Neo-Naturalism
- Andrew Potter
- Apr 5, 2016
- 2 min read
Image – Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll. Goshka Macuga, 2016. Android, plastic coat, shoes. Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo by author.
Postmodern linguistic infatuation has been superseded by diagrammatic impulses. These impulses are fueled by data1. The architect’s fascination with data has achieved previously unexperienced heights. Yet this data maintains the mercurial substance of a mirage. Chasing an illusory significance that data (read simulation) promises to justify, the avant-garde is able to fool its audience. Shimmering, rippled, and elastic forms are presented as paradisiacal moments of parametric exuberance. Yet, as a distant body is folded into and consumed by the mirage, these architectural events suck unknowing inhabitants into their strategies of deception. Presenting data as an advantageous interdisciplinary strategy, designers are able to present an architectural sphere that benefits from external influences2. This notion of externality, however, proves false—under the charge of late-capitalism, the architect and his or her new managerial role has aided the invasion of corporate organizations deep into the discipline’s core. Blazing a path of proselytization and profitization, these architects have destroyed any notion of a discipline which may monitor its borders. Porosity reigns as “capitalism presumed to be its exterior…occupies a milieu of an architectural culture industry [example: Prada/OMA, LVMH/Gehry, Chanel/ZHA]…whose administration, paradoxically, does not differ from that of any outside corporate entity”3.
With the help of their corporate sponsors, autopoietic avant-gardists seek to redefine nature’s influence, presenting the natural not as a bastion of order but as the producer of relations that are manifold, dynamic, complex, generative, emergent, et al.. This revision serves not only to promote desires of aesthetic complexity but also to validate the world’s reconceptualization as field. The signifier has now been replaced by data and the algorithm. Within the unlimited, undeviating space of the field, “difference exists for the sake of difference alone”4. The parametricist desires to downplay the true danger of this situation. Pointing to swarming birds and moldy slimes, a thin shroud of justification is wrapped around the observer, enabling data to eclipse “all other forms of evidence in the discipline” and the world to be rendered as “an unbroken, uninterrupted field devoid of politics”5. Stressing continuity above all else, the catastrophe so desperately needed to trigger events within the field is negated — this is what happens when the signifier is removed. The dynamism now exists sans catastrophe — Boccioni lobotomized.
Allowing for the proliferation of capital while presenting field as the neo-natural condition, the parametricist is able to sneak politics up a ladder and through architecture’s bedroom window, enabling a doomed, clandestine romance.
– Andrew Potter
Notes
1 Zeynep Çelik, A. (2014). Neo-Naturalism. Log, (31). pg. 24.
"It seems that the boldest epistemological claims in the design disciplines today are being made through a diagrammatic impulse that is predicated on the epistemic unit of data”.
2 Zeynep Çelik, A. (2014). Neo-Naturalism. Log, (31). pg.25-26.
The internal/external dialog produces many oppositions. Existing as "critical vs projective, disciplinary vs interdisciplinary, and now architecture’s supposed core vs its expanded field”.
3 Zeynep Çelik, A. (2014). Neo-Naturalism. Log, (31). pg. 26.
4 Zeynep Çelik, A. (2014). Neo-Naturalism. Log, (31). pg. 29.
5 Ibid..
Bibliography
Zeynep Çelik, A. (2014). Neo-Naturalism. Log, (31).
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