Allegory, alterity or a faithful image of the architecture of an era?

Inventing new tools means inventing new spaces.

To venture into new spaces is to go beyond the limits of the known world, even in danger of getting lost. As technology opens up new spatial domains with the potential for inhabitation, new transgressions take place, and these require the creation of new forms of architecture. Inevitably, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, as the passage of time metabolizes strange images and forms and transforms them into (new) commonplaces. Transformations, especially rapid ones, driven by technological progress and mutations that instantly and irretrievably fracture familiar definitions and conceptions, have become a constant in modern culture.

In biological terms, the growing interest in the 'other', the 'alter', indicates an epistemological shift of emphasis from linear to branching modes of evolution: new species of theories, practices, disciplines and, ultimately, new species of beings are emerging. Allogenesis refers to the 'alien within', or rather to the process of evolution and metamorphosis of a species to the point where the new branch becomes completely alien and different from its origins.The Renaissance anthropomorphic production of the philosophical notion of the human being followed an era preoccupied with the theocentric production of the philosophical notion of God. The Birth of Man led to the collapse of theocentrism, with Nietzsche pronouncing the sentence: 'God is dead'.

In other words, centrifugal allocentrism is now pushing aside anthropocentrism, just as it had replaced theocentrism, and bringing into the spotlight the alien, the other side of the human coin, who is coming to take the place of Nietzsche's superman.

Read the full text in issue 1 / 2012 of Arhitectura magazine.