A Specific Theory of Models
AD: On Beauty, September/October 2019
Architecture needs new
scales of engagement. The scope of anthropocentric attention is one of
familiarity and comfort, defined by and for the human hand and eye. It turns
all the diverse and wild entities of the world into things “for us,” as if all
the snowflakes, gas giants, polar bears, kittens, and aircraft carriers of the
world existed only to serve the human mind. Now is the time for architects to
engage with the massive variety of entities and scales that make up reality, as
unsettling and unfamiliar as that might be. Freed from allegiance to the human
scale, architecture can refocus on challenging our expectations of what our
access to reality is like. In the philosopher Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) we see what can
happen when we shift our attention from the human scale to that of the
half-life of plutonium or the slowly shifting drone of the standing pressure
wave over the Atlantic Ocean.We might also consider
objects at a scale much smaller than human existence: “hypo-objects,” perhaps.
In place of the human scale, we might jointly leverage the resources of the
vast and the miniature, conceiving architecture at the scale of planets or
toys. The aim would be to enchant the familiar by flattening assumed scale
hierarchies onto a single ontological plane, as in
the film Men in Black, when a jewel
on the collar of a cat is found to contain a galaxy. ...
![]()
Download PDF︎
Download PDF︎