Rethinking the Individual–Collective Divide with Biodigital Architecture

Abstract

This article suggests an expansion to perceptions of the individual and the collective in the context of the biodigital turn in architecture and the embrace of algorithmic, generative methodologies into its corpus of the past 20 years. Such an expansion subverts advanced capitalist hierarchies and promotes alternative (be)comings. For despite two decades of biodigital novelty narratives, which speak of a shift from humanist-formal processes in architecture to complex, generative and posthuman architectural practice, biodigital architecture, it is argued here, fails to account for bios (human and non-human) and therefore fails to promote real novelty/difference. Drawing on current posthumanist and nomadic theories of subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti and on turn of the twentieth century ethological theory of ecology developed by Jacob Von Uexküll, alternative materiality here emerges to transpose two biodigital practices, Achim Menges and François Roche’s, toward ethical paths.

Keywords:

• biodigital
• generative
• architecture
• algorithmic
• umwelt
• subjectivity
• posthumanism
• Braidotti

Notes

1. T. Bar, “Digital Architecture and Difference: A Theory of Ethical Transpositions towards Nomadic Embodiments in Digital Architecture” (PhD diss., The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, 2018). This article is based on my PhD thesis, where I argue for a gap between algorithmic architecture’s post–formal and generative narratives of novelty and their actual methodologies (parametric and biodigital), which still harbour unaccounted for humanist-modern thought models. These, I argue, stir algorithmic practices towards formal, universal and deterministic ontologies and away from their novelty narratives. At the same time, the thesis develops algorithmic architecture as a site of promise for qualitative change. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic, non/posthumanist philosophy to rethink the synergy between humans and their technological tools not in terms of improved human capabilities, but as amounting to a change in the structure of contemporary subjectivity. My thesis reframes nomadic subjectivity with process already inherent to mathematical generative thinking, connecting Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus with current posthumanist theories of perception and creation.

2. Ibid., 201–212.

3. Christina Cogdell, “Breeding Ideology: Parametricism and Biological Architecture,” in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 123–137. The architectural historian and critic Christina Cogdell describes GAs in terms of “eugenic processes,” which suggests an active strategy of selection and weeding on the basis of a set of finite criteria. Cogdell’s new book, Towards a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design (Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is another account of a reductive transition biological thought and methodologies go through when adapted to architectural practice. Cogdell exposes a discrepancy between biodigital architects rhetoric of Complexism, which relies heavily on organic imagery, and between the actual scientific models incorporated into these biodigital projects, which fall short of their emergence rhetoric and therefore fall short of tackling real complexity, which can impact targets such as sustainability.

4. Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press Book, 2011). Mario Carpo, associates modernity with Alberti’s treatises On architecture (1452), which codified the centrality of the architect and the division of labour between the architect and the builder, as well as defining the main methodology that corresponds to this separation and to the architect as a focal point of creation through the introduction of projective architectural processes: plans, elevations, perspectives, etc. Carpo claims this tradition is stretched therefore from the Renaissance and until the shift to digital architecture.

5. Michael Hensel, Achim Menges, and Michael Weinstock, “Introduction.” in Emergent Technologies and Design: Towards a Biological Paradigm for Architecture (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2010), 12.

6. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), and Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflection on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

7. Achim Menges, interview by Sophie Lovell, May 25, 2015, Into The Cyber-Physical, Uncube Blog, www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/15572449, May 12, 2016.

8. Achim Menges, “Material Systems, Computational Morphogenesis and Performative Capacity,” in Emergent Technologies and Design: Towards a Biological Paradigm for Architecture, ed. Michael Hensel, Achim Menges, and Michael Weinstock (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2010), 44.

9. Achim Menges, “Towards a Novel Material Culture,” Architectural Design: Material Synthesis: Fusing the Physical and the Computational 85, no. 5 (2015): 10.

10. Ibid., 12.

11. Ibid., 9.

12. Institute for Computational Design at the University of Stuttgart site: http://icd.uni-stuttgart.de/?p=11187 (accessed November 2019). Menges credits a long list of collaborators: “Institute of Evolution and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology of Invertebrates, University of Tübingen; Department of Geosciences, Paleontology of Invertebrates, University of Tübingen; Module Bionics of Animal Constructions, University of Tübingen; ANKA / Institute for Photon Science and Synchrotron Radiation; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT); Institute for Machine Tools, Universität Stuttgart; and Institute of Textile Technology and Process Engineering ITV Denkendorf.”

13. Achim Menges, “ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion,” Architectural Design: Material Synthesis, Fusing the Physical and the Computational 85, no. 5 (2015): 56 (italics at the source).

14. Menges, “Material Systems, Computational Morphogenesis and Performative Capacity,” 44.

15. Menges, “ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion,” 56.

16. Bar, “Digital Architecture and Difference,” 221–229.

17. Grosz, Becoming Undone, Darwinian Reflection on Life, Politics, and Art, 175.

18. Ibid.

19. Karen Barad, “After the End of the World…” (Lecture, European Graduate School Video Lectures, August 13, 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68I0y1koakA&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0lFoHQoLlo-rCSud-qWavir5fDEi4ygigxXf5Jdy7Cg9BmQv5fw3gtwMs (accessed September 4, 2019).

20. “New territories” http://www.new-territories.com/polemiquearchiart.htm (accessed November 2016).

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., Roche explains: The units are developed according to the following rules: 6.2 A new citizen may adopt one of two residence modes:—“Entropic”, which consists of negotiating growth with the structure.—Nomadic, which consists of borrowing an abandoned cell. In both cases, the Viab is to carry out the transformations. 6.4 All citizens are obligated to develop a three-storey habitable space comprising an underground cellar and an attic above the ground floor, no matter how small. Flat, single-storey residences are prohibited. This is a general rule. 6.6 Citizens are completely free to modify, transform or adapt this initial envelope or even to solidify it with the material of their choice. Note that only vertical walls are permanent. The Viab can modify and perforate horizontal structures (ceilings and floors). 6.7 Any use of these cells is allowed, for private or public use or services.”

23. Ibid.

24. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004 [1988]), 407.

25. Ibid., 396–407.

26. Bar, “Digital Architecture and Difference,” 194–199. I use “Reintroduces” here, because, as I show in my PhD thesis, the insistence on embodiment exists in Deleuze’s work in separation from Guattari, especially in The Fold, in what he terms “perspectivism.” Perspectivism follows immediately after Deleuze’s discussion of the objectile. The non-dualist, non-representational system entails a new subjectivity that Deleuze terms perspectivism, as that which generates point of view, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pre-given or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be that which inhabits a point of view. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and The Baroque (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006 [1998]), 193–199.

27. Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 101.

28. Rosi Braidotti, “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 159–160. Such a repositioning of the forces that define subjectivity are posited as an alternative to the Descartean and neo-Kantian tradition that centres on cognition, nor is it a purely social entity, and as such positioned as an alternative to Marxism, as well as in dispute with Freud and Lacan’s emphasis on desire as lack and on the Hegelian-based current psychoanalytic obsession with identity formation.

29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 452.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tal Bar

Tal Bar is a theorist and historian of algorithmic architecture, who lives and works in London, where she recently completed her PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research explores an expansion of digital architecture practices along posthumanist paths to allow for an ethical reconceptualisation of the field. Tal holds an MA degree in History and Theories of Architecture from The Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. She presents her work in national international conferences and is now in the process of publishing her PhD research.