The Space of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements

Robert Gorny (ed); Stavros Kousoulas (ed); Dulmini Perera (ed); Andrej Radman (ed)

doi:10.59490/mg.95

The Space of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements

Authors

Robert Gorny (ed)

Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4603-4081

Stavros Kousoulas (ed)

Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0285-0653

Dulmini Perera (ed)

Department of Theory and History of Modern Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9300-5737

Andrej Radman (ed)

Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8914-1197

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59490/mg.95

Keywords: Architecture, Axiology, Ethico-aesthetics, Philosophy, Transdisciplinarity

Synopsis

Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously.

The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism.

In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability.

When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason.

This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiBAgxC5FM

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Author Biographies

Robert Gorny (ed), Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Robert A. Gorny is a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, where he has been teaching and coordinating courses focusing on theory and research methodology since 2015. Combining historically-grounded scholarship with an assemblage-theoretic extension of genealogical accounts, his transdisciplinary research studies built environments,
their organization, and worlding dynamics. As a member of Footprint, he recently co-edited an issue on Stiegler’s related concept of Epiphylogenesis (2022)

Stavros Kousoulas (ed), Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Stavros Kousoulas is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and research coordinator of the Theories, Territories, Transitions research section at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on the irreducibility between architecture, technology and culture. He is the author of the book Architectural Technicities (Routledge, 2022) and the edited volumes Architectures of Life and Death (RLI, 2021) and Design Commons (Springer, 2022).

Dulmini Perera (ed), Department of Theory and History of Modern Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany

Dulmini Perera is a lecturer and researcher at Bauhaus University Weimar. She works at the intersection of design and systems/cybernetics research. She is the recipient of the Heinz von Foerster Award 2021. Her current DFG (Germany)-AHRC(UK) funded research focuses on the complex relationships between the questions of ecology, technology and practices.

Andrej Radman (ed), Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Andrej Radman is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and coordinator of the Ecologies of Architecture research group at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Over the past two decades Radman’s research has focused on the nexus between Architecture and Radical Empiricism. His latest publication is Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (2021).