Participant: Filho Cabral and José dos Santos
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

Over the last decades architecture has been characterized by a series of computational design strategies aiming at a paradigm shift in the profession by adopting operative ideas such as evolutionary, liquid, interactive, morphogenetic, parametric, emergent, etc. This paper discusses how most of these design strategies, by restricting themselves to either form-making or form-finding, end up just reenacting the old linear and deterministic perspectival paradigm that has been the basis of architectural practice since the Renaissance. Thus, most contemporary buildings are produced with an instrumental use of cybernetics without escaping prescriptiveness and determinism. This happens despite the series of exemplary attempts carried out by architects such as Cedric Price in the 1960s, which focuses on architectural indeterminacy.

In fact, current design and construction process takes advantage of an intensive use of cybernetic principles to expand their possible scenarios and cope with the uncertainties of ill defined tasks. However, this strategy faces an ethical limitation because they fail to take this openness to the final segment of the design chain, the actual dwelling. Apparently, these architects seem to be following Hans von Foerster’s ethical imperative: ‘act always so as to increase the number of choices’. Nevertheless, by restricting the possibilities of increasing choices to their immediate practice, they ignore that von Foerster’s dictum implies reaching the greatest possible number of people.

The paper concludes by discussing a few examples of interactive architecture and similar experiments in which buildings, instead of being obstacles, are thought of as occasions for expanding the number of existential possibilities. It is argued that this is achieved by an explicit adoption of second-order cybernetic principles, such as conversation and the inclusion of the observer, to complete the design chain and to avoid the ethical limitation of computational design strategies.