Very Strange Mereology

Architecture as a continuously evolving organic body, growing and adapting under external forces - the prevailing paradigm for computation in the past two decades - is under pressure. This lecture will explore how that paradigm has undermined architecture’s autonomy, and has fundamentally always been in trouble with tectonics. Rather then borrowing models from nature; or moving into neo-phenomenology; I will argue for an architectural ontology based on sharpening the tension between architecture and its parts. Increased computational capabilities are able to push the modernist understanding of architecture as an assemblage of prefabricated, discrete elements into an unexpected new domain of previously unachievable detail, materiality, structure and aesthetics.