Scrittura Architettonica | Vera Bühlmann (TU Wien)

Logic of Discovery: Scrittura Architettonica: The Voice in Which the Generative Speaks

Lecture by Vera Bühlmann

Scrittura Architettonica: The Voice in Which the Generative Speaks

In the frame of the Module Emerging Fields in Architecture (++), HB2, TU Wien

+

Scrittura Architettonica approaches writing as a medium of articulation in which relations are not merely expressed but composed. Its operative principle is syn-taxis: the placing-together of elements such that their intervals, recurrences, and conjunctions become capable of generating further relations. Extending beyond grammatical order, syn-taxis concerns the disposition through which a form acquires its particular temporality.

Reading Anne Carson’s notes to If Not, Winter, we can trace a poetics of temporal operations. A particle binds the vividness of the present to a history of repetitions; a delayed verb distributes an event across an interval; a shift of voice admits another scale of time without announcing a boundary. Spacing, fracture, and selective marks of textual loss likewise make a form’s latent movements and histories available to attention.

This disposition can be understood as an act of signing. To sign is not simply to attach a sign to an already constituted meaning, but to institute a relation, give it a place, and make it available for continuation. The mark distinguishes and connects, directs attention without exhausting what may become legible through it. Signing is therefore both an act of determination and an exposure to the undetermined.

The generative speaks in the interval between institution and continuation: in the capacity of a configuration to persist through alteration, recur without remaining identical, and make further articulations possible.

This approach also proposes a way of working with AI. Rather than treating it merely as a producer of finished outputs, Scrittura Architettonica approaches AI as a medium for testing, varying, and recomposing relations. The task is to sign, arrange, and sustain conditions under which unexpected articulations can emerge—without assuming that their consequences are fully determined in advance. Architectonic writing thus composes not the future of a form, but the conditions under which a future can begin to speak.

++

The module Emerging Fields in Architecture imparts current knowledge from new research fields in architectural and engineering disciplines, with the aim of dealing with current and future design challenges in a broader social context in an interdisciplinary and fundamental way. The lectures impart knowledge about different and interdisciplinary approaches to design, current developments and results of material and construction research, about planning and building under/in extreme conditions as well as about structures that change or develop due to changing parameters.

In this context, strategies for design (from the initial idea to implementation) are questioned in an interdisciplinary discourse, and the question of how the path from idea to realisation can be shaped and to what extent it is possible to be systematically creative is explored. In the practical part, an independent cross-thematic examination is to be carried out.

Banner image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain / CC0.

Vera Bühlmann, geb. 1974 in der Schweiz; Studium der Englischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften, Philosophie und Medienwissenschaften, Universität Zürich; Promotion im Fach Medienwissenschaft, Universität Basel; seit 2010 Aufbau und Leitung des laboratory for applied virtuality, ETH Zürich (mit Ludger Hovestadt); seit 2016 Professur und Leitung der Forschungsbereiches Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie ATTP der TU Wien. Zu ihren speziellen Interessen gehört die digitale Architektonik und Gnomonik, Ästhetik aus der Perspektive der New Materialisms, sowie die Rolle von Figuration, Skulptur und Rhetorik in einem tropologischen Humanismus des Anthropozäns.

Sie ist Herausgeberin der Applied Virtuality Book Series bei Birkhäuser (mit Ludger Hovestadt), einer Buchreihe die sich aus philosophischer, mathematischer und architektonischer Perspektive der Digitalisierung sowie einer entstehenden QuantumLiteracy widmet. Zu ihren eigenen Publikationen gehören folgende Monographien: Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury, London 2020), Die Nachricht, ein Medium: Städtische Architektonik, Generische Medialität (Birkhäuser 2014), sowie zwei Anthologien, eine zur Stadt: A Quantum City, Mastering the Generic (Birkhäuser, Basel 2015, hrsg. mit Ludger Hovestadt, Miro Roman, Diana Alvarez-Marin, Sebastian Michale), und eine zu Weltobjekten: Sheaves. When Things are Whatever Can be the Case (mit L.Hovestadt, Birkhäuser, Basel 2013), sowie als Herausgeberin vier Bände zum Metalithikum, einer Spekulation zur gegenwärtigen Human Condition unter den Vorzeichen eines New Materialism: Printed Physics (ambra, 2012), Domesticating Symbols (Birkhäuser, 2014), Coding as Literacy (Birkhäuser, Basel 2015) sowie Symbolizing Existence (Birkhäuser, 2016).