This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology.
The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism's infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic 'networks'. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks.
The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks.
This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.
About the Author: Gary Huafan He is a scholar and architect currently residing in Hangzhou, China. He received his PhD from Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and School of Architecture in 2020. His primary research focuses on the intersection of architecture and theories of modernity, with particular interest in forms of naturality, culture, class, and social identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and the United States. He has co-edited the collection of essays Nature as Ornament (Yale University Press, 2020), and his scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is a licensed architect with a professional BArch degree from Cornell University and has previously taught at Cornell University, Yale University, and the China Academy of Art. He is currently a researcher and assistant professor at Zhejiang University School of Art and Archaeology.
Skender Luarasi is a licensed architect, educator, and writer. His PhD, received at Yale in 2018, focuses on how design processes end and how such question intersects with style, geometry, and parametricism in history. He has published in Future Anterior, Log, Bitácora Arquitectura, Haecceity, and Forum A+P, among others, and has contributed in The Past is Unpredictable: Untimely Interrogations into Architecture (Transcript, 2022). He has co-authored Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on Geometry and the Baroque (Routledge, 2019). He is also the author of Survival through Architecture: A Survey and Analysis of the Architectural Oeuvre of Skënder Kristo Luarasi, 1908-1976 (TU Graz, 2023). He holds an MArch from MIT and a BArch from Wentworth Institute of Technology. He is currently the dean of the Faculty of Research and Development at Polis University in Tirana, Albania. He has previously taught at the RISD, Yale, UMass Amherst, WSU, and MIT. His design practice is based in Boston and Tirana.
