The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume I

A New Framework for Architecture

Patrik Schumacher

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470772980, 9780470772997
• eBook ISBN: 9781119990499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Take a theoretical approach to architecture with The Autopoiesis of Architecture, which presents the topic as a discipline with its own unique logic. Architecture's conception of itself is addressed as well as its development within wider contemporary society.

Author Patrik Schumacher offers innovative treatment that enriches architectural theory with a coordinated arsenal of concepts facilitating both detailed analysis and insightful comparisons with other domains, such as art, science and politics. He explores how the various modes of communication comprising architecture depend upon each other, combine, and form a unique subsystem of society that co-evolves with other important autopoietic subsystems like art, science, politics and the economy.

The first of two volumes that together present a comprehensive account of architecture's autopoiesis, this book elaborates the theory of architecture?s autopoeisis in 8 parts, 50 sections and 200 chapters. Each of the 50 sections poses a thesis drawing a central message from the insights articulated within the respective section. The 200 chapters are gathering and sorting the accumulated intelligence of the discipline according to the new conceptual framework adopted, in order to catalyze and elaborate the new formulations and insights that are then encapsulated in the theses. However, while the theoretical work in the text of the chapters relies on the rigorous build up of a new theoretical language, the theses are written in ordinary language? with the theoretical concepts placed in brackets. The full list of the 50 theses affords a convenient summary printed as appendix at the end of the book.

The second volume completes the analysis of the discourse and further proposes a new agenda for contemporary architecture in response to the challenges and opportunities that confront architectural design within the context of current societal and technological developments.

1. Architectural Theory

Today a systematic theory that claims to encompass the totality of an extensive field like architecture might seem somewhat anachronistic. Such a claim certainly distinguishes the theory proposed here from all other theoretical efforts that circulate within and around the discipline. Obviously such a claim presupposes that there exists a phenomenon called architecture that is sufficiently cohesive to allow for a general, systematic treatment.

The theory of architectural autopoiesis argues that it is not only possible to describe architecture as a cohesive entity from the outside, but that architecture as a system of communications has itself maintained and strengthened its cohesiveness by means of architectural theory, and can be expected to do so in the future. Architectural theory is an indispensable, inextricably involved dimension of the autopoiesis of architecture. Theory is an essential ingredient of all architecture. The architecture we practise – at the level that we practise it today – was only reached with the aid of theory. This does not imply that all architects must be architectural theoreticians. Most might never have read any theoretical book, and only a few write theory. But all have to argue and explain themselves in presentations and in explanatory texts that must accompany competition entries or the publication of their works. The theoretician’s theory succeeds when its guiding premises, conclusions and turns of argument diffuse into the ongoing autopoiesis of architecture.

1.1 The Unity of Architecture

THESIS 2

There exists a single, unified system of communications that calls itself architecture: World Architecture (the autopoiesis of architecture).

The assumption that a term or title like ‘architecture’ denotes a cohesive unity is far from self-evident in an intellectual culture⁵⁰ that has internalized the insights of Post-Structuralism. The theory of architectural autopoiesis is built upon the premise that ‘architecture’ indeed denotes a cohesive entity. Architecture does exist. It is a phenomenon of recursive social communication with real internal unity. This is not only the a priori stipulation at the beginning of the theoretical edifice to be developed here, it is also the conclusion of the accumulated experience of an architect working for 20 years in many different countries across the world, collaborating with local architects, lecturing, discussing and meeting the local representatives of world architecture. The shared conceptual foundations and shared paradigmatic reference points allow us to connect to any architectural communication, to join any architectural debate, anywhere in the world, notwithstanding the existence of sharp differences concerning the current state and outlook of where architecture should be heading. Different styles and ‘ideological’ positions are expected and fought out within a single discourse and are not markers of discursive fragmentation. This sense of an integrated disciplinary platform of understanding – despite diverging stylistic and ideological trajectories – is further corroborated by teaching Master’s degree students with a prior architectural education from all over the world.

Contemporary institutions like the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the enormous number of mostly non-partisan architecture magazines are as important indicators and active factors of this disciplinary unity as are universal reference points such as Mies, Corb, Gehry, Koolhaas and Hadid. Key writings also play a crucial role, such as Corb’s Towards a New Architecture, Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, Frampton’s Critical Regionalism, Peter Eisenman’s writings, as well as (more recently) Greg Lynn’s and Jeff Kipnis’s writings. The influence of such writings as key references does not rely on the assumption that every architect can claim full first-hand readings of these texts. It suffices that the key concepts and tenets formulated in these key texts filter through and are appropriated by the active players within the discipline.

1.1.1 ARCHITECTURAL SYSTEM-FORMATION AND SELF-REGULATION

It is the total mass of architectural communications – to the extent that it forms a system – that constitutes the ongoing autopoiesis of architecture. The stream of simultaneous as well as successive communications constitutes a system to the extent that these communicative events have the potential to refer to each other, either directly or indirectly, mediated by focal reference communications like paradigmatic architectural works and texts. A network emerges through the assemblage of chains, through cross-referencing, and focal points that are recursively revisited and reinforced. Routine procedures, lead-distinctions, focal concepts and well-trodden paths of argumentation crystallize into stable conceptual structures that order and channel the further flow of communications.

Architecture, like all the other subsystems of society, has developed its own reflective, regulative mechanism, namely architectural theory that filters, selects and refocuses architectural practice and thus facilitates the unity of architecture. Architectural discourse maintains the unity of architecture by continuously distinguishing architecture from neighbouring domains.⁵¹ The discourse thus protects the integrity of architecture by means of boundary management, denouncing incursions from neighbours such as engineers and artists who threaten to invade and blur the boundary and distinctiveness of architecture. The discourse also polices against unsustainable overextension of architects into alien territory. The construction of unity always demands both – the intensification of internal communications (via focal points) and external severance.

The theory of architectural autopoiesis endeavours to describe architecture as unified system. Within an academic, intellectual climate where the presumption of irreducible multiplicity trumps the concept of unity, a theory that starts with assuming the cohesive unity of a system of communications might be viewed with suspicion. The same current climate that assumes multiplicity also clamours for the overthrow of the division of labour into specialisms. Specialization is indeed the only chance to achieve cohesion, ie, cohesion within the specialist domains. The alternative is an unstructured, continuous field of intertextuality and multiplicity. The impression (and programme) of open intertextuality is produced and promoted in a rather particular (and itself circumscribed) domain: philosophy. In the context of the proliferation of specialized discourses, philosophy has assumed the function of tracing, comparing and abstracting the most basic conceptual schemata and types of reasoning from the various specialized domains to facilitate their dissemination across those specialized domains. Philosophy has thus become a kind of circulation system for abstracted paradigms.⁵² This function explains the ideological overemphasis on intertextuality that originates within philosophy.

While open, freewheeling communicative patterns have been widely promoted, I argue that these ‘tendencies’ are an ideological myth rather than an effective reality. The fact is that the autonomization of discourses continues unabated.

The theory presented here begins by grasping and appreciating the pervasive reality of the great, stable distinctions/unities that continue to structure societal communication, and emphasizes the virtues and proven achievements of differentiation and autonomization. Autonomization is a precondition of cohesion and unity within the various societal subsystems.

Architecture is an autonomous subsystem of modern society and will be explicated as an autopoietic social system, ie, as a self-referential system of communications, differentiated with its own peculiar operative mechanisms, discursive structures and reflective self-descriptions.

Every architectural theory is describing architecture in order to steer architecture. The theory of architectural autopoiesis starts with the thesis that this steering effort is not a supplement but rather an indispensable component of architecture. Architecture is neither simply given as a class of objects (buildings), nor simply given as certified profession. ‘Architecture’ is a value-laden term, it is deployed as an honorary title, and is as such contested. Architecture’s essential content is being fought over. The distinction and recognition of a class of artefacts as works of architecture is a contested field, laboured upon by architectural theory. The question at any time is: who can act in the name of architecture?⁵³ Who is producing the most compelling statements concerning its direction?

Architecture exists only in symbiosis with theory as its ‘steering mechanism’. Tschumi put it bluntly: ‘ . . . architecture does not exist without texts’.⁵⁴ It is only in conjunction with anticipating and/or validating texts that original projects can hope to become communicative pivots that start to forge the styles through which the discipline progresses and regulates itself.

1.2 The Evolution of Architecture

THESIS 3

Architectural theory effects an immense acceleration of architecture’s evolution.

Architectural theory unifies and stabilizes architectural practice. In its written, theoretical treatises an architectural practice fixes its premises, values, turns of argument and conclusions. In this explicit form – open to everybody’s inspection and reflection – architectural theory exposes itself to criticism and further dialectical evolution. As an invitation to criticism, theory thus becomes an engine for the progressive transformation of practice.

1.2.1 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AS MECHANISM OF SELECTION

The evolution of the discipline might be theorized in analogy to biological evolution. This is what Niklas Luhmann proposes with respect to the development of social systems in general and with respect to the development of the functional subsystems of society in particular. Luhmann theorizes the historical development in close analogy to the theory of evolution and identifies a key condition for the take off of accelerated evolutionary processes: the differentiation of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. The theory of architectural autopoiesis confirms this insight for the case of architectural development.

Evolution presupposes that the key evolutionary mechanisms of variation (mutation), selection, and retention (reproduction) have been sufficiently separated. Only as the discipline differentiates these mechanisms can the evolution of the discipline of architecture really take off. Within the autopoiesis of architecture the evolutionary mechanisms are implemented as follows:

• Variation: Variation is triggered via the external environment through new, unusual client demands, new emerging urban contexts, newly available technologies etc. These phenomena constitute external perturbations and provocations. Internally the capacity for (responsive or wilful) variation is allowed for in the graphic design process where unexpected and strange markings are always possible. This possibility becomes fertile only at the dawn of Modernism when an avant-garde segment is differentiated that has the audacity to experiment and operate the graphic apparatus in analogy to (and inspired by) abstract art. The avant-gardist architect assumes the role of original creator or form-giver. Experimental avant-garde practice – stirred by external pressures and stimulations – is thus the differentiated mechanism of mutation that is the first precondition for an accelerated evolution.

• Selection: The necessary mechanism of selection is provided by an architectural theory that closely tracks the avant-garde movement – selecting and reinforcing the results of experimentation via manifestos and theoretical treatises. This relationship between avant-garde practice and theory is not necessarily always ordered in this way: first experimental practice and then theoretical confirmation. Theory might also stimulate new practice. The crucial point here is that any new, unusual practice tends to disappear quickly unless it is being selected and interpreted by architectural theory, and thus reinforced by being inscribed into the discourse.

• Retention: As mechanisms of retention we can identify canonizing architectural histories of the recent past, ordinary schools of architecture⁵⁵ and the inertia of institutionalized mainstream practice. Two exemplary retrospective canonizations that facilitated retention/reproduction were, for example, Hitchcock and Johnson’s The International Style and Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Both works are insightful distillations that could look back upon a decade of accomplished avant-garde design and theory. Such works of contemporary architectural ‘history’ reconfirm the selections achieved by earlier theory and help to push the new achievements into the mainstream. Once certain innovations have entered the mainstream – with the initial help and continuous sustenance of canonizing histories and supported by educational curricula – they tend to stay there until pushed out by new innovations brought forward by new avant-garde design and new theory. Only when these innovations have reached the stage of reproduction should we speak of evolutionary achievements within the discipline of architecture.

A subtle point to be grasped here is that the effective selection of certain formal deviations (stylistic mutations) requires anticipation with respect to the possibility of re-establishing a canon.⁵⁶ An architectural theory that is becoming involved in the formation of a new style would therefore be well advised to heed certain general conditions of later re-stabilization, for instance the necessity of general principles explicated in the following chapter.

A style that cannot be effectively canonized cannot become a hegemonic style that takes control of mainstream communications.

1.3 The Necessity of Theory

THESIS 4

Architectural theory is integral to architecture in general and to all architectural styles in particular: there is no architecture without theory.

Architecture as distinguished from mere building is inherently theoretical. Theoretical treatises are essential components of the autopoiesis of architecture. Architecture in contrast to mere building is marked by radical innovation and theoretical argument. Innovation questions the way things are done and requires an argument which transcends the mere concerns and competencies of building. Innovation requires theory. In contrast, vernacular building relies on tradition, on well proven solutions taken for granted. The status quo does not require theory. This affords a functional explanation of the emergence of theory as a necessary ingredient of a self-steering autopoietic function system: such theoretically reflective practice can considerably accelerate societal evolution.

Every great work of architecture offers a radical innovation. That is an observation of the way the discipline evaluates itself. Most great architects are also important architectural theorists. This is another significant empirical fact. Virtually every architect who counts within architecture was both an innovator and a theorist or writer. The most striking examples are Alberti, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas and Greg Lynn. This immediate link between ‘great architecture’ and significant theory is especially pronounced in the 20th and 21st centuries: nearly all Modernists, Postmodernists and Deconstructivists, as well as the most recent protagonists of Parametricism,⁵⁷ are theoretically articulate.

Innovation calls for theory to substitute for the assurances that were provided by adherence to tradition. Theory thus steps in to provide a necessary function that allows building to become architecture, thus contributing to society’s shift from conservation to accelerated transformation.

That theory is required in order for building to become architecture can be asserted e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Architectural Theory
• 2. The Historical Emergence of Architecture
• 3. Architecture as Autopoietic System – Operations, Structures and Processes
• 4. The Medium of Architecture
• 5. The Societal Function of Architecture
• Concluding Remarks
• Appendix 1 Comparative Matrix of Societal Function Systems
• Appendix 2 Theses 1 – 24
• References
• Index
• Picture Credits