For a Post-critical Architecture

Abstract

The future of architecture is post-critical: we must empty architecture of its narrative superstructures through the erasure of subjectivities in order to rediscover a certain blankness or psychological neutrality of things. In this process, we can discover the formal and programmatic possibilities of things for the design of spaces and buildings through quantifiable scientific knowledge. This is a paradigm shift where space no longer has meaning, but instead has physical and chemical presence. We must engage the targets of critical theory (subjectivity, multiplicity, diversity) but change its tools (narrative, story), replacing them with objective, scientific, neutral, nonnarrative approaches. This is where the semantic gives way to the somatic, and where storytelling and fiction make room for the measured properties of the world, in a new objectivity of things, of space.