which includes our sensuous bond to the earth and all that is not human).
