Remarkably two forks in the road have opened up for architecture at this millennial moment. One is marked by the difference (as perhaps a culmination of the Modern in the maturity of the Postmodern) between the traditionally authored and automatic, or the (tragic pursuit of the) fixed and the (lazy preference for the the) variable, manifested in the distance interpolated between the author and design, especially by new (digital) technology. The other is the profound divergence today of sense and sensation - between work that appeals traditionally to the intellect and that which appeals only to the senses. In other words, we have seen the emergence of a belief in the possibility of pure effect, pure sensation.

However much of these new possibilities trade on the mythos of the avant-garde, neither can be said to presage any kind of revolution, and in this regard the “road” metaphor is inaccurate. Both of the new directions are post-critical phenomena, uninterested in the barricades and confusing progress with difference. While authorless design might have begun with political aspirations as a means of avoiding the repressive effects of convention, it quickly devolved into an unavoidable digital side effect obsessed with its own possibility. And the discourse of sensation is less a positive rejection of repressive meaning than a plea for the indulgence of excessive form, unmolested by reason or practical consideration.

Nor are the two forks unrelated. In fact, both can be understood as consequences of a shift in the underlying sense of architectural necessity. As an elective enterprise, architecture is constantly in need of self-assurance. The sense of architectural necessity is a kind of faith, exercised at every step of the design process and through each design choice. Traditionally residing in the convictions of the sophisticated subject, the intuition or judgement of what is right in architecture is being pushed toward something objective, external, quantifiable.

This is the real story. It may itself be the last step of a larger process that began when modernity replaced God with the Cartesian cogito as the source of certainty; and architecture may be the last place where the faith in such certainty has survived. After God, it settled deep into the disciplinary DNA, first through the discourse of tectonics and then in the visionary channeling of the Zeitgeist. Eventually this faith succumbed, though, to poststructural sarcasm, which undermined the field’s autonomy, and Postmodern irony, which nullified individuals’ capacity to aspire to anything larger than themselves. What remains is a coolly disinterested trust in numbers that barely masks architecture’s definitional insecurity. 

So although authorlessness and sensualism get the headlines, they are merely symptoms, or even side effects, of the more profound dissolution of the faith in architectural necessity and ascendence of the dry certainty of computation. A reliance on computation unavoidably results in authorless design; that it might also result in sensation-focused work is less clear, if not outright counterintuitive. Yet the capability of computation rapidly leads the object away from comprehensibility and thus as naturally into realms of mind-numbing sensation. More positively it could be understood as a way of laundering out any fugitive meaning in the interest of achieving pure affect.

Two practice models exemplify the range and character of responses to this event and its expression in authorlessness and sensualism. On the one hand, what has come to be known as “Dutch” architecture finds its putative architectural necessity in program-based computation, favoring the authorless pragmatism of statistics and quantifiable cultural research. On the other hand, the ubiquitous “digital” design finds its own certainty in a parametric computation of infinite, non-critical formal variability, with its simultaneous assurance of all possibility and no particularity: necessity not by way of certainty but through infinite accommodation and sensuous delight.

The underlying computational nature of both approaches follows a trajectory originating in the earliest work of Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman, the ultimate progenitors of the Dutch and digital. But while the old men were still in contact with the tradition of faith-based architectural necessity, and shy about the nihilism lurking below, the succeeding generation of combative young architects determinedly pushed on to the unholy logical conclusion of objective measurement. Following those original trajectories, Dutch work came to it by way of sarcastic aloofness and the digital by blind ambition. Both were examples of conscious father-killing one-upmanship by the youth, yet in neither case did the youth realize that they were themselves well within the kill zone.

Continued shortly…