86 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy
in what responds within space and what is responsive within architecture; but I am
also interested in the background static components as well, that is, the things that
form part of the city, the permanent structure and so on. So I have a slightly more
dif ferentiated kind of understanding of these kinds of components and how they
operate in time.
I would also like to add that a key point in my history is Hegel. In 1807, Hegel wrote
the Philosophy of Nature and in 1817 he wrote the Aesthetics. He wrote the Aesthet-
ics using the language that he acquired in the Philosophy of Nature, so that he takes
natural processes and dumps them into aesthetics, and that is a key point in this kind
of suffusion. Another episode, and there have been lots of episodes, Moyen Age, the
New Vision, the Bauhaus, do exactly the same kind of thing: they take the architectural
process and describe it, re-describe it as a natural process. And I think that the confu-
sion between nature and culture, what is natural and what is cultural – the two things
are indistinguishable today – has a long history, because we have described buildings
in slightly different ways. Josef Rickford, in fact, says that you can describe a building
“as a logic of parts and as a system of elements”, and what interests me is how you can
integrate those two orders within a single entity.
Paul Coates, London, United Kingdom
You know, it says here “Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances
in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy”. I think that I have sat in on many discussions
about Deleuze, Guattari and most of the French philosophers of the 20th century, and
they have always been very interesting, and I keep on trying to find out whether or not
I understand this stuff, given that I have been plodding away for the last forty years
in an attempt to do something that other people tell me in fact derives from de Saus-
sure, Derrida and other post-structuralists. But I have never understood that, so the
only thing I can say is that I think that it would be really great if we could somehow
tie together the things that we can now think, the new epistemologies we have, just
because we have got the hardware and the software. One thing did occur to me a couple
of weeks ago at a seminar, where as usual the participants were divided – there were
people at the back shouting about French philosophy and other such things and there
were just a few of us sitting around the other side trying to work out if one could say
anything without looking completely stupid – and that is that one of the things you can
say about Deleuze, what he is all about perhaps, is that he is talking about distributive
representation: that the idea of the thing, like the neuro-natural cellular automaton
or any of the kind of technologies that we can now play with and show our students and
use, no longer resides in any one place but is held everywhere. I think that it would be
really great if we could make this link between what after all has been something that
people have been talking about in schools of architecture for a very long time. It has
been rehearsed quite often, of course, but this seems to be a likely time to have a go
at seeing whether we can have another think about this, looking at it from the point of
view of the new paradigms, the new epistemologies that come out of the fact the you
can teach the machine these kinds of ideas and what should happen and make experi-
ments about distributive representations and what the implications are for the space
and the form and for everything.