Philosophical Difference and Advanced Computation in Architectural Theory

From Less to More

Jefferson Ellinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book presents a new take on the evolution of digital design theories in architecture from modernity to today, as they have been inspired both by contemporary philosophy and the emergence and access to advanced computation. It focuses on how concepts of difference in philosophy transformed architectural design theory and takes on even more significance with the introduction and ubiquitous use of computers within the discipline, changing the architectural design paradigm forever.

Beginning with a presentation of American Pragmatism's push towards process, the book continues on to Husserl's influence on the modern movement, mid-century phenomenology, post-structuralist Derridean exchanges with architects, the Deleuzian influence on the smoothing of form and finally contemporary architectural references to speculative realism.

Analyzing the arc of design theory as influenced by philosophical and computational logics, this book presents the transformation to contemporary design approaches that includes more biology, more data and more information, moving from "less is more" to "From Less to More!" Philosophical Difference and Advanced Computation in Architectural Theory is an influential read for students and academics of architectural theory, computational design and related areas.

1

Difference in Architecture

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193821-2

When Gilles Deleuze announced difference as a “thing in itself” in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition, a clarity in the way this new understanding of how difference could inspire new approaches to architectural design immediately crystalized. Deleuze articulated a critical new position in relation to the concepts of difference and repetition, as the title of the book clearly and obviously indicates. The coupling of these new interpretations of difference and repetition produced a new understanding of how as things “in themselves” they could be used to challenge normative design thinking. The new conceptions of these things, difference and repetition, taken together would be understood to produce what could be termed differentiation, a process that recognizes that it is the repetition of differences that is the significant thing in understanding objects¹ and events. This new conception of objects and events would offer a new kind of logic that would be used by architects and theorists at the end of the twentieth century to challenge the previous regimes design methods and theoretical approaches. Architects would invest a substantial amount of intellectual capital on Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, as it would become known, and it became clear that the way Deleuze characterized differentiation would be a driving force for architectural design theory at this time. While there is little doubting that Deleuze’s notions of difference and repetition had a profound impact on the discipline at the end of the twentieth century, what it also exposed was a realization that architecture had been concerned with notions of difference for quite some time as a means to confront former and create novel design methods that would challenge the status quo. With this realization came the questions: how did it become such an important influence and why? And will architectural theory continue to be obsessed with and informed by notions of difference as a way to challenge contemporary design methods?

Before presenting any answers to these questions a couple of things should be addressed, including: what aspects of architectural design, and likewise those of design theory, were subjected to the influence of difference imported from philosophy and when did this influence begin? First, there are arguably three primary elements of architecture that are internal to the discipline: form, function and material.² Every building that has ever been built with aspirations to be an Architecture, without question, necessarily and fundamentally, has these three elements in some strategic organization, intelligent or not, in its construction. Although the attention paid to each within the emergent design theories and styles of any era or by the design architect themselves varies wildly.³ This often has given rise to conditions where one of these fundamental elements is given privilege over the others and that implicit design bias would of course affect and influence the resultant architectural intellectual stock, buildings, unbuilt work and theoretical discourse, from the differently identified design eras. This may seem like a rather innocuous aspect to consider, but when precedent is so often used as a method to initiate and work through design problems it is imperative that this kind of design bias is well understood. With this bias wrangling in mind, those are the aspects of architectural design, form, function and material, that are discussed in relation to how architects have used difference to sponsor change within the discipline.

Second, while design methods and styles across history have dealt with how to arrange these three elements of architecture, again often privileging one of these aspects over the other, the argument here is that the adoption of difference as an influencing agent brought into architecture from the discipline of philosophy begins with modernism. As with most design agendas throughout history, the modernist design agenda was influenced by the emerging cultural and intellectual ideals of the times as the new design method came into being. Interestingly, modernism shares its developmental timing with two emerging philosophies that would radically change the intellectual thinking across several decades and disciplines, pragmatism and phenomenology.

Louis Sullivan’s iconic statement “form ever follows function” served as a call to arms for the modernist movement as a rejection of the precedent driven design methods of the neo-classical and the design notions he presents are in lock step with the emerging philosophy of pragmatism, of which Sullivan was party⁴ to as he applied his trade in Chicago. Sullivan’s inspirational call for the modern movement, which would be shortened to “form follows function,” was penned while Sullivan himself was involved with those intellectuals in Chicago who were framing and developing the philosophy of pragmatism. Being directly connected to those espousing pragmatism clearly indicates that Sullivan, and by extension, architectural design was, at a bare minimum loosely inspired by the contemporary philosophy of the time and more likely owes a great deal to the philosophy for the new design trajectories. Likewise, the argument can be made that Sullivan’s relationship with those intellectuals meant that these emerging architectural concepts were informing the framing the philosophy as well. While pragmatism is not explicitly characterized by how it approaches notions of difference philosophically, it does challenge the way ideas and concepts are to be considered, namely, to being judged by their utility or function where the intellectual argument (form) of a particular statement is judged by its utility (function). This suggestion influenced the new architectural approach Sullivan articulates to promote the concept that form is a consequence of function, or that form is to be defined secondarily in the service to the primary aspect of building function—functionalism. As modernism evolved, this was then extended to the material expression of the building itself whereby material would be presented in its pure form without ornamental embellishments as the expression of the material’s pragmatic utility. The phrase that Mies van der Rohe would borrow and make famous from his time working for Peter Behrens, “less is more,” embodies this minimal pragmatic material expression that would dominate the modern discourse in its attempt to reduce and distil design to the essential.⁵ Mies van der Rohe was but one of many influential non-American architects that would come to work in the Americas and the evolution of modernism was heavily influenced by the imported European masters. Those that came to the Americas brought with them their design methods influenced by concepts emerging from their contemporary European intellectuals. Most notably was the reference to and use of Husserl’s phenomenological approach for determining essence. Paired together, American pragmatism and Husserl’s early phenomenology would form a powerful influential force toward the formation of the modernist design method that is characterized here as rejecting difference.

With preliminary answers to what things in architecture design and when in architectural history difference as an influencing force emerged having been addressed, the actual philosophical concepts of difference that were imported as design influences needs to be elucidated. As stated at the top of this text, the clearest is perhaps the influence that Deleuze’s notion of difference had on architecture. Deleuze’s presentation of differentiation and how the notions of difference influenced architectural design, at least in relation to aspects of form, is illustrated in Greg Lynn’s inclusion of Deleuze’s chapter, “The Pleats of Matter,” from The Fold in for the volume of Architecture Design written by Lynn, Folding in Architecture. This publication perhaps most significantly marks the arrival of Deleuze’s conceptions of differentiation as it completely entered mainstream conversations of design theory, most especially in relation to formal design methods⁶ though it would also inform program decision making and new material logics as well. In the opening line of the first chapter “The Pleats of Matter,” Deleuze states that the “baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function” clearly indicating that the notion of the fold is to be understood as a differential method or technique rather than as a conceptual ideal⁷ while simultaneously reinforcing that the presentation is not to be understood in relation to Husserl or Heidegger’s phenomenological methods. The fact that baroque space is used to illustrate the point frames it in such a way that architects can interpret the intellectual concepts clearly and immediately for their own design purposes.

To state the obvious, baroque architecture driven by complex interplays of form, program and material has had a profound impact on the trajectory of architectural design in its own right without any Deleuzian promotion. However, this intellectual reading gave architects a new insight into how to translate the baroque for contemporary design thinking and though it is referenced here in the context of philosophical difference, the baroque style was clearly not influenced by it other than its own attempts at differentiating itself from previous design methods. While there may be argument of whether form or function in baroque design was actually of primary concern, in neither case would the argument made for it being related to philosophical notions of difference. In fact, Deleuze’s own presentation of the spatial analogy of the complexities found in baroque architecture is invoked to illustrate and explain Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz philosophical concepts, something Deleuze defines as a folding operation. Also important is that Deleuze’s argument is not how the baroque is driven or influenced by the philosophical notions of Leibniz, but rather how Leibniz’s philosophy can be explained through an analysis of the baroque spatial conditions. Deleuze’s description of the baroque fold as “an operative function” is clearly related to his notion of differentiation, which in The Fold is compared to Leibniz differential calculus. By presenting ideas of differentiation through a reading of Baroque space, the connection to formal architectural ideas became incredibly clear and quite provocative for those architects. It would inspire architects to challenge pragmatic approaches to spatial design as being merely a reflection of function to rather promote how function can be influenced by formal folded manipulations to compound functional effects and create the emergence of new opportunities for the unexpected.

Though it was perhaps in The Fold where the most direct spatial analogy for architecture would first emerge for mainstream design theory, arguably the most famous of Deleuze writings for architects was the chapter “The Smooth and the Striated” from A Thousand Plateaus. In this influential text, Deleuze and his writing partner Felix Guattari offer an analogy for differentiation that truly resonates with architects by tapping into the very design language that they were using.⁸ From the first lines of the chapter Deleuze offers a descriptive analogy for his concept of difference that describes how striated space and smooth space, terms very familiar to architects, are to be understood as unique and distinct but are still related and interconnected things. By connecting the philosophical concepts to spatial representations, architects could again immediately incorporate the ideas into their design methods. Because of the ease of internalizing the analogy, many architects and designers would unfortunately gravitate toward the concepts of the smooth presented in this chapter to offer a kind of intellectual merit to their gratuitous use of smooth form as a way to challenge the formal objects of previous generations. The proliferation of the smooth as a kind of style for these designers unfortunately led to a casual dismissal of the more important notions being developed as presented by Lynn and others in relation to the inclusion of the heterogeneous and discontinuous alongside and within the smooth, as “The Smooth and the Striated” illustrated. Lynn’s reference in his own writings to systems that are “continuous yet differentiated,” draws directly from this most famous chapter, and highlights the complex interplay between the smooth and striated. The statements in Lynn’s writings offer a description of how differentiation can be used in design to move between the striated and smooth, continuous yet differentiated. These conversations of smooth and striated would come to dominate the intellectual conversations framing a new architectural design theory.⁹ Lynn’s phrase, “continuous yet differentiated” perhaps best characterizes how differentiation was internalized as a driving force in design during this period, especially for those architects looking for ways to challenge the previous method of architectural deconstructivism.

Deconstructivism was of course linked directly to Derrida’s philosophical method of deconstruction that is pr...