alpbacher architekturgespräche 2003 - ATP

mound up just like the sand in the hourglass. But at a certain moment after the
beginning of that piling it is ready to collapse. Collapse is built into the piling,
which is why we have volcanic eruptions, landslides, and earthquakes.These,
according to Bergson, are just like that pile of sand in that collapse is built into
them from the beginning, at some moment beyond our perception or control.
We are beginning to understand our natural world in ways that we never could
before - seeing that the time of the object and the time of our experience has
nothing to do with our perception of the object. Perception is no longer the
key ingredient.What we see may no longer be the truth as well as we may not
know of what we see.The capacity of objects to be there and for us to see
them or be in them and yet not know them is an important distinction.
Let me give you another example.At architecture school we were taught what
was known in America as descriptive geometry.We would take Cartesian solids
such as tubes, ovals, and cones, etc. and shine the sun upon them, drawing the
resulting shadows, and from this shade and shadow we should learn about
architecture.The early computers created another kind of geometry called
projective geometry - known to students as morphing.You could take the
letters A and B and, by pushing a button, see all the intermediate stages as A
turned into B. Or you could turn a cube into a cone and stop the computer
at any point to get something strange - something strange that came to resemble
architecture in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when people were experimenting
with early computation. However, Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA
fifty years ago showed us that there was a possibility of a different geometry -
mutational geometry - and that the language of how things happen in natural
conditions of growth is not how things happen in our languages. Crick saw that
our language is not natural to natural phenomena.The sign of a protein element
represents a protein element, and when we change the sign something changes
in the reaction of the protein to cause mutation. And what we are now able
to do in our computer and computational language is to model in 3D form
those kinds of changes which are no longer descriptive or projective geometry
but mutational geometry.We are now able to produce mutations where
the sign, when it changes, is not necessarily related to a signified.
The entire enterprise of dialectics and the metaphysics of presence was
consciously based on the fact that any sign had an original or transcendental
signified - that the sign always referred to something prior.This was the nature
of what we thought language to be.What biologists have discovered is that
there is no original signified. Instead there are signs which produce original things
so that in biology today there are signs that come before things and change
things through mutation.This takes us back to Le Corbusier in the early 20th
century and his use of d’Arcy Thompson’s volume On Growth and Form.This
was Le Corbusier’s bible, and it was also my bible when I went to school. From
this book I was able to understand natural forms through things like the
Fibonacci series and Le Corbusier’s modulor dimensions; the suggestion was
that nature was evolutionary and that signs came from natural phenomena. But
Crick changed the entire aspect of what we do by saying that signs do not come
from natural phenomena, but rather that signs create natural phenomena.
The events of 1945, 9/11, and the Francis Crick revolution demonstrate that
there has been a history of radical discontinuity.We say that modernity began
in Vienna because Freud’s notion of the return of the repressed and the
opening up of the unconscious was an important condition to changing the
subject.Without Freud there could not have been an Einstein or a Heisenberg.
In architecture we still believe in the theology and mythology that we are the
locus of the metaphysics of presence and that presence comes before the signs
that we make.This is because we are still teaching nineteenth-century physics
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