Return to Nature
by omake, 2004
Digital technologies can add a new dimension to architecture, but they cannot redefine its fundamental character. For architecture, utopia will continue to lie in the real world, not the virtual realm.
Otto Riewoldt
Several basic questions should be raised to avoid any slapdash comment talking about redefinitions or changes of architectural landscape: What is Architecture? What is the fundamental of Architecture? And what was added into Architecture in information age?
Architecture and its fundamental character
Le Corbusier (1923) has famously argued that: “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us and without ambiguity. It is for that reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms”. Although he mentioned architecture as a mater of “harmonies”, and a “pure creation of the spirit”, still, lying outside questions of construction and beyond them, architecture was also illustrated as a ‘machine’, a thing of art, a phenomenon of the emotions.
As a different views, after examined the history of architecture in light of its essence as space, animating and illuminating architectural creations so that their beauty or indifferences exposed, Bruno Zevi (1948) stated in his book Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture[1], that ‘‘architecture is environment, the stage on which our lives unfold’’.
“To grasp space, to know how to see it, is the key to the understanding of building.” He emphasized, “Architecture is not art alone; it is not merely a reflection of conceptions of life or a portrait of systems of living. Architecture is environment, the stage on which our lives unfold.”
Quite different with Le Corbusier’s concept of ‘building machine’, Zevi successfully clutched at the concept of ‘space’. Thus, it could abstain falling into the never-ended argument between shape and function. Thus, Zevi’s concept came to be wildly accepted by follows.
Cyberspace® – Made in Information Age
Significantly, since history steps into the information age, what was brought into architecture by digital technologies is a completely new dimension out of geometric Euclidean space. Beyond the word ‘network’, Cyberspace came to be the most popular concept which is believed as the best one to represent those digital evolutions.
Cyberspace is a combined word which was first introduced by Sci-fi writer William Gibson (1984). It is the ‘space’ produced by information age, the non-physical space created by computer systems. ‘Position’ and ‘Distance’ are two of the keywords to make a further understanding of cyberspace; however, they also became the main battlefield of an epistemology-based argument.
Since the age of René Descartes and Isaac Newton, or even earlier, the flourish of theology, there use to be a red line lies between virtual and physical worlds. However, the development of technology break those balance down to a slough of philosophical argument, that if science have been tortured by epistemological dualisms.
Dualism
Generally, dualism is the view that reality consists of two disparate parts: mental and physical. Thus the mental is at least not identical with the physical.
The most important branch of dualism which is of immediate interest to philosophers of mind today is the Descartes mind, or so-called matter distinction. It was first given out in Descartes’ work Meditations (1641) and act as a particular kind of substance dualism which most accurately called Cartesian interactionist dualism. Cartesian dualism is used to refer to the general class of substance dualist theories. Substance dualists hold that mind and matter are different kinds of substances. It is a particular kind of substance dualism espoused by Descartes in which these two different kinds of substance can causally interact. Thus, mind substance can cause matter substance to act and matter substance can cause mind substance to have certain 'sensations' most often by itself being acted on by other material objects. For Descartes, the essence of matter is extension whereas that of mind is active thinking.
Because Descartes believed these two sorts of substance are essentially different, so that they are also independent. Thus, matter can exist without minds and minds can exist without matter. Such position raises an important question: How do mind and matter interact?
One thing to claim is that they do interact, while another to convincingly explain how, particularly when mind and matter are conceived of so differently. It is this question that must be answered to solve the classic mind-body problem. The Cartesian solution to the problem is to insist that the mental representation, though caused by the physical, does not resemble the physical. However, this does not seem to explain how the mental comes to represent the physical at all. It seems that Descartes' position is to insist that God is the one who responsible for these interactions.
Argument of dualism; or, beyond dualism ?
As philosopher, William H. Poteat notes about this decontextualized knower, however, "to be deprived of place is to become disincarnated, to be driven mad, to become an alien -- to have no home or not to be at home?"
Probably, the most accurate statement of those efforts was raised in Joseph Incandela’s work (1996), that "We ask where we belong; we try to place ourselves in our proper location."
There has been a recent revival of interest in the topic of Cartesian dualism amongst modern philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists. Arguments against dualism have been provided on the basis of both empirical evidence and on philosophical grounds. However, though of minority, some modern philosophers of mind have come to the defence of dualism.
As Churchland (1996) mentioned in his book, the argument of dualism is not only of historical interest, it also has important implications for the enterprise of science.
It means, that, if a convincing rejection of dualism can be formulated, the classic mind-body problem will be solved by its becoming a non-problem and the materialist approach of modern science will be vindicated. Or, conversely, dualism can be convincingly maintained, it is by no means obvious that empirical evidence will suffice for a thorough understanding of the mind. “In other words, understanding the brain may not be enough for understanding the mind.”
Since the flourish of postmodernism, some postmodernists began to think beyond Dualism. “That theology and science have been haunted by epistemological dualisms is an unremarkable claim.” As MacIntyre (1984) concluded. “Current postmodern efforts to think beyond such dualisms as objectivism versus relativism include recent attention to knowledge as socially constructed, communitarian, and nonfoundational.”
[1] This classic work first published in Italian in 1948, translated in 1957, and revised in 1974. Along with commercial and dwelling units, temples, palaces, and cathedrals, Zevi treats structures such as fountains, columns, and monuments, subjecting them all to aesthetic, cultural, and functional criteria and explaining them in easily understood terms.
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