Towards a New Architecture
Towards a New Architecture
‘Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome...it is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion’ Giles Deleuze.
1. Introduction
We may have to wait for the “end of history”. Francis Fukiyama (1992) originally made claims of political and cultural stability in an essay of the late 1980s, perhaps the high noon of the Postmodern era. If his historical predictions seem premature a generation later, then by some consensus it is Postmodernism that has met its demise. In the search for a phrase to capture the successive state of our cultural condition a new contender was put forward in 2010 by Dutch academics Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010) ‘what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new cultural dominant – metamodernism’.
Architects and artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These artistic expressions move beyond the worn out sensibilities and empty practices of the postmodernists not by radically parting with their attitudes and techniques but by incorporating and redirecting them. In politics as in culture as elsewhere, a sensibility is emerging from and surpassing of postmodernism; as a non-dialectical Aufhebung1 that negates the postmodern while retaining some of its traits.
In support of the metamodern this thesis will put forward an argument that a new sensibility is
1Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing. Translations from the German include "to lift up", "to abolish", or "to sublate”. The term has also been defined as "abolish," "preserve," and "transcend." In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel to explain what happens when a thesis and antithesis interact, particularly via the term "sublate." emerging in two new and distinct areas which can be interpreted as a rhizomatic
‘Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome...it is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion’ Giles Deleuze.
1. Introduction
We may have to wait for the “end of history”. Francis Fukiyama (1992) originally made claims of political and cultural stability in an essay of the late 1980s, perhaps the high noon of the Postmodern era. If his historical predictions seem premature a generation later, then by some consensus it is Postmodernism that has met its demise. In the search for a phrase to capture the successive state of our cultural condition a new contender was put forward in 2010 by Dutch academics Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010) ‘what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new cultural dominant – metamodernism’.
Architects and artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These artistic expressions move beyond the worn out sensibilities and empty practices of the postmodernists not by radically parting with their attitudes and techniques but by incorporating and redirecting them. In politics as in culture as elsewhere, a sensibility is emerging from and surpassing of postmodernism; as a non-dialectical Aufhebung1 that negates the postmodern while retaining some of its traits.
In support of the metamodern this thesis will put forward an argument that a new sensibility is
1Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing. Translations from the German include "to lift up", "to abolish", or "to sublate”. The term has also been defined as "abolish," "preserve," and "transcend." In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel to explain what happens when a thesis and antithesis interact, particularly via the term "sublate." emerging in two new and distinct areas which can be interpreted as a rhizomatic