Engineering Architecture and Dostoyevsky
Architecture is seeming more and more frivolous with the development of AI and parametrics, appealing to engineering and the science of predictability. Striving for the most desired outcome with a specific number of inputs is important, but using AI software to formalize these specific and desired outcomes as a universal solution does not disintegrate the purpose of architecture. It is not so simple as to call it an art either. The debate between ardent supporters and fear ridden deniers of AI architecture brings into focus the lessons of existentialism which are beginning to dissolve. Calling AI and data-driven architecture an existential crisis has an ironic truth, only if the meaning of the slogan had a genuine structure.
The contemporary teacher of a future architect provides a sense of impotence in students who might think they are not enough to stay relevant amongst this machine of architecture: software which responds, in approximate perfection, to a plethora of environmental inputs within a given context to provide the most comfortable, sustainable, and cost-efficient solution. Done! We have solved the question of our socio-political existence haven’t we? What is the use of the students?
What follows is a cloud of despair over a profession unable to posit itself in the political environment which calls upon it to solve the housing crisis, the heating world, and our interconnected loneliness. When architecture fails to do this, it becomes the fault of architects and designers. The building, though, is simply a signifier of the sum of institutional decisions which allowed for its existence via the architect. The excess of responsibility and lack of agency places intense despair in the well-to-do architect. This, in addition to artificially intelligent technologies, places the architect in the position of Dostoyevsky's piano key.
The plane in which the architect works needs to be justified and publicly known for faith in the profession to persevere. Well let us ask, what does the architect do? It’s something most of the public has little to no idea of. Is it drawing, or managing, or political justice? In some ways no but in some ways everything. Architecture is the signifier of society which alludes to interconnectedness, cooperation, values, etc. It is the frame in which we draw our existence, what directs our walk to work, or holds memories. Architecture lends us the means to live and its broadness makes its existence less touchable and direct. A lesson existentialism has taught us about life is it is one of desire and not simply reason or data. We may desire for reason but “desire, on the other hand, is the manifestation of life itself” and not just reason as a law of nature. Reason and data fall under the umbrella of desire since all things reasonable are desirable but not everything desirable is reasonable; “it encompasses everything from reason to scratching oneself” (Pg. 106). If architects design for the means of life, we design for desire. Therefore, if AI and Sustainability parametrics conclude architecture as “explained and worked out on paper, then certainly so-called desires will no longer exist” (Pg. 104). The web and contradictions of human desire here become infringed, and when one’s desire is restricted, “what he wants to preserve is precisely his noxious fancies and vulgar trivialities, if only to assure himself that men are still men and not piano keys” (Pg. 108).
The architecture of Dostoevsky’s existentialism is not a universal solution carried out by a series of specific needs but an intuition of human desire for closeness, love, comfort, memory, all of which could be predicted but would immediately be met by human wickedness in return. An architecture of wickedness within reason perhaps. One which the architect sees universals, data, and law as a play-thing in which they can slip through the cracks to contradict or critique it. But the critique is not just a reaction but an action of wickedness and desire that fulfills the web of needs and freedom which an individual requires to posit itself as a particular expression of universal, data driven values. This prevents the architecture from becoming arbitrary and reactionary in its freedom.
Here, the public can understand the architect's point of view: a professional within the field of institutional dogma and political distance who sits as a voice of public wickedness in the built environment. Someone who is pushing boundaries and subverting expectations set upon them such as AI and sustainability as if they are not the only vital inputs.
Bibliography:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground, White Nights, the Dream of a White Nights and Selections from the House of the Dead. 1961.
