One of the main properties of substance as a category of new architectural thinking is its formlessness. Substance has no form, at least not external. The external form of a substance is the texture of its surface, that is, in a sense, the same substance that has become a surface, a two-dimensional variety.
For architecture, in its current paradigm, formlessness seems to be something completely unacceptable.
While a closer look at the recent history of theoretical preference may reveal that the acceptance of space as a central category is itself equally not form-oriented, hence the new category of "organization" seeping into architectural thinking. The concept of organization in architecture has passed, perhaps, from the bureaucratic vocabulary, for this is the proper name of bureaucratic institutions. And the bureaucracy is interesting because, being completely formless as a whole, it is thoroughly formalistic and everything is based on manipulation of forms and formalities. On the other hand, something biological is also heard in the concept of "organization" - namely, "organism" as a concept that determines its meaning not by its appearance, but by the systemic nature of internal organs. In this context, the category of organization leads us to rational organization and to intelligence, that is, functionalism - which also corresponds to the general principles of bureaucracy.
But in fact, space in architecture won not so much because of its orientation towards rationalism and intelligence, but because of its free scale and closeness to the plastic play of volumes. This outwardly space is no longer so much a material, as Ladovsky believed, as a three-dimensional background of plastic. As for how the space is organized in the form of forms, we find ourselves in the area of the interior, and it is in the interior that the play with space in recent decades looks rather timid - this is a mixture of the simplest theatricalization and decorativeness. Of course, the orientation towards space, in line with which the last century gave birth to outstanding architects. And the charm of genius invisibly sanctified the theoretical postulates of the spatial approach.
Attempts to strengthen the category of space as a reliable foundation - neither topology, nor proxemics and geography, having taken a number of important steps that illuminated the inner nature of space, have not come to the final goal.
Space remained an important but far from fully understood category of architectural thinking.
It is this, in my opinion, that became the incentive for the complication of the initial paradigm and the introduction into the theory of architecture of the fourth dimension - time. Esoteric teachings also played a role here, and the experience of the theory of relativity became something of an authoritative support for this shift, and it was accepted without much thought. But now several decades have passed and the call for the temporalization of the architectural space remains, in fact, a call.
I do not want to give the impression of an outsider and independent observer of this story. It is possible that my participation in it was not significant, but in any case I participated in it as best I could. In the late 70s, moving away from the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMK), led by G. P. Shchedrovitsky, I plunged headlong into the architectural space. In part, the departure from the methodology was a consequence of my analysis of "design without prototypes", which ran into problems that not only did not have ready-made solutions at that time, but also did not promise such in the foreseeable future. G. P. himselfAt the same time, Shchedrovitsky made a sharp turn from theoretical methodology to game methodology, which seemed to me a fun, but equally hopeless exercise.
At the end of the 70s, I prepared a small book published at the Central Scientific and Technical Institute, dedicated to the problems of architectural space. At about the same time, I published a problematic article "Intersubject Space" in "Soviet Art History-82". At the same time, I wrote a rather large work "The Poetics of Architectural Space", which did not appear, but was published on my blog. Here the very word "poetics" speaks of an attempt to supplement spatial ideology in architecture with a kind of formal apparatus, since poetics is a teaching about artistic forms.
The end of the 1980s was marked by a general enthusiasm for the “environmental” approach, in which the spatial pathos became somewhat diminished, although by inertia it remained in the term “subject-spatial environment”. I participated in it rather as a benevolent skeptic, suspecting that the promised turn to ecology for architecture would turn out to be another utopia, since it does not provide real means for either design or research, limiting myself to multiplying facts that testify in favor of an understandable problem without them.
Finally, in 1990, in the first part of the book "Form in Architecture" (Methodological Problems), I make an attempt at theoretical generalization, resorting to an epistemological strategy, that is, relying not on the ontology of the subject, but on the language of its description. The term "methodological" did not mean a return to methodology; rather, it demonstrated that this approach leads to a dead end, since the synthesis of a variety of subject descriptions cannot be resolved by any of the known methods, including with the help of "methodological organization."
At the very end of the 1980s, I tried to propose a new type of architectural school, since I already understood that the solution to problems lies not so much in theory and not so much in the "organization" of space as in the organization of professional thinking. These attempts did not find support and I took time out and switched to journalism and painting, which is nevertheless closer to implementation than architecture. As a result, the book "99 letters about painting" was published (written in 1999-2001, published by the UFO publishing house in 2004). As I now understand, it was in her that I managed to finally get away from space, taking advantage of the fact that in painting the first violin is still played by color, coloring, which became for me - then unconsciously - the prototype of a new category - substance.
Starting from the first years of the XXI century, I return to theoretical work at NIITIAG under the sign of a new search for a fundamentally new paradigm. It was preceded by an excursion into the architectural thought of the 19th century, which even today seems to me to be a completely unsolved problem, from which symbolism and avant-garde, and functionalism and modernism grew - which so effectively completed their good hopes by the middle of the 20th century, paving the way for a new eclecticism of postmodern critical deconstruction of utopian thinking itself.
For several years I, with the light hand of S. O. Khan-Magomedov, tried to systematically describe the misadventures of the theory of architecture of the 1960s – 2000s. The case moved slowly, and along the way, I began to rather actively engage in ongoing criticism in the Architect magazine of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where I was heading the Independent Judgment. This independence was largely determined by the fact that by that time I had lost my once keen interest in conceptualism and the lines of the artistic avant-garde that were synchronous to it. In the middle of the decade, I saw a case of a rather serious return to MMK, in the book "The Square of the Circle", written by 2011 and still unpublished.
Of course, all these areas and areas of my interests and the corresponding changes in my style of thinking require careful research and criticism, for which the time has not yet come, but in this short autobiographical account, I believe I was able to name at least the main intentions that eventually came true. in the works of 2011–2013 and this year, where I first analyzed the category Style and Environment under the sign of the category of meaning as replacing the category of form and the category of temporality as the key to understanding meaning.
Temporality or time in these reflections went far beyond the framework of historical time and began to penetrate into the processes of perception and understanding, arousing interest in the category of memory. From the category of memory, I naturally moved on to the Platonic anamnesis and to the hierarchy of scales, remembering from instant recollection and oblivion of impressions and experiences and to eternity as a transcendence of the very idea of memory.
Returning from these extensions of temporality to the architecture of our day, I came to disappointing conclusions about the dying of architecture and the complete victory of design thinking, conventionally called "design", at the intersection of which some "architectural monsters" appeared to the world, coming mainly from the workshops of "starhitectors" and supporters of "parametric methodology".
These gloomy assessments forced me to more closely trace the fate of the theory of architecture itself from the beginning of the last century to our time, and I saw that remaining on the surface as a cascade of theoretical and design attractions, this theory was in fact steadily losing its subject matter, qualifications and professional intuition, repeating, often without any hope of understanding, fashionable philosophical and scientific ideas.
A more detailed textual analysis of this is still to be done, in particular, a careful re-reading of the works of professors Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS and the authors of the famous journal "Oppositions". But in order for such a re-reading again not to become a simple apologetics and propaganda of the ideas of the avant-garde, as it happened with the avant-garde of the 20s, and with the post-avant-garde of the 60s-70s, it is necessary to have some basis for criticism, and this is the basis can be neither an academic theory of architecture (in the spirit of Zholtovsky), nor all the same synopsis of the ideas of French structuralists and poststructuralists and German and French phenomenologists. For objective criticism, it is necessary to develop some, even hypothetical, theoretical and methodological, but independent basis. Only by relying on it, "criticism" and analysis of this theory will cease to be a simple retelling, quoting and abstracting.
Having understood this, I tried to put forward a certain skeleton of a new theoretical paradigm of architecture, which, in need of its own deployment, could serve as a basis for criticism and feed on its own results. As a central one, I put forward a triad of categories, symbolically opposed to the Vitruvian triad (benefit-strength-beauty) and the form-construction-image triad that replaced it in modernism (at least in the interpretation of A. Ikonnikov), where the latter usually coincided with the category of symbol and sign …
This hypothetical triad of mine looks like a trinity of three categories: norm, scale and substance. At the same time, this triad is addressed both to thinking and to ontology, which in recent years has become more and more of interest to theorists of architectural design (in our country, for example, the late M. R. Savchenko).
The category "norm" includes all normative structures of architecture - first of all, the type and typologies, the so-called "patterns", but also semiotics and symbolism, and, accordingly, all typical "forms" and compositional prototypes, including proportional prototypes of harmonic structures of relations of parameters. The category of scale includes both anthropomorphic structures and their changes habitual for the theory of architecture, and temporal scales, measured by the processes of functioning and forms, historical changes in norms and transcendental temporal categories, such as instant and eternity. Based on these categories, I then try to move to the categories of the ontological plan, among which the category of the "world" is central, and on the periphery the category of elements (elements) and the situation. There is no room here for a more detailed categorical-historical explication of these categories. But even a cursory glance at them cannot fail to catch their historical and ontological continuity with tradition.
The greatest difficulties and, accordingly, prospects are associated with the explication of the category of substance. This category is fundamentally not subject to the logic of metric schematization to which the analysis of forms is tied, and to the symbolic scale of states of perception and experience with which the category of the image is associated. So a huge number of rational concepts and categories of philosophy here remains a purely external contour of substantial analysis. The category of matter and substance * comes closest to it. But these categories in architectural studies have long since lost their own artistic meaning and entered the circle of technical epistemology.
In fact, the central traditional category for substance is the category of intuition, lost by the academic and avant-garde ideologies.
The category of intuition for many philosophical ideologies turned out to be overly subjective (romanticism) and not enough "ideal" or "formal", that is, too individual, falling out of the world of standard specifications. The only philosophical school in which this category continues to occupy an important place is the "philosophy of life" (Bergson, Spengler, Nietzsche), but these schools themselves in modern ideology, suppressed by positivism and Marxism, remain in the form left by their founders, and to this day so far not developed, although they to some extent go back to the universalism of Goethean thought.
The category of substance, however, philosophically retains traces of materialism, rejected by physicalism of energetic ontologies and energeticity of the Neoplatonic tradition. But nevertheless, the discrepancy between the category of substance and the category of form remains a stumbling block on the way of its fitting into the context of the theory of architecture. And this single stone turns out to be more difficult, whereas the aesthetics of the decorative use of minerals could enter the theory of architecture with less difficulty. No one denies her such an entry, but the essence of the matter is that it is the category of substance that allows us to hope for the synthesis of various ontological representations - not only the decorative properties of stone and wood, but also those material structures that underlie memory and comprehension - that is, structures for processing and storing information by the cells of the brain.
I have not the slightest desire to reduce the spiritual aspects of the substantial representation of architecture to processes in the DNA molecule, but not using them in the theory of architecture as an analogy or parallel would be just as unreasonable as neglecting the physical properties of a stone in the light of the aesthetic categories of heaviness and strength, using categories of substance.
I place special hopes on this category in order to "revitalize" architecture, which nowadays everywhere shows, if not signs of "dying", then the features of "mortification".
The latter for the survival of humanity, in my opinion, are as dangerous as dying and death. And disagreeing with pessimists who see in the near future (50-100 years) a global catastrophe of culture and humanity, I hope that architecture will become one of the most powerful means of comprehending and revitalizing human and social existence. One of the first steps towards such a new renaissance of architecture, I believe, is the transformation of its vocational education system and theory, in which the category of substance, not displacing, but complementing the categories of space and form, will become no less important and decisive.
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*Note
There is a possibility that the category of substance introduced in this way will be taken as a synonym for the category “content”. This danger of categorical confusion of substance with content is quite real. Then it turns out to be nonsense - for the category of content can neither be replaced nor "supplemented" with the category of form. However, in the theory of architecture, in contrast to logic, substance is neither content nor matter, although the categories of both content and matter can be attributed to it. It is simply in a different “aggregate” and, metaphorically speaking, state, and it is recognized not so much by its form (as a liquid or gas is also not perceived by us as forms), but by something like reverberation and resonance.
