One of the complexities of modernity is that it can equally be characterised as overly arbitrary, relativistic and subjective and as being dominated by an objectivity that can exclude the individual. Somehow we have managed to construct a world in which we are often neither properly free as individuals nor part of a cohesive community. This excess of both subjectivity and objectivity can though be seen as related. For instance, Vesely argues, in relation to architecture, that modern technology and aesthetics are not opposites but imply each other (Vesely, 2004) while MacIntyre argues that modernity's emotivism is a result of the enlightenment attempt to rationally justify morality (MacIntyre, 1985).
In modernity we are free to make our own choices and are responsible for what we choose. We cannot rely on some other authority without ourselves choosing to do so and so the responsibility always lies with us (see for instance Sartre, 1948, p. 36-8; Tillich, 1956, p. 86). Traditions and conventions that have framed actions in the past must now themselves be chosen in order to have relevance while such first principles as are not themselves contestable are insufficient to determine complex actions. This situation is particularly evident in designing architecture where such principles as there are (say, the conditions of the site and the brief), while important for evaluating the project, are not sufficient in themselves to determine a solution: the project must therefore be designed! This freedom can be regarded either as a wonderful opportunity or a paralysing responsibility or indeed as both.
Prompted by this starting point I have firstly been interested in how designers deal with these situations which have no logical solution: those questions which are either so under-constrained that it does not matter how they are resolved or so over-constrained that there is no way to resolve them satisfactorily. Designers in fact have a sophisticated methodology for dealing with this sort of situation: drawing. The activity of drawing has a circular structure (Glanville, 2007a, 2007b; Gedenryd, 1998) which combines proposing and evaluating together allowing the designer to proceed even in situations in which it is not clear how to progress.
Secondly I have been interested in the more explicitly ethical questions which follow from this, particularly with respect to architecture. Because architecture impacts on so many people it at first seems especially problematic that a design cannot completely be justified in rational terms. The sort of ethics of personal responsibility advocated by von Foerster - where I concern myself specifically with what I should do rather than with what you should do (von Foerster, 1995) – is particularly hard to maintain in architecture where intervening in other people’s lives is rather the point. But conversely the activity of designing is well adapted to proceeding in such situations offering mechanisms for participation (which is heightened in the case of participatory design but always present to some degree) and sometimes interaction. Both participation and interaction can be thought of as forms of conversation and this analogy links them back to the circularity of designing and drawing mentioned above (my allotment calendar and toast rack projects can be seen in these terms). Design therefore can perhaps offers us more general guidance in terms of the ethical dilemma of acting for others.
A further difficulty that follows from the relativism of modernity is that of architecture’s communicative and representational role (see for instance Vesely, 2004). Part of architecture’s traditional role was to set the activities that it contained within a larger context. This is presently extremely difficult because of firstly the dissipation of architecture’s traditional representational language and secondly the lack of any common agreement in modernity over what indeed architecture should represent. Vesely proposes the reconnection of architecture with the natural conditions (cosmology) in the sense of our spatial embodiment and for an articulation of the latent qualities of typical everyday situations (Vesely, 2010). I am also interested in how architecture might communicate the limitations of rationality noted above, which I regard as one of the primary characteristics of our modern situation. Whereas initially many of my projects proposed mechanical components in order to operate in particular ways, in projects such as those at St. Alphage Gardens I now see mechanisms in terms of their communicative potential as an analogy of causal reasoning and its limits.
REFERENCES
Foerster, Heinz von (1995) ‘Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics’ in SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind
Gedenryd, Henrik (1998) How Designers Work, Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities , Lund University Cognitive Studies [No.] 75, Lund, Sweden: Lund University
Glanville, Ranulph (2007a) ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better: the cybernetics in design and the design in cybernetics’ in Kybernetes, vol. 36, no. 9/10, pp. 1173-1206
Glanville, Ranulph (2007b) ‘Designing Complexity’ in Performance Improvement Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 75-96
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1985) After Virtue, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth)
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948) Existentialism and Humanism, trans. P. Mairet, London: Methuen
Tillich, Paul (1956) The New Being (London: SCM)
Vesely, Dalibor (2004) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: the question of creativity in the shadow of production, Cambridge, Massachussets and London: MIT
Vesely, Dalibor (2010) ‘The Latent Ground of the Natural World: Introduction to the communicative role of architecture’ paper presented at The Communicative Role of Architecture, 21-22 June 2010, Leicester School of Architecture, De Montfort University, available at http://www.dmu.ac.uk/Images/Dalibor%20Vesely%20Latent%20Ground%20final%20version_tcm6-62553.doc (accessed 5/07/2010)
