W11 Reading

A veritable epistemic revolution occurred with the advent of digital technology. The design of a project was no longer concerned with representation, but rather with calculation and computation. This upheaval within the language of architevture, which would lead to another level of project temporality, had already been anticipated by the design practices that emerged in the 1960s through radical architecture in Europe. Architecture was no longer a constructed object but an environment being perpetually reconfigured, a thing of the moment. The ArchiLab events helped to bring fame to generation of architects in France interested in research on an international scale. A number of these are featured in the FRAC Centre's collection and in this exhibition: dECOi architects and etc. Constructional architecture, the referent in these various projects, is inseparable from the genetic exploration of the process. These self-organisational systems are defined as living, phylogenetic systems, outside of all "models" and all representational conditions, opening architecture up to ideas of transformability. Thus, architecture becomes a dynamic environment. The exhibition is the result of a long-standing interest of mine in a subject which, on the contrary, because this subject is not just mathematical but also defines a culture, there has always been a underlying question involved: how can we consider computation without falling into the trap of an all-embracing analysis at a time when, from the point of view of computers in all areas of life, this same computation leads to the most global and radical transformations.