Theory and History Seminar, 45 credits
2019, 2020
Both modernity and late 20th-century (post)structuralisms celebrate the notion of subject, understanding it as an ontologically privileged object. Modernity associates the former with the “figuratively” of the human being (Descartes), whose centrality resonates with a type of spatiality that Steven Kent Peterson has defined with the expression anti-space: a neutral, universal and flat spatiality associated with Plato’s chora, that is, the eternal receptacle in which forms (eidos) are originally held. Le Corbusier’s “free plan” and Mies van der Rohe’s “open plan” constitute good examples of this spatial condition, in which the subject, that is, the human, contrasts with the open flatness of the Modern floor. Instead, (post)structuralisms associate the subject with human relational fields, particularly in their linguistic (Derrida), ideological (Althusser), psychological (Lacan), or political (Foucault) registers. The subject is enmeshed with its surroundings and its relationality resonates with the topological spatialities characteristic of the experimental architecture of the ’90s. Aristotle’s topos, in its empirical, articulated and topographical character responds to this three-dimensional variability. FOA’s “Yokohama” (2000) or OMA’s “Jussieu” (1992) are good examples of this spatial approach. Both architectural spatialities, respectively associated with Plato’s chora and Aristotle’s topos, respond to Kent’s anti-space; besides its subject’s cultural assumption, both can be reduced to one single notational system, that is, a single formula, and, therefore, both share a decisive condition: that of being homogeneous (Eisenman).
This seminar argues that a new spatiality, associated here with the Roman term limes and defined with the expression Limit-Space, is emerging out of a peculiar contemporaneous ontological condition: the autonomy recently recognized of zoological, algorithmic and geological beings question the presence of any privileged ontological entity, that is, any subject. Supercomputation, associated to this subjectless condition due to its autonomous and alienating massive operativity, is impacting today’s space conception; as Mario Carpo suggests, in a context in which designers use the power of today’s supercomputation to notate the inherent discreteness of reality instead of reducing it to simplified mathematical formulas, the production of homogeneous spatialities constitute an unnecessary process of heterogeneity’s reduction. The Seminar will analyse a set of computational experimental projects in which, unlike the chora or the topos, the Roman limes and its Limit-Space contrasts to Kent’s anti-space by being liminal, limited and limitrophe, three decisive attributes associated with supercomputation’s capacity to avoid parametric reductionism.
