Architectonics as the Maintenance of Compatibility

This chapter introduces Michel Serres's philosophy of natural communication and seeks to initiate translations of it to the field of architectural theory, where there is, currently, a rising interest in a materiality that incorporates code and a formality that is computational. I am grateful to the architectural studio Pa.LaC.E (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds, palacepalace.com) for contributing images from their Paris Hermitage (2015) project. Paris Hermitage is ‘a place to know yourself by knowing all: omnia disce’, they say, and they think of their project as the design of ‘a place for elective counteraction to the reshaping of living practices (social/familial/working) by the extreme conceptual abstractions made possible by our raw power of technology’.

Serres's philosophy is animated by a particular maxim: It is the demand that philosophy must be capable of factoring in state-of-theart science and mathematics, as a real and factual, material as well as formal puissance with which it must come to terms. As Serres puts it: ‘If philosophy doesn't have to dominate science or become its slave or handmaiden, it must at least maintain compatibility with it.’ It is this same maxim that I want to raise for architecture as well: If architecture doesn't have to dominate science or become its slave or handmaiden, it must at least maintain compatibility with it. Maintaining compatibility with science means nothing less than distinguishing architecture (philosophy) from any form of dogma, as well as from the blind reflexes that pertain to ideology and the forms of corruption that are triggered wherever dogma and ideology are applied as ‘immediate’ or ‘intuitive’ and ‘real’ evidence, and feature in that sense as the representations of ‘objective knowledge’ in political opportunism, economic irresponsibility or religious fundamentalism.

Raising this maxim with Serres for philosophy, or as I suggest here for architecture, is not a call to moralism. At the core of such corruption, Serres's philosophy points out, there is no malign principle or personal ill intention to be found, no corrupt ‘objectivity’ or ‘subjectivity’ that could be ‘accused’ and ‘corrected’. Rather, we find in Serres's philosophy a particular state of confusion responsible for this (our contemporary) situation, which contemporary philosophy does not know yet how to address.