Debate on the papers of Session 2 457
studies group to look at this question. I just think that one has to be open-minded
about these things – critical, but open-minded to possibilities – because I think that
architectural culture can be very conservative sometimes, and I think that education
establishments can be very conservative. And I think that what is pushing things
ahead right now are people like KPF, where Neri was working, or indeed SON, where
Tobias Finn works. They are the ones that are pushing things forward, and recognis-
ing that is a vital part of what we should be doing. And if we want to make students
employable right now we should be teaching them scripting, we should be teaching
them KATIA, we should be teaching them generative components, and so on.
Then in terms of the issue of a paradigm shift, actually I am not that keen, I am
somewhat nervous, about using this term. I think that in the end it is more to do
with what Foucault would call a kind of epistemia, a kind of savoir body of knowledge,
how you look at the same things in a different way. In other words, a paradigm shift
could be the result of how, having followed a kind of Newtonian model of physics, you
shift to an Einsteinian model, where if you reconfigure things in the same way it does
not just have to do with a different set of preoccupations. I am not so sure I would
use the term paradigm shift myself, but for sure there are things that are changing.
I think that mutation is fundamental to human operations, which is why I would like
to use the term mutants to describe the kids today, the students we are teaching. So
there is a change for sure, but I am not sure it is a paradigm shift, as such.
Saeed Arida, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Thank you. Neil, I really liked that experimental spirit you showed in the project. I just
have one question about you being a famous theoretician and educator and curator,
and I think you play a very important role in presenting a coherent picture of what this
shift is, whatever one chooses to call it. I think that what one thinks of as progressive
plays a really important role in how one collects this data, this material. So, my question
is: how do you define what is progressive? Because what struck me at the end of your
speech was what you said about Columbia and Mark Whitley, that it is not progressive.
For me it is more progressive than what some other people are doing, because at least
he is trying to take the school away from ten years of, for me, meaningless digital stuff,
because I think that they do not really understand what digital technology is. And what
struck me also is that even the AI people are now kind of clueless about the computer
and what it does, and they are kind of stuck at a wall that they cannot get past. Even
Chomsky, or Marvin Minsky, who has this new book called The Emotion Machine and tries
to go beyond the numbers and the Turing machine. Mark Wigley, on the other hand, is
trying to establish this C-lab or something in collaboration with Volume Magazine and
AMO and such, trying to engage again with culture and stuff and to move beyond the
numbers. So I am really curious to know how you define progressive.
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
That is a really good point. I mean, to be honest, you cannot just flick through
a catalogue and look at forms and make a judgement on that, because, actually,
what I am talking about is precisely getting beyond forms themselves. I also think
that there is actually something very conservative about the way a lot of people
use computation methodology. I mean, just scripting when you are using no kind