Theory for a Praxis

Certainly at this point any kind of proposal remains in the level of theory therefore needs a further investigation in the field of the praxis. What can be produced at this point are sets of particular plausible conclusions and an outline of the aims of a further research that could make the whole idea actively productive. The intention is not to give a final but rather to show a direction

Taking into account that the practice of building and its output, especially habitation, are, not only social, but also natural necessities what I counter pose is a more in-formal and also a-formal approach towards the process architectural design that attempts to re-establish the relation of the subject and the built space. Somehow give to the people more freedom to occupy and modify their space because this is what makes space to become place and creates the feeling of belonging with all that means.

There are already a lot of issues that have been illustrated in the text and need to be taken into account for the production of a theoretical platform that could sustain the productive use of informality and the smoothening of the multiple polarities that have been described above. The mechanical end of technical productions, the power of the architect over the user, the formative and reductive tools we use etc, raise issues of origin, identity, autonomy, authority etc.

Eventually, the overall discussion is a discussion about relations and how we can stimulate the growth of continuities instead of the established borders or linear connections. In these fields where continuities need to grow, we often find informality emerging. Informality emerges dynamically in between the general / universal and the particular / singular (scales), the idea / immaterial and the praxis / material (actions - creations), the personal and the collective (social), the public and the private (inscription of the social in space), the subject and the object (perception), the technical and the natural (topography), the legal / proper and the illegal / improper (convention).

Therefore, informality is the establisher of this continuity we seek for, always appearing on borderlines and overlaps or gaps in the fields of the in between spaces restoring continuity. Taking into account that informality derives from the subject the idea is to give space for subjective (informal) implementation in our practices.

Concerning architecture in particular, the position I take is that as long as the architect is the sole and exclusive executor of a form or a process, without being informed by various exteriorities, he becomes the establisher of enclosed systems and eventually formalities that tend to become formative conditions. No matter the origin, the benefits or the purpose of the particular formality, the result is that the subject of the user is put aside and autopoesis is kept outside of the processes giving space to heteropoesis (somebody else creating for myself). The reason is that the status of the architect as a specialist in matters of space is fading as we attempt to have a closer look at the ways how space is constituted dynamically by needs and innate powers architects cannot predict or control. Therefore I believe that the basic discourse in architecture today should obviously be about the role of the architect as space "creator".

The architect is the carrier of the technical and the main question is not how he can apply that over the natural but how he can connect it with it. The "naturalization" of the architectural process, the smoothening the boundaries between the natural and the technical is something I regard as a necessity since architecture is the technical expression of a fundamentally natural condition (necessity), this of habitation, (shelter protection). This naturalization could again be approached by the use and stimulation of informality. There are dynamics that cannot be planned and don't need to, there needs only to be space for personal involvement and engagement into the poetics of space. This becomes obvious in cases where informality is emerging naturally, filling up the material and immaterial gaps that our formal productions leave open and covering needs that formal architecture failed to predict. There will always be gaps in our processes and the question shouldn't be how to cover them in order to prevent informality because this will end up with cracks. The question then should be rather how we will manage to have an active dialogue between the formal and the informal that can be productive, how to create an intelligent formality that is able to inform itself by the informal instead of excluding it.

The idea is not to strengthen formality or establish new heteronomies that regulate autonomies, but to establish fields for communication and negotiation among individual autonomies outside of heteronomies. This presupposes the implementation of the users in the design process and the use of a different medium for communication. It needs a thousand little pigs instead of three, the establishment of a new communication among roles, the implementation of multiple subjects in the process.

To make it more tangible I will go back to the story of the little pigs... Once they build the houses they have already created a phylogenetic tank, an origin, and immediately after the demolition they know why their houses have collapsed, through trial and error and by building and rebuilding they accumulate knowledge for the process of building and for the built environment itself. But this cumulative process that informs a data tank (this of phylogenesis) with possible scenarios and possible activations presupposes communication and participation. A thousand little pigs that collaborate are more effective than three because there are more trials and errors, more causes and effects therefore this "autopoetic" process goes faster and accumulates both an origin and a variation.

Of course for this to work we need to understand that form is not a closed fixed mould, is not something final and conclusive, no matter it is often considered to be. Form is the field for communication and negotiation and we need to reestablish it as such. The answer to the imposed end, the problem of "form" and the formal (as described above), is not the refusal of form, the non form or the a-formal. It is the informal and the communication of it within a network of informalities or autonomies, an ecosystem.


The relation of the architect and the user

Therefore, it is vital is to reexamine the relation of the architect to other agents that participate with various roles in the architectural process and especially the relation of the architect with the user. We need to gain the consciousness that outside of the formality, rationality and individuality of the architectural practice there is a universe of things and situations that inform our praxis, filling the tank of the origin (phylogenesis) with possibilities.

In the architectural practice we often hear the cliché "we want to offer possibilities to the users". The question is where from we gain the knowledge and the consciousness of the available possibilities that are to be offered and additionally who offers these possibilities. The answer is that the user also participates in the generation of those possibilities therefore what we need is to use the user as a source, not merely as a target. The idea is not only to offer possibilities but also to gain possibilities from the field of the virtual. Users add and have added historically an accumulation of multiple scenarios and characteristics that function as origins and we should let them to keep on contributing to this tank adding new characteristics and possibilities. Therefore the users shouldn't be regarded as passive receivers but as active participants that produce and unlock such possibilities making them actual and creating more and more possibilities. In order to make it more tangible I could describe the way how the "informality" of the users, when inscribed in space resembles the writing of Kafka.

In his works, Franz Kafka seems to multiply continuously the characters, the objects, the possible scenaria. He is not pushing them to an end or a fulfillment but often just brings them to existence without always having in mind a purpose or knowing the potential. When brought to existence many of them remain pending in a state of latency. In that way Kafka occupies more and more space in the field of the potentiality (Deleuze would name it virtual) creating constantly new possibilities for the development of his story. Obviously, he is writing in a linear way without going back to erase or exclude the inactivated possibilities since he may use them in the future. On the other hand, the development and activation of possible scenaria seem to be rather rhizomatic, occupying more and more space in the realm of the possible since new possibilities are constantly opening and branching out from the activated ones, while others remain in a state of pending for activation and may never be activated. If it was space it would be doors that when they open lead to corridors with other doors, the space behind the doors is empty, until the door opens and another corridor is being actualized, full of doors again. Kafka's writing is a constant production-construction of the story which in turn is itself an abstract machine that creates the story in an open-ended way while all the possibilities are pending. It's a continuous, perpetual routing without end.

Similar to the above, the growth of informality is a wave of activations like those of Kafka, that open up more and more possibilities, and for this to happen the participation of the user is vital.

While the user is an author like Kafka that expands into the field of the possible, the architect could be the navigator into this field of possibilities; not a mere detached specialist or a form artist that imposes ends, but both an observer and active participant; a mediator that understands the inherent capacities of each system and doesn't attempt to impose a solution from the outside, but rather helps the inherent dynamics of the system to give birth to individual solutions that will be implemented in the system by the participants themselves. The new role would not be any more this of the αρχιτέκτων (=architect) which refers to his authority to build, but rather this of the αρχιτίκτων which refers to his ability to "give birth" (tiktein = give birth). Therefore, I refer to an architecture where there are a) a genesis, a moment of conception and a becoming, which is under the influence of the user, and b) the very moment of birth, the tiktein, which takes place under the mediation of the architect.

What we need is a more open approach; we need the participation of multiple subjects and the dynamics they encompass, but not through customization or as consumers. It should be more straightforward and for this to happen we need to use new media and understand the capacities of the traditional ones.


Language as Medium

The overall idea is not to avoid formality and form or tear down completely the models and structures that have been set in the past, but to realize that they are merely the media for the understanding of the reality and the production of space but not the space or the reality itself.

In the past I used to believe that what architecture lacks is a common "architectural" language, today I realize that I was rather wrong and that what architecture really needs is the understanding of the fact that there cannot exist something like a "common language" and if it could it would kill multiplicity. What we need to understand is that architecture is multilingual therefore we are obliged to accumulate the capacity of being polyglots, being able to understand multiple languages and systems and manage to work inter-textually and inter-contextually. This is why we need to learn how to negotiate but in the same time stimulate multiplicity without narrowing the negotiation by imposing an end. Therefore we need to postpone forms and implement them in the process of architectural production in the end and not use them from the beginning. The forms we could use for negotiation could be less formal and less formative, meaning more informal.

In order to stimulate and communicate informality we need to find processes and media (tools) that are able to encompass the characteristic of informality (open ended, context specific) in order to describe the qualitative characteristics (the quantitative are measurable e.g. economy). I cannot think of another tool that can do that adequately than verbal language. As a medium it seems to share the same characteristics with informality, it is open ended, it becomes, it constantly encompasses change, it has cumulative abilities, it has an origin that accumulates new origins (phylogenesis). No matter that it is also itself form and not a substance, still it is a non material form therefore less stable, less fixed more open ended and more flexible. A language is a system of flexible conventions, flexible empty tokens and it is the how the elements of the language relate that give the language this flexibility to express the subject. Language has a syntactic structure and a vocabulary. As a system, it consists of the "langue" (refers to the structural characteristics of the language, the language as a mechanism), but in the same time we can use it with absolute freedom (parole) and often play with its rules, invert them, ignore them and let us be surprised. As Jacques Derrida says, "my own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think". This is significant of the power of the language to open up possibilities beyond the intentions of the writer and the reader. As Umberto Eco might pose it, in any kind of text, there are three intentions; the intention of the author (intentio auctoris), the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris) and the intention of the text itself (intentio operis). The latter is an additional field of possibilities.

Verbal language does not intend to be a language of forms or a language of types (as we often think when we refer to architectural language), but a language that attempts to communicate the variety of forms and types and their characteristics not as pure entities but as abstract and multiply interpreted abstractions. In order to stimulate informality, what we need is maybe the consciousness that we should trust more the dynamics of communication, which means to trust more the bias of language and its misunderstandings. One could claim that this would deform the initial idea but this is also a misunderstanding that comes as the result of an established Neo-platonic system of thinking according to which the idea exists prior to praxis and is superior to it. In reality there is no deformation because the initial idea is not a form but an abstraction. What language does is to communicate abstractions that are not being deformed but rather constantly formed under the influence of reason and gnosis but also under the power of feelings, senses and insights that is the one that charges with meaning our practices and productions. It is this meaning that creates identity for both the object and the subject.