Architecture and the Culture of Contingency (2007)
article⁄Architecture and the Culture of Contingency (2007)
abstract⁄A culture is a set of behaviours, attitudes and values that are shared, sustained and transformed by an identifi able community. Currently, we are bound up in a culture of consumerism, and of terror there are also retro cultures and utopian cultures. What’s happening now that’s interesting is that many, if not all of these diff erent tendencies, tastes and persuasions are being realigned, interconnected and hybridised by a vast global community of online users, who are transdisciplinary in their approach to knowledge and experience, instinctively interactive with systems and situations, playful, transgressive and enormously curious. This living culture makes it up as it goes along. No longer do the institu tions of state, church or science call the tune. Nor can any architectural schema contain it. This is a culture of inclusion and of selfcreation. Culture no longer defi nes us with its rules of aesthetics, style, etiquette, normalcy or privilege. We defi ne it we of the global community that maps out the world not with territorial boundaries, or built environments, but with openended networks. This is a bottomup culturenonlinear, bifurcating, immersive, and profoundly human. Who needs archi tecture Any structural interface will do. Ours can be described as a contingent culture. It’s about chance and change, in the world, in the environment, in oneself. It’s a contingent world we live in, unpredictable, unreliable, uncertain and indeterministic. Culture fi ghts back, fi ghts like with like. The Contingent Culture takes on the contingency of life with its own strategies of risk, chance, and play. It is essentially syncretic. People reinvent themselves, create new relationships, new orders of time and space. Along the way, they create, as well as accommodate, the future. This culture is completely openended, evolving and transforming at a fast ratejust as we are, at this stage of our evolution, and just as we want it to be. Human nature, unconstrained, is essentially syncretic too.
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| Year |
2007 |
| Authors |
Ascott, Roy. |
| Issue |
Expanding Bodies: Art Cities Environment |
| Pages |
25-31 |
| Library link |
Brian Lilley & Philip Beesley, 2007. bib⁄Expanding Bodies: Art - Cities - Environment. Riverside Architectural Press and Tuns Press. |
| Entry filename |
architecture-culture-contingency |
