ABSTRACT
Architecture in Formation aims to consolidate, reorganize, and critique what has constituted a revolution in the discipline over the past ten years. This revolution is based on a growing recognition to acknowledge deeper structures in architecture. Information technologies presented a new paradigm to architectural representation through the possibility to work directly with deeper relational structures such as computer codes. This revolution is reacting against late post-structuralisms that rely only on visual judgment without acknowledging deeper relational structures. This transformation is built from a renewed advancement in digital architecture representation and architecture organization, motivating a fully integrated systemic approach ranging from bits, to codes to the structuring of relationships. Although, this cultural transformation seems to be propelled once more from a historical cyclical purge reacting consistently between two opposing forces. Media communications have advanced a sensibility and education based on the understanding of a visual logic that was highly beneficial to architecture – a visual arts discipline based on formal logic. Media has separated visual appeal and affection from the underlying protocols engineered to manipulate mass behavior. Therefore the visual is no longer a paradigm for reference, as underlying codes have now become referential. Instead of replacing visual logic for a new relational logic, an alternative axis must depart from understanding of critical relationships across perceptual structures and deeper conceptual structures. Late poststructuralist tendencies have progressively hidden conceptual structures in favor of perceptual structures rather than focusing on syntactical organizational problems that investigate alternative displacements of disciplinary fundamentals. Disciplinary fundamentals of architecture, including both representational structures and syntactical structures that organize space, must be acknowledged and then displaced. If architects do not recognize the underlying logic of the interfaces and displace the given source codes of algorithms to create their own, their work is trapped by a predetermined set of ideas, cultural projections, and aesthetic agendas contained within those interfaces. Similarly at the architectural level of the project, if architects do not displace the logic of systems from which they work, and further do not recognize implicit emerging spatial typologies or underlying relational structures, their work becomes trapped by predetermination. However, before explaining this new structuralist movement promoted by information technologies, it is interesting to first question its emergence relative to a historical cycle. It seems necessary to critique the
historical cyclical pendulum between contrasted positions predestined to continuously renew the discipline. Any reactionary force is equally problematic and presents a temporary balance without critiquing the problems that provoked such reaction. The content and structure of this book addresses a criticism of this historical cultural cyclical reaction. Therefore this emerging new structuralism is understood as a revolution, but is also aimed to attack deeper levels of this assumed historical process.
