Conference Keynoters
ON ARCHITECTURE 2017
#Conference 7-8 December 2017
From Macro to Micro: Exploring Design Ethics as an Intra-scale Epistemic Condition
In a well-known book describing contemporary interest for computational simulation and topological conception, Bernard Cache’s Earth Moves: The furnishing of territories, landscape perception is associated to furniture design; an extended field feeling is correlated to an object oriented approach.
In fact, folding forms, made simple to be represented through computer technology, may equally be applied in every scale of our compositional and constructive approaches; in urban, architectural, landscape and furniture design as well. We could thus refer to an extended ‘epistemic’ condition, in Michel Foucault’s terminology, associating contemporary scientific attitudes to design challenges. Moreover we could even refer to ‘epistemological ruptures’, in Gaston Bachelard’s terms, correlated to social mentality in a quasi-psychoanalytic way, or to ‘epistemological breaks’ as described in Louis Althusser’s theoretical approach; while having in mind that expressive interest for trans-formality, for change of forms or morphogeneses, may be compared to our generalized feeling for social informality and instability.
Clearly enough, the above contemporary epistemic attitude could be described as the maturation of cultural tendencies, initiated in early 19th century and already expressed by neoteric intellectuals of the first modernist era, in philosophy of history, political theory, natural sciences and artistic expression as well. However, it is only recently that this orientation of design ethics has attained its fully developed expression, being the result, as previously stated, of the reciprocal influence of generalized cultural and political tendencies, in association to advanced computational simulation.