Theory’s Hardware Julián Varas

Degree six, plan of maximum symmetry. Six axis of symmetry organize the elements of the main plan of the Villa Stein, by Le Corbusier. Each element has originally a different degree of symmetry (from zero to six mirror conditions). A process of linear symmetrization transforms the asymmetrical into multisymmetrical, and the single into the serially singular. Le Corbusier, Villa Stein. Garches, France, 1927. Drawing by Anna Font

For the science fiction enthusiast, the arc spanning from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to Denis Villeneuve’s recent Arrival (2016, based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 Story of your Life) is a clear sign of how blockbusters have contributed to upgrading the figure of the alien—and, stealthily, our own. Turning human/alien communication into a serious speculation, sci-fi no longer portrays aliens as a bunch of monstrous figures intent on subjugating or feeding on anthropos—at least not always. The narratives developed in recent films introduce an alternative figure: a non-divine, intelligent other whose mere existence seems to assert the plurality and decenteredness of consciousness, language, and culture. No longer couched as evil creatures seeking to overpower us, the notion of the communicative alien suggests a renewed philosophical realism lying at its base.

The de-centering of the notion of the human wrought by science fiction is, in fact, as old as the genre. Yet, its philosophical implications only began to surface during the second half of the 20th century. The problem, as stated recently by realist philosophers such as Manuel De Landa and Graham Harman, boils down to this: human thinking has for too long been concerned with humanity and the mind-world relation as its main preoccupation and source of legitimacy. De Landa had advanced an audacious proposition to counter this trend in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991). During the early days of the digital revolution, he had conjectured the development of the machinic phylum reaching the point where a synthetic consciousness would emerge. Not far into the future, our still fairly dumb robots could acquire an autonomy that would enable them to ponder about their existence, origins, and history. As De Landa’s parable goes, a robot-historian might have come to see itself as representing the endgame of the evolution of intelligence, not anthropos, its alleged creator. The robot might legitimately see human agency as a necessary instrument toward the emergence of synthetic intelligence—a kind of midwife that helped catalyze a more advanced species within the machinic phylum.

But how can De Landa’s robot-historian and science fiction’s recasting of the alien figure be relevant to a text on architectural theory? As proven by David Salomon’s Symmetry, The One and the Many, symmetry is one of those concepts through which we have insistently attempted to outline the boundaries of our identity as a culture and species, while simultaneously appropriating its ability to bridge cultures and lines of speciation. Despite its elusiveness, symmetry appears both inherent to a variety of architectural traditions and capable of connecting them with machinic and alien ontologies. Symmetry restores architecture to a networked conception of the material world. The fact that (we) humans produce (our own) architecture as an interface for the construction of the social world, accounts for just one region of such web—and not necessarily the most significant one. The remaining relations encompass organizations studied by the natural sciences. Thus, even though science and architecture belong within culture, symmetry breaks through the boundaries of culture pointing toward realities that transcend it.

These are the underlying premises for the ideas that David Salomon put forward at a seminar held at the Maestría en Historia y Cultura de la Arquitectura y la Ciudad de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in 2015. The development of those hypotheses has led to a tightly packed essay, in which architecture explodes into a matrix of knowledge and practices that reaches far beyond its established field of endeavor. The text drives us along the connections that root architecture within the broad purview of science, mathematics and communication. Symmetry unlocks those connections, serving at once to knit a sweeping historical narrative and to open up a field of potential for the conceptualization of contemporary design praxis. On first reading, the text appears as an essay on the history of an idea, which sprawls out into different areas of culture. Agile and concise, Salomon makes evident the resilience of symmetry in its recurrence across distant chapters in the history of architecture, even when—as in functionalist ideology—it had been discursively banished from the scene. Symmetry resonates in the broad space between architecture, society, mind, and crystals. The text indexes the migration of symmetry from architecture into mathematics, where it was redefined. From a feature of stable organizations, it was conceptualized as a process of transformation that maintains stability—a shift that was pivotal in bringing the contemporary disciplinary discourses on the generic and the parametric to fruition.

However, the networks of relations that symmetry constructs throughout the book are not just rhetorical. One should avoid seeing the book as an attempt to culturalize architecture, hoping to instill new relevance into it. Salomon’s project would be misunderstood if reduced to the history of an idea. Nor is it hinting at the dissolution of architecture into a vague magma of interdisciplinarity. The parallel with science fiction and realist philosophy reveals that what Salomon is after is nothing less than an ontology of architecture. In such ordering, the human is just one idea in a network of interrelated objects, with no center to create a transcendental hierarchy that binds them. The continuities drawn up by the text are therefore more productively read as a naturalistic map of the unified configuration of the natural, social, and cultural organizations in which anthropos is involved.

Even if we accept the premise that the conditions of our contact with reality (architecture) are hardwired onto the circuitry that structures our interests and sensing capacities, our conception of architecture need not be confined within those boundaries. Any sophisticated realist worldview must be able to separate what is from what can be known, and therefore concede that architecture exists prior to culture—i.e., that it is the condition of possibility of culture, its infrastructure. Symmetry is a foundational brick of that infrastructure. The tree that complexity builds is partially based on the possibilities afforded by symmetrical transformations. It gives rise to all the forms of nature, including all life forms, especially those that develop self-awareness, language, tool making, and radically artificial environments. David Salomon’s text is part of a project to illuminate how those relations escalate, cutting through eons of evolutionary development. It seeks to turn architectural theory again into a grand narrative—a new account of the cosmic, this time without irony or finalism.

1 In the 19th century, science fiction became a privileged experimental genre for the expansion of the conception of the human. Alongside Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Marx’s Historical Materialism, science fiction began to hint at the crisis of the modern subject and its pretense to liberty, integrity and sense of finality. 2 De Landa picks up the notion of the machinic phylum from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and elaborates an extensive and systematic theorization thereof. The machinic phylum refers to a flow of matter that cuts across conventionally established divides such as culturenature or organic-technological. “The idea of a ‘machinic phylum’ would then be that, beyond biological lineages, we are also related to non-living creatures (winds and flames, lava and rocks) through common ‘body-plans’ involving similar self-organizing and combinatorial processes. As if one and the same material ‘phylum’ could be ‘folded and stretched’ to yield all the different structures that inhabit our universe.” See: Manuel De Landa, “The Machinic Phylum,” in Joke Brouwer et al. (eds.) Technomorphica (Amsterdam: De Balie, 1997).

Degrees one, two, three, four, and five, plans of progressive symmetrization. Six axis of symmetry organize the elements of the main plan of the Villa Stein, by Le Corbusier. Each element has originally a different degree of symmetry (from zero to six mirror conditions). A process of linear symmetrization transforms the asymmetrical into multisymmetrical, and the single into the serially singular. Le Corbusier, Villa Stein. Garches, France, 1927. Drawing by Anna Font