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All is in Formation: Architecture, Cybernetics, Ecology | Spring / Summer 2021 | 99–110
turn, in a nascent second digital turn.5 Digital tech-
nologies have taken on an increasingly important
role both as themes within design problems and
within the design process itself. There is a rich
(recent) history of cutting-edge computational tech-
niques and insights applied in architectural design
processes, starting from the rst experiments
at applying chaos theory and complexity theory
by gures such as Peter Eisenman and Charles
Jencks, through Christopher Alexander and Cedric
Price and their early forms of patterned and genera-
tive architecture, and leading eventually to the iconic
parametricism of architects such as Zaha Hadid.6
This tradition, although certainly more varied
than presented here, seems to have concerned
itself primarily with the application of the notion of
complexity to aesthetic questions – what we might call
formal complexity.7 However, this application leaves
something to be desired when taking an immanent
view at the capabilities and fundamental functioning
of technologies of computation. For this, the work of
twentieth-century cybernetic theorist Staord Beer
provides an excellent jumping-o point. Beer was
part of the second generation of British cybernetics.8
His work diered from many of his more commonly
referenced peers in that he placed emphasis on the
relation between what amounts to an organisational
system’s relative democratisation, and its ability to
function in the face of complexity.9 As such, Beer
was concerned primarily with the way in which
computation enables and informs particular ways
of exercising control within (and not over) complex
systems. Formal complexity as an approach to
In recent years, there has been a revisiting of the
twentieth-century debate surrounding the viability of
planned economies and the supposed necessity of
market structures, in the face of a declining neolib-
eral world order and the emergence of new kinds
of techniques for processing information that can
arguably provide an alternative to market structures.
However, this is an insight that has by now informed
a number of dierent views on alternative techno-
social principles of productive coordination that are
not premised on utilising price signals for resolving
questions of organisation, distribution, and agency.1
These range broadly from seemingly progressive
surveillance-technocracy capitalism to especially
authoritarian forms of neoliberal capitalism that can
both be said to have ‘broken free of the shackles of
democracy’ through the application of new compu-
tational technologies.2 There is therefore a sense
in which research concerning data gathering and
sensing techniques is arguably tied to a tendency
toward dierent (yet presumably equally un-equal)
forms of productive, distributive and social coordi-
nation.3 With this development comes the emerging
possibility for a moment of reconguration that
relates to how these questions are dealt with. One
main issue with this observation is that the horizon
of that reconguration is limited to a very narrow,
ideologically dened window of change, dominated
primarily by the notion of surveillance capitalism.4
Formal complexity
In keeping with this larger tendency, the eld of
architecture currently lies at the end of its rst digital
Critical Technics in Architecture:
A Cybernetic Approach
Zach Mellas
100
through a lack of understanding of these technolo-
gies, architecture loses its capacity to mediate
how they are applied within the built environment.
This equates in turn with a reduction in possibili-
ties for architects to engage critically with these
developments from their own specic expertise
and concerns, positioning architects as ‘secondary
authors’.14 To keep up with technical development,
and thus to stay relevant as architects, it is crucial
that we elaborate on how architecture can critically
incorporate digital technology into its activities as
a eld, rather than allowing the structural mecha-
nisms that underlie much of the development of
these technologies to dictate what is and what is
not relevant in today’s built environment.15 This
highlights the relevance of coming up with a new
framework for applying computation within architec-
tural design, attempting to go beyond the pretension
of an autonomous body of knowledge centred on
‘the singular building’, toward an understanding of
architecture as a body of knowledge that is prem-
ised around and within organisational practice.
Furthermore, in recent years several projects
have emerged that explicitly intend to subsume
architectural and urban design to the creation of new
markets through intensive data gathering, guided
by the concept of the smart city.16 At the basis for
these developments is the underlying ideological
assumption that the future built environment will be
privately owned and operated, including its virtual
and physical infrastructure, a move toward a form
of surveillance capitalism in keeping with the previ-
ously described horizon for change in economic
control.17
The point of this article is to demonstrate that
the only way to harness the emancipatory and
productive potentials of computational technology in
architecture is through a general socialisation of the
architectural process. This would allow architects
on the one hand to circumvent the commodica-
tion of architectural form and on the other to retain
a distinctly architectural sphere of inuence around
the application of digital technologies within the built
computation reects what Beer described as using
a computer to do quill-pen administration: ‘we insist
on retaining ... those very limitations of hand, eye,
and brain that the computer was invented precisely
to transcend.’10
Rather than applying digital technology to solve
problems in a similar but more expedited way
compared to traditional methods, Beer argues that
the logic of computation demands a reframing of
how we think of problems.11 Instead of applying
computation as an administrative tool, it allows
for exploring reality in a dierent way: through
modelling, computation opens new approaches
to problem-solving that allow one to interface with
multi-causal, complex realities. In some sense,
Beer argued for what has become known by now
as a general ecological approach to computation.12
This was a prompt to come up with a dierent way of
using computation; that attempt led him to conclude
that what is paramount for any system to be viable
is that it is democratically regulated. Democratic
control was for Beer the key to avoid catastrophic
failure for societal institutions in the face of a
changing material environment – a radical cyber-
netic approach to organisational strategy as an
adaptation to what seemed in his eyes an inevitable
collapse of the institutions of mid-twentieth-century
state capitalism.13 At the core of this approach lies
a belief that practices dealing with physical assem-
blages – of people and material – are fundamentally
concerned with ‘the organisational’.
The discrepancy between this approach and the
application of digital techniques in architecture as
practised today might already be categorised as a
general problem, purely because it can be taken to
mean that the eld of architecture has not yet come
to grips with contemporary technological reality
and the opportunities it provides for rethinking how
problems are constituted in organisational terms,
and, more crucially, what appropriate approaches
to these problems entail. However, this general
observation points towards a much deeper and
consequential problem for the eld, namely that
101
a grounded position from which to formulate an
alternative application of these technologies. This is
something that a substantive theory would simply
not allow for. Instead of resignation, we would do
well to say that architectural value ‘is too valuable
to be left to capital’, echoing philosopher Brian
Massumi.18 As such, I posit, using the literature on
cybernetics, that a further integration of sensor tech-
nology into the environment likely will not contribute
to the overcoming of so-called technical alienation
within the built environment. Moreover, later in this
article I present the claim that generating any form
of emancipatory futurity through computational tech-
nology within architecture requires a reorientation of
the technicity of the built environment towards the
notion of an embedded intelligence in a distinctly
politicised and socialised form.
Technical development
Gilbert Simondon describes the development
of technics as the shaping of a technical object
towards (internal) functional demands.19 This is
referred to as a kind of self-suciency – the tech-
nical object ‘unies itself internally’ towards being
a concrete technical object.20 This is an abstract
process, where a technical object’s constitutive
components become more and more interoper-
able over the course of their development through
‘concomitance and convergence’ of multiple,
dierent functions into singular multipurpose struc-
tures.21 Technical objects, for Simondon, behave
as evolutionary beings that mutate toward their
own inherent tness curve; the key dierence in
this regard between natural (living beings) and
technical objects (articial beings) then, is that the
former already exist as concrete objects.22 What
is crucial in Simondon’s terminology is that the
term technical object does not refer to one specic
object in space. Instead, it is a more abstract term
that refers to a set, or branch, of technologies,
such that one would say all attempts at building a
combustion engine are part of one unitary, abstract
combustion engine.
environment. More fundamentally, it could provide
architects with a method to contribute to a futurity
that dees contemporary capitalist realism, through
an architectural form that presents itself as a form
of realist intervention which can re-organise itself
toward desired futurities.
Critical computation
The tendencies described in the previous para-
graph call for an examination of the way in which
technology is used within architecture. To that
eect, this article proposes that we rethink the role
of architecture in the application of technology and
the role of technology in architecture. I will relate
this to one set of digital technologies, which can
broadly be categorised as computational design.
This might be rephrased as conceptualising how
computational design techniques can be used criti-
cally. The word critically is used here to refer to a
capacity to generate alternatives; a critical use of
technology, then, is the application of a technology
in such a way as to engender alternative paths of
development that are not necessarily limited to the
logic of contemporary capitalism.
From this it becomes clear that it is necessary
to dispense with the notion that technology is inher-
ently geared towards certain value systems, what
might be called a substantive theory of technology.
Instead, using the work of Gilbert Simondon and
other authors who subscribe to the same posi-
tion, I argue in the rst section of this article for a
relational approach to technical development, one
based on systems thinking and a particular strand
of cybernetics. The reason for this is twofold: it is
only through an open-ended conception of technical
development that we can arrive at any meaningful
formulation of an alternative kind of technicity, ration-
ality, or future. Secondly, the previously described
ideological premises for contemporary projects that
deal with computational design, and the growing
tendency to position architecture as a eld for data-
gathering within surveillance capitalism together
present a certain urgency for architects to develop
102
The development of technology is underwritten
by the way in which it encodes a cultural congu-
ration; Feenberg argues that it is in fact here that
technology can serve to cement or lock in emanci-
patory views in society. After this, it becomes part
of the way things nominally are – as a new kind of
norm. This constitutes an aective dimension to
technical development where it is the imaginaries
and visions that a technology brings into the world
that create meaningful contributions on a cultural
level. Feenberg stresses that it is through this
locking-in of imaginaries that the coherence of soci-
etal alternatives might be demonstrated and in turn
made business as usual.25 This could be rephrased
in Simondonian terms as saying that what matters
for Feenberg is the associated milieu that is created
through technics. Invention is the process wherein
the information contained in this milieu is transduced
into a new technical schema – it is passed on as a
form of transindividual knowledge.26 Feenberg then,
oers us through Simondon a way of conceptual-
ising technics in a critical way: through modulation
of an environment one might inuence the constitu-
tion of future technics.
This is a useful way of formulating a notion of
criticality considering technology as a eld of political
struggle; what is needed, then, is a way of orienting
this modulation towards particular alternatives. What
Feenberg points to is the asymmetry of the political
arena within which this modulation takes place,
centring the notion of a technical class struggle in
line with traditional Marxian analysis. However, with
his concepts Feenberg is at rst glance concerned
primarily with resolving the apparent contradictions
between reied notions of culture and technology
through his notion of a technical culture; his concept
of the technical code is ostensibly cultural, a code
between participants in society. However, beyond
the cultural level, there are internal dynamics and
logics that govern how processes unfold within the
world. While there likely exist a number of these
logics that do have some cultural expression or
even take place on the cultural level in their totality,
It is concretisation, for Simondon, that informs
the primary path of formation that technologies
take, in turn even spawning new branches for other
technologies over the course of their development.
Simondon’s philosophy of technology allows us
to think of technicity as an open-ended but struc-
tured process, bound to its own internal logic of
coherence.
Locus of technical control / technical culture
But what does Simondon have to say about the
external factors that constitute this process, the asso-
ciated milieu of the development of a technology?
Within elds of research that study the develop-
ment of technology, there are several theories that
seek to explain how technologies are construed; the
clearest division here lies between what might be
categorised as a constructivist theory of technical
development and an instrumentalist theory. It is
relevant to combine a reading of Simondon with the
critical philosophy of technology outlined by Andrew
Feenberg, particularly his concept of the ‘technical
code’. For Feenberg, a technology is a scene of
struggle between the workers or operators of a
technology, and those who manage it – both have
their own connotations with a technology and its
development, and thus their own requirements and
demands of that technology. Feenberg, in this sense,
follows Bruno Latour’s formulation of a ‘parliament
of things’.23 Contrary to Latour, however, Feenberg
identies that there is no levelled-o network of
actors without power or hierarchy; instead, political
struggle is inscribed in the way a technology mani-
fests over its lifetime. What is stressed here is the
ambivalence of technology – as a process, not a
thing. Feenberg describes technology as a struc-
ture that develops over time and is inuenced from
myriad directions, and similarly inuences the culture
it is embedded in – a relational account that resem-
bles Simondon’s notion of modulation. This leads
Feenberg to the conclusion that what is needed is to
democratise technical development through ‘a shift
in the locus of technical control’.24
103
internal changes, which necessitate socio-technical
changes on other levels of societal becoming.
Stiegler notes that ‘these adjustments constitute a
suspension and a re-elaboration of the socio-ethnic
programs or socio-political programs that form the
unity of the social body’.29 This view, which Stiegler
terms ‘organology’, underscores the fundamental
connections that exist between technical and
social systems. As such, Stiegler’s work serves to
emphasise a point that is central to this article: that
there exists a reciprocal relation between technical
systems and social systems – both systems forming
part of one another’s associated milieu. Applying
Stiegler’s organology to Feenberg’s thought points
clearly towards a logic that takes place on a sepa-
rate level from the cultural. In a sense, Feenberg’s
notion of a critical technology is a form of socially
mediated but unidirectional technical genesis:
eecting changes in an environment with the aim of
changing future technicity. Stiegler argues that these
changes in technicity have the potential to be foun-
dational beyond the ways that Feenberg describes
– implementing not just imaginaries of alternatives,
but in fact generating a localised reconguration of
the social-political domain. Beyond this, it can be
argued that it is technicity itself that enables the
concept of futurity.30 It is through inscription that a
reference point can be retained, without which one
would be limited to experiencing a present.31
To Stiegler, this relies on the premise that ways
of thinking are informed by technical conditions: as
such, technical objects can be said to create their
own subjectivity in those that are subject to their use.
A psycho-social individuation takes place through
technical objects, which then contributes to collec-
tive ways of thinking, thus constituting a circuit of
transindividuation.32 Following Simondon, Stiegler
argues that this proceeds through the spatialisation
of temporal forms of reason, which today can be said
to take the shape of data-gathering through sensing
technologies. However, this is primarily a one-way
process as well: surveillance technologies impose
a particular subjectivity, but the private ownership of
it seems insucient to restrict one’s analysis only
to this. This means that rather than modulating the
operations and structures that constitute technical
objects, it is necessary to examine how one might
go about modulating the logics that govern their
genesis – the formulation of a metalogic.
Systems-view and futurity
Both Feenberg and Simondon describe the
genesis of technology as a system in all but name,
consisting of codes, rules and logics that govern the
specics of a technology’s coming-into-being. One
way of making this explicit is by generalising the
common conception of technical development as a
linear process from point A to point B, into a multi-
dimensional eld, where it is the logics that govern
the topology of the space of possible outcomes that
a particular technology might follow. As Marx and
Engels posit in Capital, the conditions of a move-
ment beyond capitalism ‘result from the premises
now in existence’.27 When discussing these condi-
tions in relation to technology from a Marxian
standpoint, the process in which these technologies
are produced and the way in which they are inte-
grated into processes of social (re)production take
on central importance.
We might interpret this in a way that lends itself
to Simondonian terminology: it is only when present
organisational and technical conditions reach a
metastable state, one of oversaturated potentiality,
that transduction into new forms of organisation can
take place. A key component of the notion of transduc-
tion is that it is a transmission of information through
material; this is the central thesis of Simondon’s
work on individuation against hylomorphism, and
the place where his concept of modulation comes
in. As such, one might more precisely state that this
transduction relies on specically material encod-
ings of organisational forms. Philosopher Bernard
Stiegler, following Simondon’s work on technics and
mechanology, argues that this takes place through
the genesis of technical systems.28 Through internal
evolutionary tendencies, technical systems induce
104
environment which determines the limits of tech-
nical potential. In cybernetic terms, this amounts to
the description of a system.
Complexity and variety
Considering technical development as a system
opens a number of avenues of investigation,
primarily by allowing us to specify further how that
system might be inuenced and to ask from which
loci and through which logics this might proceed to
shape technical genesis toward desired outcomes.
This would result in a critical system of technics that
takes on the form of a regulator, in traditional cyber-
netic terms.36 To characterise this critical system I
refer to Staord Beer, who represents what Stiegler
describes as the new basis of cybernetics, as
opposed to the popular conception of cybernetics
as a military, controlling technicity that is more
commonly associated with Norbert Wiener.37
Beer oers us a compelling line of reasoning to
reject the data-driven paradigm of digital computa-
tion that drives on a logic of representation: digital
machines ‘are pre-occupied with access’.38 This is
in reference to the fact that control-systems, the
predecessors to contemporary digital systems,
were built to generate intermittent output, in the
form of printouts, during a process of computa-
tion. The result is a paradigm of computation that
is charged with getting representable answers to
questions, whereas the most important result of
a computational system in the cybernetic view is
performative. In his sociological history of British
cybernetics, Andrew Pickering emphasises that
cybernetics is the navigation of a eld without a
representative mapping of it, as with a steersman
(kubernetes) navigating toward a distant light on the
shore through incremental adjustments. Pickering
aptly characterises the demand for overview in
terms of representative models as ‘an enormous
detour … into and through a world of symbols’.39
This observation can be brought back to contem-
porary digital practice in architecture: the dominant
form of building information modelling relies entirely
these systems and, stemming from that, their black-
box nature, do not allow for any reciprocal inuence
on the logics that govern these technical objects.33
Where they do, this inuence is mediated through
an internal tendency toward technocratic barriers; a
sucient level of understanding of and engagement
with ambient sensor technology is often required
to even have an overview of its capacities and
features, and thus, to conceptualise how it might
be applied, changed, hacked or adopted. Arguably,
this amounts to a cut-o of so-called smart systems
from paths of individuation that take place through
struggle, transindividuation or democratic control.
This line of thought is compatible with contempo-
rary Marxian views on processes of subjectication
that take place under capitalism.34 In particular, they
resonate with the notion that dierent technical (and
thus (re)productive) conditions generate dierent
emancipatory goals, subjects and processes,
beyond an essentially monolithic, trans-historical
understanding of class. In contrast to Feenberg,
this is a decentring of a singular historical class
struggle as the main engine of technical genesis.
Instead, this view relies on the notion that what
has changed fundamentally since Marx’s time is
that there is no longer a concept of a universal,
trans-historical emancipatory subjectivity to speak
of; as such, one arrives at a theoretical vantage
point where dierent, distinctly historical subjec-
tivities carry their own potential for an idiosyncratic
emancipatory futurity. Thus, this is an argument
that opens a critical capacity, as dened earlier in
this article. Fundamentally, this position comes
with several consequences attached. Primarily for
this article, it implies an opening up of futurity – not
merely beyond transhistorical notions, but in addi-
tion beyond what might be referred to as a ‘residual
linearity and humanism’.35
In summary, this section has described how
technical development possesses potentials: it
can occur across a multitude of paths. As such, it
produces what one might term outcomes, which
are contingent on material conditions within an
105
of regulatory variety matching system variety. This
resembles a process of adaptation within a system
to its milieu, much like the genesis of technology
as described by Simondon.45 Simondon has been
described as a proto-cybernetician – as such there
are several similarities between his work on tech-
nicity and that of later cyberneticians such as Ashby,
Pask and Beer.46
How does this concept of variety t in with
contemporary paradigms of computational tech-
nology within the eld of architecture? For some,
by taking contemporary technics in the direction of
‘animate knowledge’, where one might argue that
we have today the technical means to animate our
inanimate surroundings through ambient sensor
technology (by now mostly garnered under the
concept of big data).47 Through this animation some
argue we can overcome technical alienation – the
seemingly inherent eect by which technics mediate
our access to the world as it is constructed through
them.48 This strategy amounts to matching natural
variety with technical variety; it is implied that this
technical variety would somehow amount to the
level of variety that occurs in living systems by the
choice of words. Notably, this is a move that follows
the principles described so far: in animating an envi-
ronment through ambient technology, a designer
intervenes in the milieu of a system, changing the
terms on which interaction between systems take
place. Through Ashby and Beer’s line of reasoning
it could, however, be argued that it is precisely
this impulse to seek greater and more complex
technics that aects technical alienation. This is a
consequence of the inadequacy of technical variety
in matching living system variety (which, to Beer,
stands apart as exceedingly complex). As a result of
this discrepancy, reduction and normativity become
necessary tools to keep the technical system
viable. This amounts to an asymptotic complexica-
tion: a greater and greater animation of technical
systems, that might eventually approach exceeding
complexity, but for the foreseeable future remains
distinctly lacking in variety.
on the classication of designs into categories,
types and elements and on symbolic representa-
tion – embraced primarily for the ability to generate
intermittent printouts in the form of construction
inventory and cost estimations.40
In contrast, Beer’s position towards hylozoism
and the agency of matter seems more in line with
Simondon’s concept of modulation; both presup-
pose that material itself can facilitate an operation
without a subjection of matter to form, and without
the imposition of an ideal, or blueprint that
precedes this emergent process of in-formation.
For Simondon, this is primarily observed within
the development of technics according to its own
logic, for Beer, it is organisations of people that self-
organise. By looking for appropriate types of matter
already in existence, one can engage in the world
as it is oered, and thus engage it in a relational
way.41 Furthermore, it is for Simondon precisely this
attitude of considering an object within its milieu,
that opens the space of what is possible – its eld
of potential. Simondon develops a convincing argu-
ment for technicity that is thoroughly embedded in
its associated milieu by way of concretisation. He
demonstrates that it is through a synergy between
a technical object and its environment that new
potentialities can be rendered accessible, as with
the example of the Guimbal Turbine.42
Ultimately, a seemingly similar line of thought
leads for Beer to an ambition to formulate a para-
digm of biological computation as something
radically distinct from what is conventionally seen
as computation, even today – as a form of compu-
tation that relies on ecological systems that are
found as they are in the world.43 He arrives at
this through his concept of exceedingly complex
systems, arguing that while our representational
logic cannot meet the variety in these systems
with adequate reciprocal variety, another naturally
complex system such as the complex system of
a pond might.44 Here it is important to note that
Beer inherits from his forerunner, the early cyber-
netician and psychiatrist Ross Ashby, the notion
106
this can be rephrased as centring the decision-
making (and thus informing) capacity of social
processes: a step in the direction of a distinctly polit-
icised cybernetic approach to technicity.
Radical cybernetics
Bringing a politicised cybernetic approach to the
products and processes of architecture means
doing away with architectural authorship along
the way. It would entail an explicit move toward an
architecture of many hands. According to Mario
Carpo, this is something that is probably opposed
to the professional interest of many designers.53
Accordingly, in Feenberg’s terms, this is a concrete
example of the technical code in action: ‘it is
specically armoured against the recognition of
many participant interests’ through the operational
autonomy of its managers’.54 As such, moving
towards a politicised approach requires more than
the intention and commitment of individual actors. It
therefore points again at the necessity of encoding
this move into a technical necessity (what I referred
to before as a metalogic).
I have so far argued that one can characterise
technical development as a system. Therefore,
it is a contingent process that is embedded within
an environment – most concretely in terms of the
limits to potential, in terms of what is considered
possible, and in terms of what is viable. Moreover,
considering technics as a system means accepting
that it is fundamentally political in nature – for social
systems, their capacity for informing is related to
the degree to which a system can resolve indeter-
minacy. This is in turn tied to the level of complexity
that a system holds. In order to interface with the
exceedingly complex, autopoietic nature of the built
environment then, there is a sense in which current
models of architectural practice fall short.
This becomes particularly clear when one
considers the notion of failure and its relation to
invention and reorganisation. Staord Beer’s orig-
inal work on cybernetics hinged primarily on the
notion of viable systems – autopoietic systems that
Metastability
If one follows Beer’s categorisation, the discrep-
ancy between complexity and exceeding complexity
outlined in the previous paragraph points toward
a certain limit with regard to how well technical
systems might interface with their environment.
While I have so far highlighted a number of simi-
larities between Simondon and Beer’s work, there
are also key dierences that become evident
particularly with this limit in mind, one of which is
particularly relevant for this article: as media theorist
Simon Mills argues, Beer and others working within
the tradition of his Viable Systems Model (VSM) do
not describe a mechanism that accounts for novelty
in complex systems. By basing their model on
homeostasis and ultrastability, there is little room left
for a concept of invention.49 Accordingly, this view of
social organisation works only when one assumes
that all interactions are probabilistic – a ‘removal of
the indeterminism and novelty from the domain of
the social’.50 He further argues that this amounts to
a disregarding of politics in favour of technocratic
logic, as politics is precisely the mechanism that
resolves indeterminism in the social domain.
What Mills’s critique highlights most of all
with regard to the main question of this article
is the importance of invention – systems that
evolve through metastability rather than the
more commonly described concept of equilib-
rium stability. In Simondon’s terms: going beyond
being ‘enslaved by the nality of the whole’ through
unremitting re-organisation.51 Another way of
describing this is as self-production (autopoiesis),
rather than solely self-reproduction (or self-regu-
lation). Autopoietic systems can be categorised as
systems that can re-inform their internal congura-
tions: through metastability, these systems have
the capacity to generate new states, and as such
are continuously in a state of becoming, rather than
being.52 Metastability brings us back to Feenberg:
his conception of a critical technology relies on a
capacity for reorganisation which lies within the
political. Bearing the notion of autopoiesis in mind,
107
recognise the importance of material (re)organisa-
tion in shaping systems’ behaviours through the
concept of autopoiesis.59 Moreover, it has been
argued that any venture into the creation and main-
tenance of general intelligence systems seemingly
has to rely on a distribution, and thus exteriorisation,
of intelligence.60 This ‘ooading of our cognitive
processing into the environment’ is what allows
an understanding of intelligence as a distributed
phenomenon – a process that takes place through a
network of technical and biological individuals in the
Simondonian sense.61
Architecture and a critical technicity
Returning to the central question of this article then,
it might be argued that one way of modulating the
outcomes of technical development lies with this
environmental porosity and its relation to cognition
as a network of technical and biological individuals.
Within an architectural context it is important to
emphasise that this environment consists in more
than purely the physical boundaries and objects that
surround an intervention; instead, the broader posi-
tioning of an object within its physical, ideological,
technical and social context denes an overarching
system-environment that building occupants inter-
face with during their stay in, or use of, a building.
Crucially however, the component that takes
this architectural environment beyond the traditional
notion of an architectural context, as these aspects
are commonly called, is its change over time. By
foregoing the nature of architecture as a process
that unfolds over time, I would claim that architec-
tural practice is relieved of discussing and perhaps
even conceptualising this part of an intervention.
As such, one might argue that architecture lacks a
form of retention that would enable the formation of
a critical technicity in the built environment.
This is especially evident if one considers that
the transmission of architectural design intentions
relies rst and foremost on static images – snap-
shots of an intervention’s lifetime, often limited
to the image of a newly built structure. One might
can retain their functioning in light of any environ-
mental change, and therefore necessarily have a
capacity for self-reorganisation. For this, a system
has to sacrice its direct functionality in the following
way: a system that is narrowly functional is limited to
a very specic given set of rules; when these rules
no longer manage to adequately enable the system
to interface with its environment, it fails.55 Crucially,
the specicity of a system’s rules constrains the
complexity of the system, meaning that it cannot
meet the variety of its environment. As such, the
point can be made that for a system to be viable,
it must have a level of plasticity; it has to be able
to reorganise its governing logic in light of envi-
ronmental change.56 This is a point that Simondon
elaborates on more fully: it is not just that function-
ality negatively impacts a system’s plasticity, but
more generally, that it is through a greater level of
abstraction away from functional demands that a
technical object is made open to multifunctionality,
and thus further concretised.57
The conclusion of this argument is that for any
meaningful concept of change, and thus futurity,
to arise a system must be specically porous in its
governing logic, especially with regard to its envi-
ronment. In the context of organisational systems,
this interaction fundamentally relies on humans. If
one intends to engender a critical form of technics
there, this social basis can be taken to indicate that
what is crucial for any sort of autopoiesis to arise
is a direct relation between the subjects of these
processes and the system that is being designed.
This reasoning can be extended by looking at
contemporary literature on the research into arti-
cial intelligence – currently, there is a growing
acknowledgement of what might be referred to as
embedded cognition or situatedness, and its impor-
tance in nurturing any intelligence toward greater
levels of complexity, inuencing both the dominant
paradigm in articial intelligence and, coincidentally,
contemporary cognitive science.58 What is relevant
to this article is that there is a sense in which current
paradigms of cognition and (articial) intelligence
108
2. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Capitalism Has Broken Free of the
Shackles of Democracy’, Financial Times, 1 February
2015.
3. Shoshana Zubo, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism
and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’,
Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (15
March 2015): 75–89.
4. Ibid.
5. Mario Carpo, The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–
2012 (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013); Mario Carpo, The
Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
6. Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism:
How Contemporary Architecture Became an
Instrument of Control and Compliance (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016); Giuseppe Rega and Valeria
Settimi, ‘Nonlinearity in Architecture versus Science:
Borrowing the Lexicon of Complexity or Exploiting Its
Powerfulness?’, in Structures and Architecture, ed.
Paulo J. S. Cruz (London: Taylor & Francis Group,
2010), 167–74; Leonard R. Bachman, ‘Architecture
and the Four Encounters with Complexity’,
Architectural Engineering and Design Management
4, no. 1 (6 January 2008): 15–30.
7. Rega and Settimi, ‘Nonlinearity in Architecture’.
8. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches
of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
9. Democratisation is not Beer’s term as used in his
technical writing – instead, Beer refers to a kind of
autonomy at dierent levels within an organisation,
so that decisions can be decentralised. This was
the basis for his management theories and models,
where too much hierarchy is seen as inhibitive
to the self-organising capacity of a system. See:
Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain; Thomas Swann,
‘Towards an Anarchist Cybernetics: Staord Beer,
Self-Organisation and Radical Social Movements’,
Ephemera 18, no. 3 (2018): 427–56.
10. Staord Beer, Designing Freedom (Hoboken: John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1974), 32–33.
11. The creation of complex geometric patterns and forms
has been a central pursuit for many architectural
thus posit that architecture as a discipline in its
current form has no ‘memory-for-time’ that enables
designers to grapple with these questions and to
participate in the shaping of futurity when it comes to
the lifetime of the building in any conscious manner.
As I have outlined in the previous sections,
the notion of development in se is premised on
change over time. For any meaningful conception
of a technical development within the built envi-
ronment itself, and not external to it, a centring of
this understanding of architecture as a system is
required, and thus, an understanding of the archi-
tectural intervention as a continuous moment
– a proceeding intervention. Crucially, one can then
consider the aforementioned processes of invention
and individuation of technics within the architectural
process. From there, if one’s aim is to in-form a
particular emancipatory futurity, the necessity of a
relational approach is apparent: the potential for this
futurity, and its proceeding invention, is – through
autopoiesis – fundamentally tied to plasticity and
situatedness.
If one’s intention is indeed to maximise the
multiplicity of emancipatory outcomes that a system
can generate, then due to the nature of the process
of in-formation being premised on the resolution of
indeterminism, a key role in this system lies with its
integration with one particular aspect of its environ-
ment, namely the biological entities that occupy it. A
critical technicity within architecture then, is one that
is premised on a politicised architectural process,
providing the capacity for the emergence of new
rules and logics that follow from recongurations
of the unity that denes the total relation between
building, environment and user. This is a dance of
continuous reinvention on the part of both architec-
tural intervention and occupant, a ‘technicity that
determines the potentials of a shared becoming’
between technical and physical individuals.62
Notes
1. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Hoboken: Wiley,
2016), 54, 55.
109
20. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of
Technical Objects, ed. and trans. Ccile Malaspina
and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing,
2012), 26.
21. Iliadis, ‘Informational Ontology’, 15–16; Simondon,
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 28.
22. Ibid., 51.
23. Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A
Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 30.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. Feenberg, Transforming Technology.
26. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects, 252.
27. Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics
(London: Routledge, 2003), 3.
28. Bernard Stiegler, ‘General Ecology, Economy, and
Organology’, trans. Daniel Ross, in General Ecology:
The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl and
James Burton (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2017), 129–50.
29. Ibid., 130.
30. Stiegler’s retentions. Similarly, for Feenberg, within
technological historicity, this happens through the
technical code.
31. Claire Colebrook, ‘Futures’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed.
Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 196–208.
32. Stiegler, ‘General Ecology, Economy, and
Organology’, 137.
33. Zubo, ‘Big Other’.
34. I am here refering specically to what is commonly
known as value-form theory . See Edith González,
‘From Revolution to Democracy: The Loss of the
Emancipatory Perspective’, in Open Marxism 4,
ed. Edith González, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso
García Vela and John Holloway (London: Pluto
Press, 2019), 155–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.
ctvs09qng.15.
35. Colebrook, ‘Futures’, 13.
36. Roger C. Conant and Wilbur Ross Ashby, ‘Every
Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That
designers throughout the history of the practice, often
with very successful and highly complex outcomes
in terms of ornamental design. Contemporary design
practice in this sense uses digital computational
technology in a way that diers little from how it has
used pen and paper throughout history – for drawing,
geometrical construction and classical calculation.
12. See Erich Hörl, ‘Introduction to General Ecology: The
Ecologization of Thinking’, in General Ecology: The
New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl and James
Burton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–74.
13. Beer, Designing Freedom.
14. Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 126.
15. This refers in particular to the external nature of many
of these developments to architecture. While there
are many architects attempting to ‘design their way
around’ technologies that are in development, their
original articulations and manifestations are presum-
ably not elaborated by architects in most cases. This
leaves any architectural application as an appro-
priation of existing invention, and thus risks both
shoe-horning technologies into architectural practice,
and unwarranted solutionism. See: Douglas Murphy,
The Architecture of Failure (Winchester : Zero, 2012).
16. Adam Greeneld, Against the Smart City (London:
Verso, 2013).
17. Adam Greeneld, Radical Technologies: The Design
of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017); Matthew
Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg, The Politics of
Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
18. Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of
Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2.
19. Technics refers here specically to technique, as
opposed to the more general English term tech-
nology which may refer to technique, technical
objects and the study of technical objects. See
Andrew Iliadis, ‘Informational Ontology: The Meaning
of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation’,
Communication +1 2, no. 1 September (2013): 1–18,
https://doi.org/10.7275/R59884XW.
110
Ricardo Uribe, ‘Autopoiesis: The Organization of
Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model’,
BioSystems 5, no. 4 (1974): 187–96.
53. Carpo, The Second Digital Turn, 143.
54. Feenberg, Transforming Technology, 22.
55. David Bates and Nima Bassiri, Plasticity and
Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject,
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 205–6.
56. Bates and Bassiri, Plasticity and Pathology,194–218.
57. Stavros Kousoulas, ‘Shattering the Black Box:
Technicities of Architectural Manipulation’,
International Journal of Architectural Computing 16,
no. 4 (2018): 295–305.
58. Tom Froese, ‘On the Role of AI in the Ongoing
Paradigm Shift within the Cognitive Sciences’, in
50 Years of Articial Intelligence: Lecture Notes in
Computer Science vol. 4850, ed. Max Lungarella,
Fumiya Iida, Josh Bongard and Rolf Pfeifer (Berlin,
Heidelberg: Springer, 2007), 63–75; Randall D. Beer,
‘Dynamical Systems and Embedded Cognition’, in
The Cambridge Handbook of Articial Intelligence, ed.
Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 128–51.
59. Ibid.
60. Benjamin Bratton, ‘Outing Articial Intelligence:
Reckoning with Turing Tests’, in Alleys of Your Mind:
Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, ed. Matteo
Pasquinelli (Lüneberg: Meson press, 2015), 69–80.
61. Beer, ‘Dynamical Systems and Embedded Cognition’,
131.
62. Kousoulas, ‘Shattering the Black Box’, 6.
Biography
Zach Mellas is a design engineer currently working in the
Netherlands. He received his undergraduate and grad-
uate degrees from Delft University of Technology. During
his Master of Science in Architecture, Urbanism and
Building Sciences he studied and developed interactive
digital systems with the aim of centring democratic design
processes, starting from architectural theory and critical
philosophy of technology. His research interests include
cybernetics, prefabrication, design automation, organisa-
tional theory and computational design.
System’, International Journal of Systems Science 1,
no. 2 (8 October 1970): 89–97.
37. Stiegler, ‘General Ecology, Economy, and
Organology’.
38. Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 235.
39. Ibid., 235.
40. Carpo, The Second Digital Turn, 5.
41. Ibid.
42. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects, 57.
43. Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 231.
44. Variety, in cybernetic terminology, is dened as the
amount of possible states or outcomes that a system
has. See: Staord Beer, ‘The Will of the People’, The
Journal of the Operational Research Society 34, no. 8
(August 1983): 797; Andrew Pickering, ‘The Science
of the Unknowable: Staord Beer’s Cybernetic
Informatics’, Kybernetes 33, no. 3/4 (2004): 499–521.
45. W. Ross Ashby, ‘Requisite Variety and Its Implications
for the Control of Complex Systems’, in Facets of
Systems Science (Boston, MA: Springer US, 1991),
405–17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0718-
9_28; Conant and Ashby, ‘Every Good Regulator’.
46. Andrew Pickering, ‘Cybernetics and the Mangle:
Ashby, Beer and Pask’, Social Studies of Science
32, no. 3 (2002): 413–37; Pickering, The Cybernetic
Brain; Andrew Feenberg, ‘The Internet as Network,
World, Co-Construction, and Mode of Governance’,
Information Society 35, no. 4 (8 August 2019): 229–43.
47. Neil Leach, ‘Adaptation’, in Architecture and the
Machinic: Experimental Encounters of Man with
Architecture, Computation and Robotics, ed. Arie
Graaand and Dulmini Perera (Köthen: Hochschule
Anhalt, Hochschulbibliothek, 2018), 46–59.
48. David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun, ‘Marx,
Architecture and Modernity’, Journal of Architecture
11, no. 2 (2006): 169–85.
49. Simon Mills, ‘Simondon and Big Data’, Platform:
Journal of Media and Communication 6 (2015): 59–72.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects, 119.
52. See: Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and
