Architectural detail or the end of the virtual
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2022
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Architectural tectonics have become the central resistance, in the discipline of architecture, against the virtual simulations of reality that dominate our cultural landscape. Within that discussion, the study and critique of the architectural detail as a central aspect of architecture needs to be re-considered today, simply because it relates directly with materiality, physical materiality, of architecture. The enormous social-cultural transformations, since the turn of the century, triggered by the electronical and then digital innovations, have permitted the appearance of a virtual world that is competing with the physical role and subsequent meaning of the discipline of architecture. Alvin Tofler´s The Third Wave, Castells’ The Rise of the Network Society, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital , all reflected the changes that are now a consummated fact: we have become more and more dependent on the non-physical, on the nonmaterial aspects of technology. Paraphrasing Negroponte, it is the shift from atoms (material and mass) to bits (digital). The construction of a virtual, nonphysical world, as the late phenomenon of the metaverse, the NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, confirm this tendency in the development of a nonphysical world. The challenge presented to architecture, as the discipline of the construction of meaningful physical environments, is that it cannot exist only in appearance. It needs to have existence, physical existence and permanence. The role of the architectural detail, present since the dawning of the discipline, needs to be re-discussed: The meaning of architecture, as it has always been, can be revealed within the understanding of the construction detail. The joint and the construction detail have evolved through history, from symbolic representations of nature, to metaphors of structural elements, to glimpses of the way buildings are put together. The advent of the digital revolution, and the changes of the architectural process, the appearance of the possibility of the “fold”1, and other algorithm processes of designing, triggered the disappearance of the edge and the joint, and detail has become surpassed, forgotten in praise of the seamless extension of the perfected architectural surface. To understand the role of architecture today is, to a large extent, to understand the meaning of the architectural detail.
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Back to Human Scale : Rethinking Human Spaces for Tomorrow
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ARQUITETURA, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN ARQUITETÓNICO, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN