When architects steal terms like Post Modernism or Deconstruction from the, shrouded in bullshit, fringes of philosophy called ‘literary criticism’ and the like, what they really mean is: ‘new buildings with decoration’ or ‘buildings that look like they are falling apart’, respectively.
That does not mean that the buildings aren’t beautiful – just that the justification is pointless and the understanding of other people’s field’s limited. Because of the nature of the scale and function of architecture, architects can pretend to be scientists when they are poor craftsmen and artists when they are bad engineers.
Seed magazine has a new piece on innovations in architecture – its true that composite materials, intelligent skins and energy efficiency concerns have created a scientific edge in some styles, but the combination of the fact that you can pretty much build anything these days with the counter swing against minimalism means that by and large architecture is more art than a science then ever.
The bottom line is that there is something deeply geeky and philistine about needing to find gadgetry in architecture for it to be innovative.
In fact practitioners of the baroque decorative style were more likely to be scientists, such as Guarini who was a mathematician and geometer.
If artists misunderstand science sometimes, then equally scientists misunderstand artists. Here is Seed getting taken in by architects who appropriate scientific jargon, when they never would be hoodwinked like this by research scientists:
“This recent project in Wolfsburg, Germany, from Zaha Hadid’s London office, is essentially a study in the displacing of the horizon… the nested lines of diverging parallels; and the exhibition spaces, whose traditional homogeneity is refigured as a quasi-random scattering of particles, like billiard balls on a crooked table. Quantum indeterminacy and undecideability reign.”
This is pure metaphor, yet the Wolfsburg project has been described as using ‘fractal geometry’ as if that is true or even innovative. Fractal geometry in the way that it exists in Hadid’s buildings has been used by architects for thousands of years.