Architectural Atrophy

A rchitectural Atrophy A CONTEMPORARY ISSUE IN SEMIOLOGY

Matteo J. da Lisca

A rchitectural Atrophy

A CONTEMPORARY ISSUE IN SEMIOLOGY Matteo J. da Lisca

Modernity in the name of progress has brought to us essentially globalization and standardization, where time and technological systems (not technology) control our lives becoming means of alienation.

Post-modernity tried to fight this totalistic vision of the world, by accepting the multiple points of view and trying to understand the world of signs and language. But in its attempt to reach a deeper understanding it’s actually augmented all the modern structures of oppression and domination. In fact representation has become nothing more than a mere consumerist object that we find on the market, more important than actual experience.

Our new urban systems have lost their pureness and are now hypo-significant forms, what F. Choay calls “mixed systems”.1 He defines these as unable to deal with the new complexity of modernity and by so they are damned to be anachronistic.

Jeff Ramirez, 1000+, 2013

To defend itself, the city inserts in its interface a new layer of worn phrases in meaning, systems of ungrounded symbols like signposting. This general attitude led to a lost of symbolic meaning in the city and an increase of extra information is now needed to fill the gap.

Jean-Michel Folon, the New Yorker cover, Dec 3rd 1966

When the era of virtual communication began, post-modernism ceased and a time of weakness of the culture of symbols started: computers brought homogenization of thought, plus downward connection that finds its realization in a fetishization of bright images and signs without an explanation of intentions. By the second half of the 20th century our style of life depended on acquiring and using information effectively.

1. C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture, Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

2.C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture, Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

Jean-Michel Folon, la Foule, 1934

Today we live constantly under the influence of information and are overwhelmed by the power of our new media devices. I believe G. Baird is on point when he says that “the only way that meanings are dissolved is by atrophy, in the whole of society”.2 We are atrophied to and by the data that is input into our heads from our smartphones, tablets and computers. This is true for architecture as well, that has seen an exponential rise in its communication platforms (magazines, webzines, fanzines, blogs and social media) where

Aldo van Eyck in “the Interiority of Time” says that to create better products and images we must see time as a solution of continuity between past, present and future. If not what will be realized is going to be without temporal depth and associative perspective. He says, “Todays architects are pathologically bound to changes, like something to keep up with”.6

where new ideas and projects from all over the world are hourly shared.

Induced by media, architecture is eroding its disciplinary knowledge and its capacity to stimulate experience as physical and spatial affection that is de-sensitized due to the disjunction between subject and place. We are passive spectators of the death of spatial affection.

American philosopher John Zerzan, although he comes to a radical conclusion of society and civilization, believes that by understanding time intended only in the form of the present (now and here) we will be able to “restore the real duration of things”.7

Although we must say that media communications have advanced a sensibility and education based on the understanding of a visual logic that was highly beneficial to architecture, today they hold the power to manipulate mass behavior and so need a critical view.

I think that this statement means that the future of architecture could be a similar vision of what Andrea Branzi and Archizoom have imagined in their utopia8: a world whit out architecture, because men live their lives by the day in a continuous relation between consumption and production and by so are free from time and form (language).

In a chaotic and moving world, the relations between objects tend to dissolve and meanings become transitory.

Critics and architects today should combine their strength to first of all create better platforms where a selection of images is proposed on the basis of solid cultural values. An attempt to recognize and share what G. Broadbent calls a social contract.3

3. C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture,

Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

A sign represents in itself the conscience of time because the symbol contains structure of time. Also Derrida said that time and language are contiguous: “being in one is the same as being in the other”.4 This means that to create better and more meaningful signs for today we must understand our relation with Time and Experience.

6. C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture,

Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

7. J. Zerzan, Origins: a John Zerzan reader, Bepress

Edizioni, Lecce, 2010.

4. C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture, Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

8. Arhizoom Associati & A. Branzi, No stop city, HYX Editions, 2006.

Retrospective: Archizoom and No Stop City.

Retrospective: Archizoom and No Stop City.

Today an alternative axis has departed from “radical” architects that use information to create their models, believing that their products can become a means for a deeper cultural understanding of critical relationships across perceptual structures and deeper conceptual structures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arhizoom Associati & A. Branzi, No stop city, HYX Editions, 2006.

C. Jencks, The story of post-modernism, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, West Sussex, 2011.

C. Jencks & G. Baird, Meaning in architecture, Design Yearbook Limited, London, 1969.

P. Mazzoleni, Abitare nella società dell’informazione, Libreria Clup, Milano, 1974.

V. J. Nurcombe, Information sources in architecture and construction, Bowker Saur, London, 1996.

E. Panofsky, Meanings in the visual arts. Papers in and on art history, 1955.

A. Sprecher & P. Lorenzo-Eiroa, Architecture in formation: on the nature of information of digital architecture, Routledge, London, 2013.

R. Venturi, Complexity and contradiction in architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

J. Zerzan, Origins: a John Zerzan reader, Bepress Edizioni, Lecce, 2010.

SUPERSTUDIO

Eicundaio, Rio de la Plata 2050: de-layering of spatial information.