Conferências

Digital media, software interface used by computers, prevail today in all types of visual communication that provide information or services, including architecture. Digital media allow complex calculations and forms to be created using computer algorithms, leaving to the designer the role of selection among a series of options, a fact that has ignited debates regarding creativity, human agency, releasing control of the design process to software, curvilinearity, expressionism, computing information, all kinds of virtual space and the role of technology in society. Digital design combined or not with artificial intelligence has resulted to a vast expansion of the creative sphere, especially towards what Greg Lynn calls animate form, which is contrary to the ethics of statics in all visual arts, dedicated as they are to eternal stasis and permanence. This desire for timelessness in architecture is intimately linked with interests in formal purity and autonomy, Lynn contends, whereas digital design favors multimedia and hybrid forms. Challenging architecture by introducing models of organization which are not inert does not threaten its essence but advances its scope. Advancing systems of dynamic digital organization in architecture alters the abstract space of design from a neutral set of Cartesian coordinates to a space defined by force and motion, as in naval, airplane or automobile design where the properties of flow, turbulence, viscosity and drag are taken into account. Animate design is defined by the co-presence of motion and force at the moment of formal conception. Buildings like sculptures are designed with the cultural expectation to last forever when in fact they persist only for a limited period of time. Rather than designing for permanence, techniques for obsolescence, dismantling, ruination, recycling and abandonment through time, warrant exploration. Likewise, the functional fixity, stability as well as vertical development in architectural conventions are notions that ought to be questioned when it comes to outcomes like buildings. Architecture engaging with digital design is obliged to incorporate factors of time and motion and via experimentation with non visual regimes permeated by transformation and deformation, architects may discover how to engage time and motion in design.

The profound transformation that digital media have introduced in design has reshaped the architectural modes of production that have been roughly stable for the last five centuries and has deeply shaken the disciplinary foundations of architecture. Digital media have blurred the distinction between original and copy and have challenged the traditional notion of authorship. Furthermore, images have become poorer, as Steyerl argues, by losing resolution and by becoming endlessly ripped, accelerating through the web in the form of immaterial presence of temporary binary code translations, as May contends. An increasingly faster internet and digital social media platforms offer an alternative sense of space and time, instant gratification mechanisms, fostered by a neoliberal economy that, as Pasquinelli claims, transforms every subject into a digital entrepreneur of a Neofeudal society. FILARCH 2023 is about the effects that the “digital turn” has had in architecture and how digital media have transformed the way we conceive, think, discuss, produce, build, interpret, consume and define architecture.

Organizing institutions: University of Patras, School of Architecture, Centro de Estudos
Arnaldo Araújo-Escola Superior Artística do Porto (CEAA-ESAP)

There is an ancient and unresolved battle between Culture and Nature. Some of the few places where we may encounter a truce between them are gardens. The relation between humans and nature has been primarily hostile, based on struggle and survival, but the garden has also been the symbol of the domestication of the wild, the victory of reason, of elegance, and grace. The cultivation of gardens, that is, the cultivation of natural beauty has a long tradition in different cultures and historical eras. Beauty has a strong connection with our senses, as the discipline of aesthetics also stems from sense perception. From seeing to touching, the tamed and ordered nature is a great source of pleasure, revealing and elevating the perception of smell that takes an important role in the contemplation and enjoyment of a garden. Time is a physical concept in a garden. We can observe the seasons unfolding through the colours, the leaves, the branches, and the water. A garden is an honest and humble reminder of our own fragility and temporality. It stretches to the sun or to the snow, to the flower or to the tree, and from them all, we may draw a unified conclusion: seek peace and you shall find it here, which is a place of joy and community. Laying down or just strolling, babies and elders, women and men, all taking part in this arranged and natural intermission in the daily battle of life. All seems untouchable, with a silent background orchestra of nature’s sounds.

The relation between philosophy and gardens is also ancient. Today the garden is interpreted and understood along the notions of landscape and ecology, or under the wide notion of the philosophy of the city. The garden city movements that unfolded across Europe in the 19th century offer an alternative to the seemingly irreconcilable contrast between industrialization and nature. The emphasis of the garden as public space reveals a political, sociological, and anthropological dimensions. The demand for urban community gardens has appeared, and houseplants have become increasingly important in our apartments. All these issues raise important philosophical issues from tackling questions about the very nature, the essence of gardens to their social, moral, perceptual, and aesthetic implications.

Uma das maiores belezas da Arquitetura é o seu trabalho com o que não existe, com o que não se vê ainda, com o que não está lá. Tal como na escultura, as linhas desse trabalho desenham precisamente esse esforço de dar-a-ver, de desvelamento do pensamento, e das suas imagens, ao olhar do outro. A partilha de uma visão é um desnudamento do ato de criação, uma exposição, um interior que se torna exterior. Um movimento do esboço, no bloco de notas, na planta, ao realizado. Como um crime, e talvez mais do que em qualquer outra arte, a arquitetura permite recolher todas as migalhas e reencontrar o fio desde a nascente à foz. E esse movimento está longe de ser fácil, embora possa ser simples, e o trabalho da sua compreensão e descrição é vasto e múltiplo. O que aqui nos prende e constitui a proposta do FILARCH 2021 é o desafio de mostrar em que consiste uma visão, uma possibilidade que se ergue no real como uma sombra da imaginação sobre as coisas. Baudelaire avisa-nos para essa luta, entre a noite e o dia, e no intervalo o embate com a fantasmagoria onde “um artista (…) encontra -se então como que assaltado por uma turba de detalhes, todos reclamando justiça com a mesma fúria de uma multidão ávida por igualdade absoluta”, todos pedindo salvação do abismo escuro do esquecimento. No dilema da fixação e da liberdade do informe, nesse intervalo da criação amar a liberdade e a melancolia antecipada do cristalizado, do que nunca chegará a mostrar a sua força total e todos os seus afluentes, a visão de uma obra debate-se prisioneira do futuro, dos futuros, sem gesto redentor que a salve do longo e árduo caminho da potência ao ato. Se Aristóteles viu isto com a máxima clareza da potencialidade, a possibilidade joga-se hoje na virtualidade de uma dobra infinita. Se do ponto de vista técnico, e de execução, o gesto do projeto se encontra hoje à mercê das balizas da tecnologia e da informática que subjugam a arte ao executante, talvez seja necessário reconsiderar a visão como horizonte livre, na sua totalidade problemática enquanto radicante num movimento de projeção-visão, de uma ideia que se desenha mais do que um postal que se dá a ver sob determinada luz. Sob o reinado da imaginação, as visões da possibilidade entroncam uma compreensão da Arquitetura como arte, uma arte mais do que técnica. Visão, transformação e transfiguração como espelho do jogo livre das faculdades que Kant imortalizou.

The hand that draws the line inhabits within the same impulse as the hand that writes the music sheet. In its most radical nakedness, the same gesture is rooted in its utmost simplicity: a sight-hearing, a white sheet, a pen or pencil. The virtual root of an invisible process. For this very reason, we are fascinated by the unique beauty of notebooks, diaries, the small papers, the scribbles, and all the first attempts that something makes to be born. There is something primitive about this process that occurs before thinking and even after within thinking. A process of plasticity, possibility, visions, and imagination, mixing future and past in the same present. Coincidentally as primitive seems to be the relation between thought and architecture, as old as the relation between man and the need for shelter. That translates immediately to a specific form of relation towards nature. A division between hostility and comfort. A need for security and freedom at the same time. From a basic necessity to the beauty of a house, or to the wonders of historical buildings, the sculpture of space, its molding towards our own wishes has enable a rich and complex relation between ideas and architecture, nature and culture. In this theoretical and practical relationship, we see the main paradigms towards historical categories of analysis, but also in aesthetic surroundings where the dispute of architecture among the other arts shows its ambivalent nature between beauty and the utilitarian function. Between impossibility and creativity, reason and emotion, the hybridity of architecture build its place from the small space to the grand majestic landscapes. Trying to understand architecture is also a movement towards a practice that expands and compresses at the same time, micro and macro, from the time of thinking the building, the general space, to the place for the table, the paint, the light, the garden or the bus stop, but also the contradiction in the pressure of the construction, rapid development, economical anxiety of profit, either in builders, or in public policies planning the future of our cities. It’s a vast and passionate world that in our days faces the threat of a reductionist approach by the design and fashion industry.
Although all of the above, Philosophy of Architecture as an autonomous field, is still in its very beginnings. In this sense, the symposium presents itself as a challenge, both to philosopher and architects, to get together to think about architecture in its complexity, variety and richness. We will be in Porto to celebrate this freedom that links hand and brain, heart and minds, to bridge praxis and thought through the creativity and freedom of all those who will join us either speaking or listening. We will open the space to remember that forgotten and lost link between those two forms, to show different silhouettes and to present the state of the art in this area.

Visual record here