Reading Response 7: Indeterminacy, Systems and the Dissolution of Buildings – Archigram 7

Reading Response 7:

Indeterminacy, Systems and the Dissolution of Buildings – Archigram 7

Beyond Architecture

One of the more esoteric modernist debates in the 1950s had asked whether a composition is ever complete. Davies proposed an ‘endless architecture’, a design method making use of modular elements repeated in a building to suggest imminent extension. Davies & Weeks are credited with bringing the word ‘indeterminacy’ into architectural discourse applied their principle with wings of buildings rudely finished in anticipation of addition.

An imperative seemed to be to create ‘open ends’, an architecture that expressed its inhabitants’ supposed desire for continuous change.

Modernists were forced to consider, however superficially, how human communities might ctually function, rather than how they should function.

Buckminster Fuller’s indeterminate architectural ‘kit of parts’ (such as his geodesic dome system) sought to redistribute the world’s finite building resources more equitably.

Almost without realising it we have absorbed into our lives the expendables.... foodbags, paper tissues, plastic wrappers, ball pens then others though bigger also planned for obsolescence.... the motor car, caravan etc. The previously unchanging scene is being replaced by the increase in change of our user-habits – and thereby, eventually, our user-habitats....

In the 60s experimental architecture was itching to break away from the great and singular solution and unity, to break the unwieldy static support, from house to megastructure, to which architecture seemed to be addicted.

The merging of architecture and industrial design suggested that: “A house will no longer be this solidly built thing which sets out to defy time and decay... it will become a tool as the motor car has.

Skilled technicians, using production line technology in the factory setting, can produce units and other kit houses built off site, delivered and then assembled in an accurate and timely manner.

With systems a new diversity has emerged with computer design, communication and control. This allows modules, kits, joints and components to be utilised creatively in a streamlined process that is able to be automated and maintains accuracy whilst being able to evolve to manage emergent and changing situations not established ones.

We are constantly revising the total structure of ‘interface’. Information feedback results in environment change. Smart or intelligent buildings sense the environment and adapt internally and externally through a range of means for temperature, light and sound.

Beyond Ideology

Philosophically, two things are striking about the move ‘beyond architecture’. One is the ambition to transcend all social convention (including politics and conflict) through relentless cybernetic modification. The second is the likelihood that, pitched in opposition to mainstream modernism the indeterminists were straying into idealism themselves – a belief in the purity of a constant functional ‘becoming’....

The ability to change is a characteristic o our time. The restructuring and continuous revaluation of things that were reliable, sacred, hierarchic, acknowledged is something that we learn to live with. Since the industrial revolution, the Western middle class has consolidated itself, geographically and ideologically, within choice urban and suburban residences, close to centres of product and information.

The power of the mind has always ranged further than the limits of environment. Now our dreams happen though wires, waves, pictures and stimulant. The interface is between the unlike and the unknown, the real and the unreal.

“The deficiency of words, symbols and visual information is that they cannot communicate experience from one person to another. Only you really know what you like or what you know. Yet still there is that desperation of trying to communicate, to reach some understanding of one another’s experience and preconceptions...”