Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In architectural spatial design, the dynamic field of space is produced by the interactive transformation of subjects’ and objects’ characteristics. The simultaneous conception of subject-object semantic networks is attempted to be represented as bilingualism: Two languages with different histories intertwine regarding the sentient with the sensible and vice versa. Two systems with deep roots in the past are entangled to design the elusive object of the next subject-object encounters. The one describes the epistemological causality of object definition according to the perceptual, ideological, evaluative schemes of the subject. The other describes the ontological consistency of the object within categorical, functional, procedural semantic networks. During modernism and the changing phases of reality paradigms, an archive of designed objects “19th-21st century seating” is translated into the two languages. And respectively an archive of specific words and sentences is proposed as a frame for understanding the transcendency of semantic stereotypes, and as a heuristic tool for the elusive object in design. The archive is organized according to four cognitive areas: – transformations of reality, as alternation between the periodic dominance of the proposed bilingualism cognitive fields, – transformative rules of reality, as the periodic stabilizing rules of clustering properties referring to the bilingualist cognitive fields, – stereotyped formations of object properties, as representations of reality paradigms, – simulations of design object, as mechanism to assign properties to the real. The first two areas include the data background for object conception in our thought tradition. The third accepts the transcendency of data, constructing interpretative metalanguages. The fourth area reconstructs data with different object simulation species in a cloud of given properties: A post-definition of the elusive object properties within the present design process.