Architecture's expanded field: finding inspiration in jellyfish and geopolitics, architects today are working within radically new frames of reference

architecture, after several decades of self-imposed autonomy, has lately entered a greatly expanded field. Against neorationalism, unblemished language theory, and postmodern citation febrile affection architecture--like sculpture some decades earlier--has rest new formal and programmatic inspiration in a entertainer of disciplines and technologies from landscape design to digital animation. Where former theorists attempted to identify single and essential bases for architecture, now multiplicity and plurality are celebrated, as pours networks, and maps replace grids, configurations and history. Where arguments one time raged between Corbusian and Palladian sources, now Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze are studied for their anticipation of nonformal processe blebs swarms, crystals, and webs proliferate as paradigms of built form, while software has replaced traditional means of representation with dynamic event Nearly two and a half centuries after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing inaugurated the search for medium specificity in his Laocoon and more than fifty years after humane Greenberg articulated a self-reflexive definition of novel painting and sculpture, the boundary lines of architecture remain unresolved

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And still underlying the new architectural experimentation is a serious attempt to reconstrue the foundations of the discipline, not thus much in singular terms, on the contrary in broader concepts that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to overturn the problematic dualisms that have plagued architecture for above a century: form and function, historicism and abstraction, utopia and reality, mode of building and enclosure. Over the last decade, three novel unifying principles have emerged as the greatest in quantity dominant: ideas of landscape, biological analogies, and of recent origin concepts of "program," for lack of a better word. It is perhaps ironic that these fresh conceptual models are themselves deep embedded in the history of architectural modernism, and each has already been propos as a unifying general [i]or[/i] abstract notion at one time or another above the last two centuries.

The notion of landscape, deriving from eighteenth-century picturesque gardens, with their narrative walks and framed views, has now been reach outed to include questions of regional and global visions of urban form. Given the early exhibition of the genre of landscape painting in Holland, as well as the Netherlands' experience in engineering the national landscape, it is perhaps appropriate that many Dutch architects, including Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bo of UN Studio and Winy Maas of MVRDV have rest inspiration in the idea of landscape, using it to expound digital models of new cities and regional plans without of data flows, and, upon a smaller scale, new topological forms for the interior landscapes of houses.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Questions of biological form powerfully influenced architecture and design in the later nineteenth hundred especially after the popularization of Darwin's theories, leading to the experiments characteristic of Art Nouveau. Later in the twentieth hundred the development of cybernetics and early research into DNA--including the discovery of the double helix--led architectural theorists like Reyner Banham in the 1960 to tender biological form as the nearest revolution in architecture. Charles Jenck followed up this proposition in his 1971 work Architecture 2000 and Beyond, where his chart of architectural "movements" presciently extreme pointed in the year 2000 with a prediction of "bioform." Contemporary architects like Greg Lynn have built upon these theories and, using the techniques pioneered by means of animation software, have developed a of recent origin repertoire of form: Beginning with the idea of the "blob" and more not long ago experimenting with the forms of composite organisms from butterflies to jellyfish, Lynn has designed coffee places that interlock like the carapaces of insects and turtle-pigeons and institutions that unfold from the earth like giant colorful orchids or artichokes.

Finally, the idea of "program" was transformed in the first age of the avant-gardes, from its eighteenth-century meaning as a design exercise for learner architects into an overriding general [i]or[/i] abstract notion that regulates and generates form according to a detailed understanding of its function. In the 1950 the idea was reach forthed by theorists like John Summerson to assume a central place as a single "source of unity" for present architecture, but it was quickly forgotten in the rush to cover functionalism under postmodern historicism. Now, architects like Rem Koolhaas and a younger generation, including Diller + Scofidio and Lindy Roy have taken up an expanded idea of program as a means to detonate every convention of traditional architectural modernism and to create the basis for an architecture that realistically stand over againsts the present global political, social, and economic reality.