ON ARCHITECTURAL NEWNESS

In this paper, I attempt to investigate the aesthetic and operational terms and conditions under which architecture is to be perceived as new. Factors like shock and surprise, unfamiliarity, sublimity and the uncanny are analysed in specific examples taken from the work of architects R&Sie and Decostèrd & Rahm, and artist/designer Ingrid Hora. At the same time, these same examples demonstrate attempts that endeavour to establish the new based on architectural designs that evidence openness towards the unexpected and the unknown.

Starting from these terms, I introduce the idea of a newness based on a sense of loss and uncertainty that can be used by architecture. The new in historical terms is an event the valuation of which depends mainly in the future. Nevertheless, the new is expected to be able to change the configuration of an existing discourse. The structure of architectural discourse with the architectural design included is a pre-existing situation that when the new occurs gets changed, improved or destroyed, but it definitely does not exist anymore at least in its previous form. In this sense, we could probably say that there is always something lost when the new occurs. This sense of loss is incorporated as an aesthetic condition in the experience of the new.

Starting from this point, I’m trying to investigate aesthetic, from the side of the subject, and operational, from the side of the designer, terms and conditions that influence the perception of the new. In the examined practices the new is established on a negation of the existing, the agreed, the defined, the known or the proper. By doing so these specific practices achieve to interrupt the existing formal systems of thinking, planning and designing architecture and maybe lead architectural design beyond many of its previous assumptions.

“Architecture never dismantles anything, it only assemblages degrees of certainty” writes Sarah Whiting. Architecture should maybe though start allowing itself larger degrees of uncertainty in order to be able to challenge its own boundaries. Lets allow architecture to investigate ‘new’ territories: aesthetical, functional and intellectual ones and challenge its own boundaries.