But, wait a moment. “Problem-solving is the driving force”. Actually, this sounds quite similar to the old “form follows function”. So, what’s the difference?

According to Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, author of the above quotation the difference is in the direction of the design intervention. So far we’ve juxtaposed Eucledian structures in order to create space or harness portions of it into environments. The rationale of the design is in the concept that links these solids. The reader may be familiar with the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed in Vienna in 1927 for his sister, today seat of the Bulgarian cultural institute. There is maybe this concept expressed at its best, mind you, by a non professional architect. Volumes in Wittgenstein House develop from each other in an orderly albeit ambitious manner, as in a logical deduction. It’s like shedding light in the dark and acknowledge space.

A variation to this deductive way to building was dubbed “deconstructionism,” and consisted in disassembling  these configuration of solids before they were even erected, to show their relations in a more honest way.

Parametric design, on the contrary, is nothing about deduction. It is an attempt to let structures grow systematically, according to their relation with the environment, as a living organism would do in order to survive. Everything is interconnected, and to take into account everything, sophisticated softwares are necessary and do much of the work. Instead of “spaces,” Schumacher actually speaks of “fields,” which fluidly articulate themselves to accomodate the complexity of contemporary life.

Parametric design therefore bears a striking resemblance to organic forms. Curiously, it’s visually very close also to surrealist decoration patterns. Both styles share an oblique, decadent appeal. This is because organic structures are economical: organisms – as also computers if they are so programmed – always try to find the shortest way between A and B. This is why living forms are usually curvilinear and not square, Cartesian or Euclidean. A parametric city would resemble a circulatory system, rather than a modernist grid. Every element would be interconnected and the complexity of functions would lead the growth of the system.

Transition and fluidity are greatly praised by Schumacher. This makes one remember of the “natura non facit saltus” (nature does not make sudden jumps) motto by Lucretius. Also Gaudì’s architectures were supposed to imitate nature – and in the process praise divinity. The Sagrada Familia designed today would look a lot like a building by Zaha Hadid.

I like the idea of an architecture whose form develops according to fractal geometry (the geometry of leaves, plants, clouds and all natural structures) instead of being constrained by platonic solids. And yet, all this organic matter makes me feel like a virus, a parasite, as though I shouldn’t be walking along these circulatory systems. Or, in the best case scenario, I feel like a part of the system, inextricably linked to it and forced to give away some individuality.

I’ve taken some time to reflect upon this, and now I think the underlying reason for this awkward feeling is that this ideal biomimicry in architecture eventually eschews one crucial aspect of design I am otherwise used to. This is: confrontation between built space and human being, borne exactly of the artificiality of the constructed space.

This is a structural confrontation in which one usually develop a critical, informed understanding of things. It may just be premature to say, but parametric architecture to me feels like being sucked back in an ideal utero, in which the spatial sense that characterizes human beings as a species is dimmed and left unripe. No wonder it is actually the favourite style for international airports, the most iconic non-spaces around these days.

Art and Answerability, written in 1919, is Mikhail Bakhtin’s first published essay. This early text, written when the author was only 24 years old, is usually recognised as significant for two principal reasons. First because the questions it poses will continue to resonate throughout Bakhtin’s subsequent work. Second because it is part of a series of early texts that were re-discovered following the author’s death in 1975 and whose English translations have only been published between 1990 and 1993. These texts have become highly relevant in establishing the philosophical foundations for Bakhtin’s later work which had by then been absorbed outside of Russia into various disciplines, including, to a very limited extent, architecture and design.

The central thesis of the essay states that “art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability” (Bakhtin “Art and Answerability” 2). What is identified here by Bakhtin is the fundamental split between culture (art and science) and life as it is actually experienced, or in other words, the split between theory and practice. The only possible unification of these two, he argues, occurs in individual responsibility. One must answer to theory for what they have experienced in practice, as one must answer to practice for what they have done in theory. This is what Bakhtin calls “two-sided answerability”. Bakhtin here enters the debate on a contentious issue at the time, namely the debate on “art for art’s sake or art for life’s sake.” Bakhtin explicitly argues for art for life’s sake, saying that art for the sake of art squarely falls into the realm of “theorism” since it negates the actual and real experience of life from which it has inescapably drawn. Indeed, in Bakhtin’s Neo-Kantian critique, there is no pure vantage point within the mind of an individual from which one is able to understand and create. There is rather an “impure” vantage point that is invariably defined by the experience of being and the experience of the other (Bakhtin “Author and Hero”).

As Clark and Holquist have noted, Bakhtin will throughout his lifetime continue to address the same issues as set in his early work (Clark and Holquist “Bakhtin”). His position may vary and be refined over time, but the questions themselves remain constant. His better known concepts of dialogism, carnivalesque, and heteroglossia are all, in a way, derivatives of his early work on ethics, aesthetics, and the architectonics of the act.

Most references to Bakhtin’s thought in architectural studies have drawn mostly on the carnivalesque and also to a smaller extent on his theory of dialogism. These have been relevant in addressing social issues related to space, for example in theorising the subversive act in public spaces (Shields “Places on the Margin”) or in seeing how a construction process involving multiple designers may be negotiated through dialogue (La Marche “Surrealism’s unexplored possibilities”). Still, Bakhtinian concepts, as far as I understand it, have yet to be introduced significantly into architectural theory and practice. Reading Bakhtin’s early texts allows us to address this issue by understanding the ethical and aesthetic philosophical foundations of his later, more well known theories. This may well offer an approach to social issues in the built environment that is more familiar and more relevant to architectural discourse as it may also shed new light on current discussion on the relation between practice and theory in architectural research.

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References:

Bakhtin, M. M. “Art and Answerability.”  Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

—. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.”  Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.

La Marche, Jean. “Surrealism’s Unexplored Possibilities in Architecture.”  Surrealism and Architecture. Ed. Thomas Mical. New York ; London: Routledge, 2005. 273-89.

Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin : Alternative Geographies of Modernity. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge, 1991.

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See also:

Bakhtin, M. M., Michael Holquist, and Vadim Liapunov. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. 1st ed. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Çaliskan, Sevda. “Ethical Aesthetics / Aesthetic Ethics: The Case of Bakhtin.” Journal of Arts and Sciences (2006).

Habermas, Jürgen, Nick Crossley, and John M. Roberts. After Habermas : New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Sociological Review Monographs. Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing : Sociological Review, 2004.

Haynes, Deborah J. Bakhtin and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Nollan, Valerie Z. Bakhtin : Ethics and Mechanics. Rethinking Theory. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin : The Dialogical Principle. Theory and History of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.