Architecture's expanded field: finding inspiration in jellyfish and geopolitics, architects today are working within radically new frames of reference

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Anthony Vidler

architecture, after several decades of self-imposed autonomy, has recently entered a greatly expanded field. Against neorationalism, pure language theory, and postmodern citation fever, architecture--like sculpture some decades earlier--has found new formal and programmatic inspiration in a host of disciplines and technologies from landscape design to digital animation. Where former theorists attempted to identify single and essential bases for architecture, now multiplicity and plurality are celebrated, as flows, networks, and maps replace grids, structures, and history. Where arguments once raged between Corbusian and Palladian sources, now Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze are studied for their anticipation of nonformal processes. Blobs, swarms, crystals, and webs proliferate as paradigms of built form, while software has replaced traditional means of representation with dynamic effect. Nearly two and a half centuries after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing inaugurated the search for medium specificity in his Laocoon and more than fifty years after Clement Greenberg articulated a self-reflexive definition of modern painting and sculpture, the boundary lines of architecture remain unresolved.

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And yet, underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations of the discipline, not so much in singular terms, but in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to overcome the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for over a century: form and function, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure. Over the last decade, three new unifying principles have emerged as the most dominant: ideas of landscape, biological analogies, and new concepts of "program," for lack of a better word. It is perhaps ironic that these new conceptual models are themselves deeply embedded in the history of architectural modernism, and each has already been proposed as a unifying concept at one time or another over the last two centuries.

The notion of landscape, deriving from eighteenth-century picturesque gardens, with their narrative walks and framed views, has now been extended to include questions of regional and global visions of urban form. Given the early development of the genre of landscape painting in Holland, as well as the Netherlands' experience in engineering the national landscape, it is perhaps appropriate that many Dutch architects, including Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio and Winy Maas of MVRDV, have found inspiration in the idea of landscape, using it to construe digital models of new cities and regional plans out of data flows, and, on a smaller scale, new topological forms for the interior landscapes of houses.

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Questions of biological form strongly influenced architecture and design in the later nineteenth century, especially after the popularization of Darwin's theories, leading to the experiments characteristic of Art Nouveau. Later in the twentieth century, the development of cybernetics and early research into DNA--including the discovery of the double helix--led architectural theorists like Reyner Banham in the 1960s to propose biological form as the next revolution in architecture. Charles Jencks followed up this proposition in his 1971 book Architecture 2000 and Beyond, where his chart of architectural "movements" presciently ended in the year 2000 with a prediction of "bioform." Contemporary architects like Greg Lynn have built on these theories and, using the techniques pioneered by animation software, have developed a new repertoire of form: Beginning with the idea of the "blob" and more recently experimenting with the forms of complex organisms from butterflies to jellyfish, Lynn has designed coffee sets that interlock like the carapaces of insects and turtles and institutions that unfold from the ground like giant colorful orchids or artichokes.

Finally, the idea of "program" was transformed in the first age of the avant-gardes, from its eighteenth-century meaning as a design exercise for student architects into an overriding concept that regulates and generates form according to a detailed understanding of its function. In the 1950s the idea was extended by theorists like John Summerson to assume a central place as a single "source of unity" for modern architecture, but it was quickly forgotten in the rush to bury functionalism under postmodern historicism. Now, architects like Rem Koolhaas and a younger generation, including Diller Scofidio and Lindy Roy, have taken up an expanded idea of program as a means to explode every convention of traditional architectural modernism and to create the basis for an architecture that realistically confronts the present global political, social, and economic reality.

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Each of these three ideas has been proposed as a way of overcoming the persistence of a theoretical dualism in architecture that has its roots in the Enlightenment. The philosopher and mathematician d'Alembert put the problem most concisely when he defined architecture as the "embellished mask of our greatest need," which meant that to the philosophic eye architecture was little more than the aesthetic or "rhetorical" supplement to shelter. One could interpret all of the attempts to define the "essence" of architecture since then as struggles to reduce this dualism to a singularity. Thus the appeals to an architecture of pure metaphysical uplift (John Ruskin through Louis I. Kahn) or one of pure functionalism (J.N.L. Durand through Hannes Meyer) and all the shades of the "functionalist aesthetic" in between. Each phase of modernism has juggled the equation according to its own standards of politics or aesthetics. "Function" has been reduced to structural integrity or spatial economy, while "metaphysics" has been defined as spiritual uplift or sublime effect. Other subsequent theories have posited the power of the "sign," the return to "tradition," or the fundamentals of tectonics. More recently, some have proposed the idea of the "diagram" as an attempt to fuse function, space, and aesthetics into a singular entity, while others have privileged the affect in the surface in an aesthetic appeal to the new materials cast and molded by digital programs. But the paradigms suggested by landscape, biology, and program seem to go beyond these singular concepts in order to frame a new field of action for architecture that subsumes form and function within a matrix of information and its animation.