It is common enough question: What is the human? Sure enough, it is also a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds to walk this planet. Nevertheless, one might wonder, is it really a good question in its own right? To show our allegiances from the outset, we categorically declare it an extremely bad question – in the sense of being unproductive. Like most “what is” questions, to ask “what is the human” cannot avoid but fall victim to an implicitly essential and reductionist definition of the human that would, in addition, aspire to remain eternal and unchangeable, a supposed one-size-fits-all account. However, many of those same “what is” thinkers have appraised the human as the greatest among animals, the one who possesses logic, the one who can adapt to anything that this harsh and cold existence throws at it. The contradiction becomes obvious then: how can there be a universally applicable and everlasting definition of the human if the human is the animal that can (supposedly) adapt and transform better than any other? To avoid this conflict, we propose to follow Gilles Deleuze (who, on this topic, followed Marcel Proust) and adopt what we can call minor questions: when, where, how and for what purpose is the human?1 Such questions do not essentialize but rather impose an approach that demands to be returned to experience itself and therefore provide plastic – as in, transformable and open to revaluation – definitions.@en

It was Gregory Bateson who coined the term metalogue. Enacting an imaginary conversation between father and daughter, Bateson argued that the structure and form of a conversation are critical to the problem that is being addressed. This is precisely why a metalogue is meta: it expresses a shared problem as a point of convergence. As such, a metalogue is by default transdisciplinary or impure, in the sense that it requires the production of methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations, novel trajectories that emerge so as to address a problematic field that binds disciplines together. What is the problem that architecture, perception, action and an epiphylogenetic understanding of the world share? We will claim that it is the world itself that needs to respond to this, in all its complexity, all its filthy heterogeneous entanglements, all the aberrant nuptials that in their differential can produce information or, as Bateson would have it, a difference that makes a difference. The information that produces architecture as a world-making technicity, and the information that architecture produces as an actual world-making consequence, will be brought together in the form of a metalogue between the architect and the world, attempting to outline an autonormative understanding of the architectural asignifying mediality, no longer depending on anything transcendent to it, but rather being reconceptualised as the driving motor of a purposiveness without purpose, a consequence-organised dynamic that is its own consequence.1 The strong conviction – that the conditions of sensations are, at the same time, conditions for the production of the new – calls for an aesthetic rather than merely epistemological approach to design. But this is easier said than done considering the traditional tendency to regard the singular – or the purely present – as fulfilled only in the thought of some representable whole. Claire Colebrook thus identifies an ‘architectonic’ impulse in metaphysics, “regarding as properly present only that which can be re-thought, brought to consciousness and rendered universal and transparent to thought in general.”2 Conversely, a particular metaphysical impulse in architecture makes it highly dependent on representation and as such prone to misplacing concreteness. The metalogue sets the convivial stage for the world to push back. The architect is yet to conceive that the opposite of the concrete is the discrete, not the abstract. [...]@en

In the early pages of his seminal Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, Gilbert Simondon makes a straightforward but challenging claim: the physical individual has no veritable interiority; only the living individual has an interior.1 It is this claim that I will expand upon, while attempting (the audacity!) to problematise it by underlining its relativity; in the meantime, a few points that address issues of architectural concern should become apparent. [...]@en

Our present condition urges those critically and creatively engaged with it, to address the transformative potentials that are brought about by a highly intertwined triad of changes. As the posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti notes, these three changes can no longer be addressed in isolation or in the context of singular disciplines. At an environmental level, we are entangled within deteriorating ecological systems, global changes in climate that affect areas and populations in vastly divergent ways, and massive species extinction that disrupts a variety of symbiotic relationships. At a social level, we are entangled in increasing structural injustices brought about by economic and political systems going increasingly haywire. Finally, at a technological level, we are entangled in new techno-logical developments mostly related to developments in cybernetic-informational systems redefining the human and life in general, (design) intelligence, and related systems of bio- and necro-political governance and control, that accelerate in their longstanding dehumanizing and disindividuating logics and effects.1 Given its urgent multi-layered social, psychological, and environmental dimensions, this latter technological condition in particular cannot be answered through technology alone. It requires a compound view that ought to be not just multi-, cross-, or inter-disciplinary, but fundamentally trans-disciplinary, in order to address issues in a transversal manner.@en

In the format of a round-table discussion, we bring together voices from different department, sections and roles within TU Delft to explore questions arising from the current issue of the magazine. Unlike the elusive concept of atopia or the grim reality of dystopia, utopia is a well-known vision of an ideal society, challenging us to rethink perfection in our complex world. As we delve into this timeless theme, each participant has provided their unique perspective, creating a mosaic of insights and examples that illuminate the aspirational landscapes of an imagined perfect world.@en

Formally called “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” the 2014 Umbrella Movement was a civil undertaking that dominated Hong Kong’s urban landscape for a period of 81 days. This period of unrest expressed a collective spatial claim across the entire Hong Kong territory. With the streets as the primary medium of protest, the protesters barricaded bridges, flyovers and any available form of accessible spaces within their collective and material body of protest. The extraction of political debate away from the private realm, from the containment of a widespread interiority, brought political difference within the urban arteries of the world’s third densest city.

This chapter approaches the commons as processes of re-politicizing urban space. We examine the material realities that catalyzed the Umbrella Movement to explain four key aspects. First, we outline the premise of collective actions and the discourse of the commons, before linking their emergence to the spatial particularities of territories and in this case, Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. After that, we explore the notions of interiority and exteriority, not as fixed spatial terms but as animated and interchangeable conditions whereby culture and technology merge to allow for the (un)folding of affective and transformative practices of commoning technicities. It is through a folded and membranic understanding of the relation between the interior and the exterior that we posit the importance of the Umbrella Movement as an urban event: its attempt to re-politicize the urban by bringing its interiorized past in touch with an exteriorized future.@en

Retelling the age-old fable of the Scorpion and the Frog in her book Context Changes Everything, Alicia Juarrero humorously coins the term scorpionality: the set of primary properties that make scorpions scorpions1 . In a long-lasting philosophical debate, primary properties are seen as the essence of things. However, the very notion of a miserable lack is sustainable only under the assumption of an essence; you are only lacking if there is something that stands as your eternal and immutable identity, your essence. Can it be that misery is this sense of lack?2 If so, would perhaps getting rid of essences (or at least, destabilising them) allow for an affirmative opening instead of resentful, miserable, and spiteful enclosures? Can the Scorpion save both the Frog and itself by rejecting its essence, or, in other words, by defatalising its existence? [...]@en

Circularity for Educators’, and a second platform for interaction and direct exchange that we call ‘Educators for Circularity’, are part and parcel of the Circular Impulse Initiative (CII), a project intending to enhance the integration of circularity in BK education. Whereas the first provides with content on either circularity or pedagogy, the latter offers the opportunity for all of us to meet and share our experiences and learn from one another. More than 40 professors and researchers have contributed so far with videos and additional resources that are open and accessible to all. @en

Nowadays, emerging technologies continuously shift our understanding of human evolution as well as influence the understanding of the built and urban environment. It is evident that architectural and urban pedagogies are equally impacted by the so-called digital turns. On the one hand, digital technologies introduce a great variety of technical methods, such as mapping, filming, geographic information systems (GIS), parametric modelling or VR/AR technology, facilitating the extraction of certain aspects of urban life through qualitative and quantitative analyses or simulations. On the other hand, the rapid growth of such technologies has also raised questions on whether it could enhance the very understanding of urban conditions in evoking a critical thinking of the dynamic, transient and intensive encounters of urban life. To respond to that, one can perhaps turn to philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his concept of technicity: simply put, technicity deals with how humans relate and transform their environment through technology and how these relations transform all of them in their own – humans, technology, and environment. Utilising the concept of technicity, this paper intends to speculate on the intensive dynamics of urban life. It will do so by firstly embracing assemblage thinking and understanding the urban as an emergent and plastic condition. Secondly, in teasing out the tangible dimensions of technicity, the paper aims to discuss the affective, reticular, and co-transformative relations between people, spaces, and memory as produced and ramified by technology. It then brings the above discussions together to articulate potential urban pedagogies that are enabled by transdisciplinarity and a problem-based understanding of knowledge. Finally, the paper places an open-ended question: how digital literacy could produce a form of urban literacy, and how lack of knowledge on the entanglements between architecture and digital technologies leads eventually to an impediment in understanding how urban life is influenced by both.@en

The massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century would meet a radical change that occurred after the Olympic Games of 2004, producing the germ that would transform the Athenian urban ecologies: an absolute retreat to the private, understood not in financial or market terms but in terms of stratification and rigidification. Examined from that point of view, the urban unrests of the past decade can be approached as the gradual formation of a black hole: before the formation of molar fascist assemblages in the Athenian urban ecologies, there is the formation of infinite micro-fascists. The immense proliferation of micro-fascist subjectivities is no other than the emergence of infinite reactive subjects out of the Athenian urban ecologies and their technicities themselves. Precisely for this reason, any attempt to speak of an Athens yet-to-come should not involve the production of yet another narrative (of urban change, social justice or political emancipation) but rather the affirmative production of a futurity through the actual and virtual potentials of an environmental manipulation that occurs here-and-now while aiming at a not-here-and-not-yet.@en

The reasons for a dedicated edition on “design and commoning” are twofold. First, the recent surge of renewed interest in the social conditions of design remains atheoretical. A deeper theoretical and philosophical foundation will help problematize the link between commoning and design, and in doing so define the operative theories, concepts and frameworks that influence design thinking across a series of design contexts and conditions. And secondly, design has become more ubiquitous, expanding both its domain of influence and conditions of praxis. With this expansion, design touches a variety of contested areas. Designers are continuously challenged by conflicts and edge conditions, having to mitigate between both scales of conflict and the vested interests of individuals. In the global climate of population increase and the prevalent reduction of financial resources the question and theorization of shared capacities will remain part and parcel of future of design thinking. The four thematic clusters contained here exploit the theoretical and philosophical themes related to the large commoning “problematique,” providing designers better grounding in the networked context of the twenty-first century. The explicit theorization of design and the commons will explore the implicit relations through each of the collected contributions to show how this philosophical construct can be explicated in the context of network collectives and transdisciplinary approaches that currently inform design practices.

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Philosopher Gilbert Simondon claims that what one perceives is neither outlines nor shapes, but thresholds of intensity. Therefore, Simondon points out that sensation is nothing but intensive and differential; it is the ‘seizure of a direction, not of an object.’ However, the issue is how one can examine the sensation of a direction that does not address the present but rather that which is yet to come. To do so, one can approach it as an issue of synapses. A synapse is a junction, an almost imperceptible gap through which an impulse of intensity passes by. As such, synapses manage to capture both the passage of an intensity (as a synaptic moment) and the formation of an extensity (as a synaptic location). In other words, synapses can be understood as constraints and for this reason, as information; after all, information is nothing but the reduction of potentials. In this paper, I will examine how architecture, in its technicities, operates as a synapse: how it allows for both the formation of an extensive space as well as for the very possibility of intuiting a space yet to come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. To do so, I will focus on how architectural technicities allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy due to their metastability and auto-normativity. With the help of goddess Ananke and her spindle, architecture will be understood as an intensive exercise on the indeterminate, on a figure that is not yet figured out, but does so on the basis of synaptic passages. @en

Why Simondon in a volume dedicated to Stiegler? It is not that Stiegler’s oeuvre cannot be examined without referring to the crucial influence that Simondon had for his thought. More important than this, it is only through Simondon that Stiegler makes sense. Simondon is keen to remind us that sense, first and foremost, stands for directionality: to make sense is to grasp a direction. Without Simondon’s critical reformulation of our technological becoming, Stiegler’s project remains null. In a non-zero-sum game, Stiegler through Simondon and (retroactively) Simondon through Stiegler, produce the norms and values of a directing sense that can indeed compel us to engage in our worldly endeavours with neganthropic care.@en

This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To respond, it will embark on a captivating journey through many singular architectural concepts. The entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands will outline an architectural act that moves beyond representation. A ferryman who stutters will present two different types of architectural minds. A stilus and a theory of signs will reconsider the ways architects can develop a particular kind of intuition, while architectural technicities will bring forth a membranic and territorial understanding of architecture. Finally, as a melody that sings itself, a larval architecture will be introduced, bringing space and time together. Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment.@en

Etymologically unattested yet artistically long praised, there is a profound relation between life and light; next to both, the almost self-evident (and scientifically undisputed) relation between light and flow, lux and flux. Would it be correct then to understand life as an issue of perception and manipulation of flows? Surprisingly, this is a question that can only be answered by addressing death. As any lensmaker would claim (and philosophy has always had an affinity with this profession), perception is not a synthesis but an ascesis: it does not connect, it disconnects; or, better said, in order to connect, it needs to disconnect. However, following the radical empiricist dictum, one should never speak of perception alone; ever since William James, perception equals action. In other words, perception is not something that happens to us, it is something we do.5 Strange as it may seem therefore, to live one needs to practice death. This book will examine how styling life means styling death and how architecture (in the broadest possible sense) is involved in this continuous process of stylisation. To do so, architecture and perception, duration and individuation, will all converge in practising how one can die without dying in order to enunciate a life.@en

While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design methods and practices, while also tackling issues of reflexivity and complex problems. In this introduction, we examine the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share. To this end, we approach cybernetics as the study of the production, consumption and flow of information, an account that has little to do with digital logics, unless one wants to pursue that special case. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials. By introducing five short points on the relation between architecture and cybernetics, we aim to assist in this endeavour.@en

The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (secondness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness). It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of the actual presentational immediacy upon the virtual causal efficacy, and not the other way round. To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. The chapter is meant to provide the basis for the panel that will stage an encounter between cognitive neurosciences and architecture.@en

If any individual is determined by its affects as they are catalyzed in the technicities it unfolds, then one can no longer speak of posthumanism or transhumanism but of transaffectivity. Among genetic, epigenetic, and epiphylogenetic elements, there unfolds a play of intensive material informational exchange that determines both the structural and operational affects of any entity. Hence, evolution returns to its original Latin meaning, namely from the term evolutio: to unfold. Contrary to the logic of the survival of the fittest, unfolding does not dictate in advance which forms come forth, but instead, it determines which of them are not viable. In other words, it is the condition that brings forward a new world, one that is viable through the very differentials that determine the condition, and not the other way around. In this paper I will examine how structurally coupled individuals unfold an intensive continuum where there is no natural selection prescribing any outcome, but a continuous natural drift. The affective potentials that produce and are produced in the technicities of the drifted unfolding do not need to be the best, but simply good enough. Put succinctly, evolution, or more precisely, individuation, is satisficing rather than optimizing. Love—human, machinic, everything in between—and not Darwinian struggle or opposition is what determines evolution: not an affective diminution but instead an affirmative, transaffective amplification, where any individual structurally coupled with another brings forth a world through an aberrant nuptial, not because it must but simply because it can.

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In this paper, the limits between an already structured individual and its milieu are brought into focus. The significance of the limit lies between the operational potentials of an individual and its milieu: that which is neither structure nor potential yet. In other words, the architectural limit belongs neither to the past nor to the future, but to a constant present, the a praesenti of being in becoming and becoming in being. On the limit that constantly shifts and transforms, grows and shrinks, both the past and the future inform each other. Through the disparity of their informational differential, any architectural entity passes through the ongoing unfolding of its individuation. For Simondon, the limit is the here-and-now of individuation. It is where the propagation of information on a yet undetermined milieu occurs; in other words, it is where transduction takes place. Through this paper, architectural transduction will be defined as the process whereby architecture undergoes information, where one architectural individual finds its principle of constitution in another. If the limit is the here-and-now of individuation, then architecture, aiming in the production of new processes of individuation, has to deal with the reciprocal practice of finding new ways to perform a play of limits; a play on what is yet to come.@en