Minor architecture: poetic and speculative architectures in public space

Computer science and software engineering has adopted the term ‘‘architecture’’ to describe the composition of large, complex sets of interoperating code that often contain multiple concurrent operations. ‘‘Software programmer’’, ‘‘software engineer’’, and ‘‘systems architect’’ denote an increasing scale of experience and ability to carry out systemic analysis and design. The status accorded to the software architect mimics in some ways the status accorded architects proper. On the lee-side of the tipping point where more media attention is paid to computer media and informatic technologies than to 20c media of cinema, radio, and television, it is easy to forget the enormous capital and power bound up in the industries of our physical built environment, and the intellectual and social prestige worn by its designers, the architects. This issue of AI & Society focuses on the encounter between the new potentials for architectural environment, the design of the built environment, and the emerging computational media and built environment. By convention, we can date the contemporary epoch of this encounter between computational technoscience and the art of the built environment back to the origin of the MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture, now given a global currency with the advent of sensor-equipped ‘‘smart’’ buildings, computationally augmented materials, and everyday nanotechnology. While participant in the creative research into some of these mixtures of new media and architecture, we take this opportunity to lay out a critical and poetic perspective as well. We have invited artists and researchers to reflect critically on this recent history, and take stands, or draw attention to alternative approaches. In the modern and post-modern eras, architects have adopted large conceptual frames to house and motivate large capital projects: Le Corbusier and modern urbanism; Peter Eisenman and deconstruction; Rem Koolhaas and shopping centers; Bernard Cache, Greg Lynn, and the Deleuzian fold, and so forth. One may question the degree to which these architects inhabited the conceptual terrains from which they extracted these notions. And even if they did traverse those territories comfortably, one can ask how the notions they extracted really worked in the material and social operation of the built structures that were justified by appeals to those concepts. Resetting a gemstone on a tiara however lovely, nonetheless leaves behind all the suprahumanly rich, glacial processes of the earth from which it was taken. To take one example, to reduce Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold (Deleuze 2006 (1988)) to two-dimensional surfaces in Euclidean three-space seems to be a rather formal interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, a concept which has an ontological, aesthetic as well as geometric character (and although a geometry, like anything made by us humans, can be interpreted from an esthetic point of view, geometry is as much dynamics and proof theoretic structure as esthetics). Deleuze’s fold has as much to do with a boundless process of ornament, of Baroque excess, as it does with interpenetration between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Even more subtly, as Tirtza Even has observed, things can have variable and varying degrees of existence with respect to one another, and so Deleuze’s fold takes an ontological meaning as well as formal one. X. W. Sha (&) Topological Media Lab, EV-7-725, Concordia University, 1515 Ste-Catherine West, Montreal, QC H3G 2W1, Canada e-mail: xinwei@mindspring.com URL: http://topologicalmedialab.net 1 Tirtza Even, private communication, April 2002.