architektonima
Space-making through architecture, signals and weaving.
by Maya Christodoulaki.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/
– Shusaku Arakawa
‘If the poet … must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary.’
– Cleanth Brooks in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction
‘An eternal object realized in respect to its pure potentiality as related to determinate logical subjects is termed a 'propositional feeling' in the mentality of the actual occasion in question.’
– Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality
How do we go about architecture when Everybody talks about Chance?
AI, probability, and stochastics actively shape our Zeitgeist and add new vocabulary to our architectural atlas. A few years ago, the publication Everybody talks about the Weather (2023) addressed another public issue, the climate crisis, with a call to study the climate through art and science. The seminar wants to emulate this coping mechanism to make architecture as a process that is simultaneously natural and artificial, as chance and the weather.
In the Chance seminar, we will explore the weather as a metaphor – through clouds, storms, air, lightings, pollution, flooding, kairos, the weatherman – to talk about chance as mutation, ambiguity, contradiction and pattern.
A pattern, however, is not a habit. Habits are elements of organization, prediction, framing and comfort in daily life. For the artist Shusaku Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, an artist collaboration which began in 70s New York, habits are highly suspicious. In their work - Bioscleave House (2008),Container of Perceiving (1984), Site of Reversible Destiny (1995),The mechanism of meaning (1968-1988) - they favor an art of space-making that is shaped by mutable habits.
The work of Arakawa+Gins will guide our first explorations and incentivize our focus around points of inflection and changes in direction. We will talk about eternity and destiny when designing within probabilistic setups as a gesture that overcomes the platitude of total randomness, or the comfort of habit.
From the ‘moving pictures of thought’ that Charles Peirce sees in diagrams, or the ‘strange loops’ of Douglas Hofstadter we will see how the enactment of habits turns into patterns of creation. We will continue with books that look at chance, the weather, ambiguity, contradiction, and metamorphose them into manners, process, magic and ideas to arrive at Architecture.