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

Much of this new work, however, goes beyond reliance on the various avant-garde languages of the 1920s to confront the programmatic and technological demands of the present. These demands include a recognition of by now familiar digital technologies--technologies that have been too subservient to the software aesthetic that arrives with every new program, whether AutoCAD or Rhino or Maya. New critical responses are required to questions that have been posed throughout the history of modernism but remain unanswered in either political or architectural terms: the housing question that still haunts architecture and development on a global scale; the question of density raised by population explosions and land scarcity; and the ecological question of resources and modes of conservation that, with radical shifts in climate and diminishing energy sources, presents more fundamental problems for architecture than those addressed by developments in materials and "green building" alone.

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The posing of such questions is aided by new modeling techniques for assimilating, integrating, and ultimately forming data of all kinds so that the consequences of programmatic decisions might be evaluated in terms of design alternatives. These alternatives do not simply appear as random choices among beautiful surfaces or blobs. Rather, they take shape as arguments in forms that propose political, social, and technological interventions and, in turn, imply a critique of business as usual. In sum, this new modernity continues to address the questions of the present with an avant-garde imagination, but now with the wisdom of hindsight and a truly historical understanding of the modern. It is perhaps not too much an exaggeration to state that this expanded field for architecture owes greatly to the previous expansion of the sculptural field. Thus, the spatial arts now come together in their superimposed expanded fields, less in order to blur distinctions or erode purity than to construct new programmatic and formal conditions that for the first time may constitute a truly ecological aesthetics.

Anthony Vidler, an architectural historian and critic, is dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York.