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Founding member of Anamorphosis Architects, Nikos Georgiadis, guest edited the March issue 1998 of the Architectural Design magazine, called Tracing Architecture.
by Nikos Georgiadis, AD March 98  |
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'Tracing architecture' is a theoretical proposal but also a design tool. It focuses on trace as a dialectical process, as opposed to trace as a metaphor for leftoverness, dismantling or dispersion. 'Unsculpting' architecture, or 'the extended site of architecture' are concepts which also drive the work of this issue in the same direction. The debate this issue hosts aims to constitute a response to the way the emerging condition of objective realism in the visual arts is often casually imported into the field of architecture. Even the idea of the 'complexity' (or ontology) of the object seems to relate architecture as subservient to the visual arts and to the latest objective or counterobjective idealism; whereas at the same time it postpones the encounter of visual arts with the actual dialectics of space. Such trends grow by virtue of the eclectic and positivist use of psychoanalytic concepts in the context of their straightforward visual application in art and architecture, which celebrate the idea that the Freudian symptom (whether termed 'object', 'real', or 'uncanny') can be inserted as 'disturbance critique' in the course of its mere visual appearance. Deleuze and Guattari's counteroedipal 'fold' philosophy, Derrida's 'trace', and certain misreadings of Adorno's critique of Heidegger, seem to hint towards that direction, which seems to produce and actually needs a 'new' morphological style: that of spatial poverty. Architecture thus becomes an area of bizarre application of naive and crude anti-architectural metaphors from which designers are meant to take their references and inspiration. Ruins, remnants, dilapidated and abandoned spaces become metaphors for design, in a celebration of dysfunctional and unusable spaces... By criticising this trend, 'Tracing Architecture' could be also regarded as a response to certain points developed by such theorists as R.Krauss, A.Vidler, H.Foster, A.Benjamin and others, while at the same time points at a spatial aesthetics tottaly different from those of B.Tschumi, D.Libeskind, R.Koolhaas and F.Gehry. 'Tracing Architecture' means to trace architecture as the missing paradigm of unsymbolic/unvisual conditioning; and that is a paradigm which this work aims to discover in a series of fields not necessarily architectural, such as visual arts, archaeology, psychoanalysis, communication, political theory, philosophy, humanities. 'Tracing Architecture' also means conceptualising architecture as a tracing process; to de-metaphorise trace and engineer it as a proper realising design method that has the ability to engage with form at an uncompromising operational state of plenitude. The conceptual framework of this issue is formed around a spatial reading of Lacanian theory of psychoanalysis, as elaborated by the editor (crossing through problematics such as feminine sexuality, psychosis, countertransference). The issue includes texts by Nec Teymur, Phil.Oreopoulos, Richard Sennett, Andrew Samuels, Andreas Empirikos, Pavel Büchler, J.F.Lyotard, Doreen Massey, Roger Connah, Mark Durden, Nikos Georgiadis. It also presents the architectural work of F.Roche, I.Ritchie, J.Bielski, Livady architects, Patkau architects, Antithesis Architecture, Clare Design, Jones Partners, Torres/Lapena, Anamorphosis architects.~ CLICK HERE to go to back the anamorphosis´ start page |