Drawing from the imag(in)ing of passing time as a cuckoo’s repetitive passing through a threshold, this article emphasises the active role of repetition in modulating spatio-temporalities and fostering variations. It argues that the systematic organisation and classification of the milieu emerge from the human capacity to perceive and assign differences within the spatio-temporal continuum. This process is enabled by iterative interactions with environmental stimuli, whether immediate or mediated through technological means, serving as an active process of evaluation and unfolding of environmental affordances. In this context, repetition simultaneously serves two seemingly opposing functions: it creates patterns of return to previous encounters while also opening potential lines of flight away from established norms. Intelligence transduces repetition into change, as it evolves through feedback loops, that is, non-linear operations that integrate information across various time scales and through diverse physical mediations, both embodied and exosomatic. As such, intelligence is re-conceptualised not as a state but as a symbiotic, responsive, and anticipatory process that unfolds through failing and adapting to environmental stimuli.
This paper explores the appraisal of knowledge in architecture and its role shaping architectural thought, design, and production. Building on Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge—knowing more than we can tell—the paper proposes to address the challenge of assessing such knowledge by the appraisal of its generative potential. It argues that tacit knowledge can be valued by the possibilities it creates within specific social and material environments. Through an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating insights from cognitive psychology, anthropology, and information theory, the paper identifies three modes of comprehension—correspondence, adaptation, and poetic. Emphasizing the interplay of knowledge, cognition, and imagination, it proposes that knowledge should be appraised based on its generative potential, rather than merely codified information. The paper concludes by suggesting that architectural knowledge, exemplified in the work of Eduard van Steenbergen, can be evaluated by its capacity to "objectify abstract space" and manipulate spatial relations, integrating skill, knowledge, and agency. Opening up new avenues for epistemological inquiry within architectural research, the paper invites scholars to reconsider their approaches to knowledge appraisal and to embrace a more inclusive understanding of knowledge production in the discipline.
In the present paper I aim to depart from the hypothesis that the question regarding theory appraisal conceals an unbearable yet necessary anxiety for the architectural and the scientific enterprise in general and rather argue that appraisal’s significance is ontological, not merely epistemological. Referring to Slavoj Žižek’s reading of German Idealism and mainly to his reading of Hegel via psychoanalytic theory I suggest that appraisal and the perpetual formulation of theories does not occur because of some lack in our existing theories and architectures, but are grounded on a fundamental, structural lack in our rationality which is precisely why the project of science has universal appeal. A lack, a primordial ‘nothing’ which takes its architectural form and its creative power in Aldo Rossi’s theoretical work on the architecture of the city. The article concludes with the realization that the distinct attribute of scientific theory is that it is public and open for appraisal.
Diminished rewards arise from attempts to establish hierarchies within the healthily variegated scope of contemporary theory. A re-emerging pragmatism is present in current architectural discourse, which frames certain modalities as indulgences. To appraise theory—if possible—it is necessary to ask what criteria exists for sorting out theory. Exploring the edges of discourse can accomplish this: to paint a simplified antipodal dialogue between differing perspectives to understand the scope of theory better. This essay uses a dialectic between Existential Theorists (those addressing contemporary issues focusing on human survival) and Esoteric Theorists (those addressing a myriad of topics that are specialised and not as clearly relevant to contemporary topics). Following this analysis, I deconstruct the boundaries between these two modalities to cast into doubt the methods for appraising theory. This is bolstered by a brief reminder of the lessons of Pragmatism in the last hundred years and follows with the stubborn reminders of post-structuralism. William Blake, who revealed a path towards radical subjectivity, is treated as a proto-post-structuralist. All of this is in service to a deep scepticism of appraisal and a plea for a “softer pragmatism,” one that softens the hard boundaries between the variegated modalities of theory.
The contemporary sensibility seems increasingly accustomed to observing the blind spots of reality. Architecture, less interested in drawing future visions, channels its utopian tension into scrutinising the past, laying bare in its investigations those absent from History, the lesser stories, what has been forgotten, and what remains unresolved. Following the clues scattered in sociologist Avery Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, I will refer to this mode of work as ‘hauntology’ to examine the operational strength of architectural design theory in the present era. The essay, that, essentially seeks to bring Gordon’s social theories into the discipline of architectural theory, suggesting the need to restore the relation between architecture and society, is structured as a theory-fiction about architecture. The first part builds the premises for the subsequent ones, defining words ‘theory’ and ‘spectre’ and the results of their crash. The second part observes a concrete case in which a piece of a city has disappeared while remaining in place. The third part concerns the architectural element ‘space’ that re-emerges when considering architectural theory as an observation of the intangible. Finally, the conclusions will leave the essay somewhat suspended, opening up the necessity for a spectrology of architecture.
