The Ultimate Goal of Architecture

My Swedish friends dislike dull facades with rendered concrete or metal panels. They think buildings with such plain facades look cheap, flat, and unamusing. If I ask them to choose a building they like, they point me back to a Neo-classical building. They prefer the more intricate and complex facades of that old style. Similarly, if I show them an elaborate and complex parametric design, they will like it. So, after all, my friends are not retrograde and nostalgic. People expect architects to deliver buildings that offer something else that attracts and affects them.

Architecture is more than just a solution to shelter the activities of human beings (construction). Architecture is more than just an optimal solution to problems (design). Architecture (Art) enhances our existence by affording us to see the world in new ways or even see new worlds previously inaccessible to us.

The British musician?Brian Eno?(1) says that just as kids imagine new worlds when they play, adults imagine new worlds when making Art. We find our best ideas and concepts in this playfulness. Art is an investment in keeping us human. Let's blame the recent playless, capitalist strategies of profiteering optimisation and efficiency—brought via processes like Generative Design— for the blandness my friends dislike in contemporary architecture. The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis rightly says that "doing art [...] is the very definition of going against Neoliberalism." (2)

We can agree with Joseph Beuys that 'Every man is an Artist', and among all those artists, some have found ways to take us into extraordinary worlds that speak universally, stand the test of time, and bring us sophisticatedly by surprise. Theirs are the pieces of Art we save in museums. But what is this sophistication? What makes Art art?

In their book What is Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari said that Art is a block of affects that can bypass our five senses and affect our nervous system directly (3). We can't smell, see, touch, hear or taste such affects, but they can undoubtedly affect us.

Deleuze and Guattari offer two possible methods to produce affects. Firstly, re-origination or?re-territorialisation. Anthony Hopkins interpreted Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs by studying cats and their behaviour instead of learning about serial killers. Lecter catches us off-guard. We like him and find him familiar, but at the same time, we feel the horror of what he is. He affects us. Our nervous system is affected directly, bypassing our senses. So it is the Mona Lisa and her mysterious smile. And so are buildings like Mies' National Gallery in Berlin. If Art is experiencing God, Mies' maxim is true, "God is in the details". The geometric alignment of all the construction details at the National Gallery is a powerful block of affects.

By contrast, Halle Berry's Catwoman is an imitation, and Midjoruney and Dall-E's creations are collaging. Neither is re-territorialisation. Re-territorialisation is occupying an existing territory or space previously belonging to another entity (Hopkins' territory occupied by a cat).

The second method to produce affects is?territorialisation.?This method entails actualising a?diagram?or the flesh-out of a concept. The novel entities resulting from this process have no referents (nothing like that has been seen or heard before). When Farshid and Alejandro presented the?Yokohama International Port Terminal, journalists kept asking what the concept of the building was because all the data and circulation?diagrams?they were showing needed to make more sense to them. The need for references disables our senses. What those journalists saw went straight to their nervous systems.?

While re-territorialisation is the clashing of two existing entities, territorialisation creates a new entity.

If an?architect?creates blocks of affects, a?designer?well-poses a problem and describes its solutions so that they can be actualised or built, and a?builder?can read and write.

On the one hand, a builder is a literate: a person who masters the grammar of a language. There are literate in music, dance, Spanish, and architecture. We are talking about writing per se, flat, just repetition—the simple ability to take dictation, for example. With CAD and BIM, we have already digitised and automated?construction?drawings (floor plans, elevations and sections).

On the other hand, a designer is already literate. She mechanically executes techniques inherited genetically (instincts) or culturally learned to find and solve problems. Commercial music is design: Max Martin knows this as well as?Jukedeck. Since?2012?(4), the latter has been using Deep Learning to create jingles. With Generative Design (TestFit, Spacemaker or Finch), we have already digitised and automated?design?(adjacency rules between programmatic areas and their material and environmental performance).

How do digital tools allow architects to explore affects? Art is not a fuzzy thing like Steven Holl using phenomenology and waiting for six months until he "got" the concept for his Stretto House (5). Art is a concrete, historical and materialist concept. Small-scale art pieces like paintings, sculptures, performances or installations can be easily altered and afford experimentation when generating affects. Digital simulation is critical to creating affects in large-scale pieces such as buildings. Products like Omniverse allow the simulation of light, textures, physics and sound and modelling agents' behaviours. Such agents include timber columns, the slab's structural reinforcement web (6), or people wandering in an airport.

Firstly, based on the historical materialistic definition in this article, Art will allow us to move from anthropocentric to ecological architecture. Art goes beyond humanity. Nervous systems are present in other species that can be bypassed! It is time to do Art for the rest of the species. Object Oriented Ontology teaches us that. With the technologies available and to come, we need to digitise the process of affecting its users.

Secondly, should we push things further and be artists? Shall we challenge Capitalism's efficiency and optimisation and the resulting boring, flat facades?

References

(1) Brian Eno. (2012, February 24). What is Art Actually for? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIVfwDJ-kDk

(2) Yanis Varoufakis. (2020, April 9).?Brian Eno in conversation with Yanis Varoufakis: Reflecting on our Post-Virus World | DiEM25 TV?[Video]. YouTube.?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ei1-rYHMU&list=LLKYKfgoh2GCGbqjl1-RpeRQ&index=5&t=0s

(3) Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1996)?What is Philosophy (revised edition).?Columbia University Press.

(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/arts/music/jukedeck-artificial-intelligence-songwriting.html

(5) Zaera-Polo, A. (1996). A Conversation With Steven Holl.?El Croquis, 78, 14.

(6)?Hans-Jakob Wagner. (2021).?Design Methods for Variable Density, Multi-Directional Composite Timber Slab Systems for Multi-storey Construction. eCAADe 39 - Computational design - Volume 1.