architektonima
Space-making through architecture, signals and weaving.
by Maya Christodoulaki.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
By inhabiting the unswept floor of Hadrian’s Villa in Rome, we establish a way of thinking that learns through accumulation, leftovers, and what resists cleaning up. At once intimate and excessive, the image frames domestic comfort as abundance, disorder, and residue.
Among bones, shells, peels, and nuts, this figure complements the idea of learning as home, introduced by Vitruvius in his reflections on domestic architecture. For Vitruvius, the fulcrum of architecture lies in the abundance of learning: a capacity that transcends geography, social ties, and the instability of fortune (fortuna), granting the learned individual a form of global citizenship.
Tasked with the extreme allowances produced by the amplitude of computational and built Bestand, the seminar turns toward the curious nature of foundations. We look at the floor and resist the desire to clean the unswept. Rather, we negotiate its principality; rather, we think in terms of affordances. How might we observe and speculate, bridge noise with measure, see perspective through the oblique, compute the primary through the provisional?
Drawing on Michel Serres’ Foundations trilogy—Rome,Statues, Geometry—the course moves between human and machine, tracing relations within what is already present. Through the writings of Vitruvius, Michel Serres, Massimo Scollari, Erwin Panofsky, Pierre Hadot, Manfredo Tafuri, Ernst Cassirer, and Raymond Ruyer, the seminar sways between Rome and Fortune to think the spatial through the soft.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/
– Shusaku Arakawa
‘If the poet … must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary.’
– Cleanth Brooks in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction
‘An eternal object realized in respect to its pure potentiality as related to determinate logical subjects is termed a 'propositional feeling' in the mentality of the actual occasion in question.’
– Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality
How do we go about architecture when Everybody talks about Chance?
AI, probability, and stochastics actively shape our Zeitgeist and add new vocabulary to our architectural atlas. A few years ago, the publication Everybody talks about the Weather (2023) addressed another public issue, the climate crisis, with a call to study the climate through art and science. The seminar wants to emulate this coping mechanism to make architecture as a process that is simultaneously natural and artificial, as chance and the weather.
In the Chance seminar, we will explore the weather as a metaphor – through clouds, storms, air, lightings, pollution, flooding, kairos, the weatherman – to talk about chance as mutation, ambiguity, contradiction and pattern.
A pattern, however, is not a habit. Habits are elements of organization, prediction, framing and comfort in daily life. For the artist Shusaku Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, an artist collaboration which began in 70s New York, habits are highly suspicious. In their work - Bioscleave House (2008),Container of Perceiving (1984), Site of Reversible Destiny (1995),The mechanism of meaning (1968-1988) - they favor an art of space-making that is shaped by mutable habits.
The work of Arakawa+Gins will guide our first explorations and incentivize our focus around points of inflection and changes in direction. We will talk about eternity and destiny when designing within probabilistic setups as a gesture that overcomes the platitude of total randomness, or the comfort of habit.
From the ‘moving pictures of thought’ that Charles Peirce sees in diagrams, or the ‘strange loops’ of Douglas Hofstadter we will see how the enactment of habits turns into patterns of creation. We will continue with books that look at chance, the weather, ambiguity, contradiction, and metamorphose them into manners, process, magic and ideas to arrive at Architecture.
Lecture Series, University of Innsbruck, Architecture Theory, Teaching
https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/architekturtheorie-baugeschichte/architekturtheorie/events/the-architecture-chat/
Communication in architecture is nothing new: a forum, a dialogue, a platform – there are countless formats which allow us to talk to each other. Yet, the Chat has charmed the world as an art of discovery, as for over a year now it transcends its sonorous articulations by reading, thinking and writing computationally through LLMs with us and for us. At this turning point, the Architecture Chat aims to facilitate new concepts and approaches to thinking about architecture, seeking creative ways to bridge intellectual traditions with new narratives in the face of prescient political and natural realities.
This spring we welcome six guests: Stephan Trüby (Uni Stuttgart), Philippe Morel (The Bartlett), Vera Bühlmann (TU Wien), Tülay Atak (Die Angewandte), Jörg Gleiter (TU Berlin) and Andrew Witt (Harvard GSD) in our faculty to listen to and discuss their recent publications. With the Architecture Chat we hope to touch upon current issues in our discipline, exploring boundaries and formats, discussing rhetoric and formulations, and probing what fascinates us and what might go out of fashion.
Teaching, AI, ATTP, TU Vienna, Architecture Theory
www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/project/architekturtheorie-chance/
There is chatting and rumbling, murmur, and noise - Machine Learning is about dealing with signals that are muddy and unclear in which we look for harmony and sense.
In this seminar at TU Wien, we will explore ways to work conceptually as a space-maker with the idea of CHANCE. With Large Language Models, an architect’s operation has shifted from designing to architecting, as an act of navigation with and among the myriad nodes and connections that make up the art of space-making.
We set the center of this architecting operation in the kitchen, where CHANCE manifests through a creator/inventor/thinker that improvises with Midjourney, ChatGBT and AskAlice all possible text-to-text, text-to-image and image-to-text productions. In the kitchen we find our tools: we learn to improvise using Machine Learning Models (convolution, GAN, stable diffusion) and use them as storytelling devices. On the kitchen table, we play a game of associations from speech-to-image (DIXIT) to experiment with the backbone of every narration, biographies. Here, we open a communication channel with non-other than (our own) Leon Battista Alberti. He is perhaps best known for his seminal work Ten Books on Architecture (1452), or his treatises On Painting (1435), and On Sculpture (1464). Yet in this seminar, we focus on Alberti’s antiquarianism, art of discovery and autobiographical motif found in his letters, short stories and mythical novels.
With these tools at hand, this seminar examines an architectural hypothesis, suggesting that the probabilistic, self-referential nature of Machine Learning aligns with concepts inherent in architecture and the art of space-making.