Architecture Facing the Digital Revolution:

Mind, Land and Society

Josep Muntaola Thornberg. Architect

jose.muntanola@upc.edu
www.arquitectonics.com

School of Architecture of Barcelona

Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Diagonal 649, planta 5a
08028 Barcelona
Spain

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Introduction: The Reality of the Digital Impact on Architecture
Architecture is affected by technological changes of the digital revolution from
different sides. The first is the use of computers in design, which opens up enormous
possibilities for imagination and the building of new shapes. The second, the GIS, or
satellite information systems and their use in city planning. In the third place, the impact
of transport and communication systems increases the possibilities of working at home,
and of being permanently connected to the world no matter where we are. Finally, the
higher precision of the machines used in construction and in production of constructive
elements with accurate measures. As I will aim to discover, which I have already done
on previous occasions,1 all these possibilities are used more as a novelty to compete
in marketing and promotion, than as an effective device to increase accuracy of
measures, quality and control of the building process, etc. Architecture and planning
have never been more inaccurate than now when we have the means to avoid
millimetric errors in the transformation of landscapes, cities and buildings. Has not the
same thing happened in medicine or in computing itself ? which should make us
reflect on the enormous differences between the marketing of sale of computers or of
sale of land and buildings. The laws of supply and demand play with opposite rules. For
example, to delay the sale of computers or cars is not profitable because they will
devalue within a few months, but retaining land is often a guarantee of wealth in the
future, without anybody denouncing the retention.

Let us see where all this will bring us through three linked meditations.

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First Meditation: Data towards an Ontology of Architecture

In several publications I have been analyzing data on what architecture is in our

society,2 with help from fields that do not pertain to architecture itself as a profession,
but that are capable of going into depth in search of the meaning of the acts of design,
building and dwelling, which for twenty centuries, and up to M. Heidegger, J. Derrida
and P. Ricoeur, have been the central axes in the theory of architecture.3 In diagrams I
and II we can see these three acts as basic dimensions of an ethics of architectural
wisdom, in accordance with the famous definition of Aristotle,4 and also as a complex
structure of architecture as built and inhabited place, which finds, maybe, the best
definitions in the latest works of the now deceased French philosopher Paul Ricoeur,
without forgetting the tense dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman that
ended so sadly,5 but that was of great interest. Let us have a very brief look, then, on
two of these data towards an ontology of architecture.6

The first data comes from the essential change in the conception of places to live in of
children between two and three years of age, just when human intelligence rapidly
surpasses that of other animal species. In diagrams III and IV I have synthesized the
essentials of this change.7 Diagram III represents the place before the time concept as
something irreversible appears. So the child will always be a child and the father or the
mother were never children. Place is indistinctly either train-street, or window-
mountain, in the first nomadic case, or Aristotelian time. In the second case it is
mountain or looking outside, in total immobility and contemplation, in accordance
with a sedentary place, with Augustian time of dilatation of the soul. Human beings
either walk or keep still, but their subjectivity in both cases is dissolved in a
psychosocial comparison that does not allow exceptions. Diagram IV contains a
radically different conception, because here there is a before and an after: I will grow
up, my parents were children. And there is en empty place where bodies no longer have
chimneys and doors, and buildings do not have legs and eyes as in the previous stage of
diagram III.

What has happened? On the one hand, the two times, the Aristotelian and the
Augustian, have merged into a unique empty spacetime, which permits to separate the
body from the content of its container, and understand that one space can be occupied
by me or by another, without moving the building, and understand also its capacity to
contain something, approaching thus the known definition by Aristotle of place as
interior envelope of the enveloping body, which limits the contained body.

Also in agreement with the famous definitions of Plato8 on place as something that is
not sensitive or intelligible, which is discovered with a spurious reason, as in a dream
when all senses are absent. Children put everybody to sleep, just before moving
from a solid place to an empty place, as we can see in diagram V.

The essential thing about this first piece of data, on the one hand, for an ontology of
architecture, is that the spatial and temporal correlation is necessary in order to separate
body and building and to make social, intersubjective and adult relations possible. Also,
that the relative empty space is a sociophysical space that opens possibilities for
geometries, and for the crossing between dynamic ways and static forms, which are the
bases of the poetical relation between building and dwelling. However, as said Paul
Ricoeur, this space converts the interlacement between Aristotelian and Agustian time

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into void, into a kind of black hole, insensitive and unintelligible, in accordance with
the Platonic prophesies. This is what best characterizes our intelligence, and what is
hardest for us to understand, a paradox that is, perhaps, not at all strange, because we
know how hard it is to be aware of familiar things in everyday life. This empty space is
what guarantees freedom between action and contemplation,9 and between building and
dwelling, and, at the same time it gives to the subject the ontological autonomy that
defines John Searle, and that he identifies with the background. Furthermore, there
are lots of data waiting to be deciphered.

A second example comes from similar research, but with another aim. It is about
proving that the designs and the models of cities built by children of one school, show,
as if dealing with a test, the architectural (spacialtemporal and sociophysical)
structure of the transmission of knowledge of that school.

In other words, what educational factors mold and define the architecture of the cities
collectively designed by children? The answer is that these factors are exactly the same
that differentiate wild children and children that have lived with others of their own
species. And it was Linneo, the father of biology, who defined them perfectly well:10 a)
no conscience of their sex; b) difficulty in walking upright; c) unbalanced state of mind
and no sleeping rhythm; d) no recognition of body in a mirror; e) obvious lack of
language, geometry, etc. All this is irreversible if the wild state was lived out in key
periods for mental growth as for example the one described above from 2 to 3 years of
age. It is not difficult, either, to prove that these factors are, thus, the decisive ones in
the sociophysical space conceived from the age of three.

In diagrams VI and VII there are two examples of completely different architectures
created by two schools that often, without being aware of it, transmit a rather specific
architecture.

When we present these results to the teachers they ask: When did we transmit this
architectural structure? The precise answer is that instead of favouring interaction
between sexes, age groups, and cultures through the school activities and exercises, they
favoured individual work, or they favoured activities in separate girls and boys groups,
thus not calling for intersex and intergenerational interaction. Theatre (interactive),
music, etc., can prove to be activities with a high architectural level, whereas teaching
architectural styles, in a learned manner, can be done at a low architectural level, with
poor influence. Also important is the rhythm of the activities, or ritual, with special
emphasis on collective rituals: celebrations, artistic collective activities, social
experiences outside the school, etc. The same as for symbolic value, image, the built
place, always through the schools activities and the schools use of space.

So, the spaces of a city, their distribution, their size, their repetition, distinction between
private and public, festive or not, space for children and for adults, etc., depend on the
psycho-socio-physical model that the school transmits.11 Two schools with a similar
social level can transmit a completely different architecture. Therefore, as I said, it
is a test.

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Second Meditation: Architecture as Dream of Reason or as Digital
Nightmare
This second meditation aims to point out certain ideas in the transhumanistic
scientific debate in relation to architecture.12

Indeed, the crossroads between mind, land and society that I have described in the
ontological data of the first meditation, can be studied from various perspectives and in
the search for very different objectives. The Center for Visual Studies of Santa Cruz, in
California headed by M. Novak, defines itself as the only world center capable of
uniting science and art, through the use of powerful computers that can generate
transhumanistic architectural forms, in the sense that they possess their own
intelligence, totally different from that of previous architectural objects in history.13
This intelligence will attain a synthesis between brain and computer, and it will,
simultaneously, create a new mind, a new land and a new society, where art, science
and politics cannot be distinguished, and, as in an enormous Bing-Bang, the three
axes in diagram I and II collapse into a new psycho-socio-physical object: the
Rhinoceros. Diagram VIII is built from the digitalization of the brain of M. Novak. Is
it science or fiction? A very expensive fiction or/and science in any case.

Thousands of students of architecture listen and look with enthusiasm to these proposals
that elevate their profession to the highest level of contemporary knowledge. What are,
then, the coordinates of these problems? Let us have a look.

1) In the view of epistemology of the machine-brain relations, and I refer here to

the works by John Searle, the problem is not the great capacity of the computer,
but the dissolution of the subject in an object created by a machine dealing
with algorithms, in such a way that the object must be accepted as a result of an
innovative scientific process that, moreover, is artistically valid and ethically
indescribable. In architecture this produces today virtual designs that are based
on virtual assumptions in the digitalized design, even though it is impossible to
build and use them in the real world the way it was promised in the virtual
world. And, above all, even though the system of relations that the design
suggests virtually has no relation with the system of relations that built work
obtains in a precise place. The crossing between the real world (city) and the
virtual world (design), does not in these cases lead to humanism or to the
promised transhumanism, just as would occur to a child that literally acted out a
film in the real world, whether it be Superman or Matrix, the disappointment is
bound to be dangerous and traumatic.14

2) This inhuman distance, or this bad correlation, between reality and virtuality,
leads to obvious abuses in the representation of physical and social-historical
reality, with actions, distances and textures, where the virtual representation is
the legal document that makes it allowable to eliminate annoying biological,
sociological or territorial realities, simply by not drawing them. The digital
facilitation, for precision and for error, indicates that there is a necessity for a
legislation that watches over abuse and neglect. Obviously it would be unjust to
detain the digital process in architecture for moral reasons, but we should
condemn the systematic use of the virtual in architecture and planning as a

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 screen that does not permit us to see the abuses and the speculations on the real.
Just think about what these same errors would mean in medicine, in courts, etc.

3) It would be appropriate here to reflect on the pathological dimension between

the three spaces of diagram I. As said Freud, the same elements that are crucial
in the development of a literary, architectural, etc. poetics lead to the wonders of
human innovation in art, science and ethics, on the one hand, and they are in the
origin of madness, on the other hand.15 Madness is born just when space is filled
with objects and strange guests, which are incompatible with the conception of
space, by the subject in its ontological intimacy.16 Paul Ricoeur17 warns that we
cannot literally move from a pathological situation to a general
phenomenological explication, but there is no doubt that we are still being
seduced by psychoanalysis.

4) The relations between art, science and ethics in architecture are generated, then,
between reason, madness, and magic or alchemy as exemplify the works of Paul
Ricoeur that I referred to before. Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the thinkers of the
twentieth century that best defined the risks of a confusion between art, science
and ethics, defending with his architectonics and his chronotopes the
possibility of finding some threads of reason in this digital labyrinth. Paul
Ricoeur has Bakhtin in mind when facing the most complex moments of his
discourse.18 I will aim to synthesize a diagnosis of the current situation of
architecture in the third meditation, because it is obvious that an architectural
object relates art, science and ethics, and thus we should ask where to find the
seeds (or the genes) of its madness, or of the bad crossing between virtuality
and reality in the architectural object.19

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Third Meditation: The Dialogical Hope
Aristotle, as I said, instead of defining the ethics that the architect needs, he defined
ethics as something the architect has when he is wise and does good work.
Architectural wisdom was, then, the reasonable and virtuous union between ethics,
science and art. Bakhtin builds a similar structure with ethics as the main pillar, through
an architecture between I and the other, and determines that the deep aesthetical
structure of art is an architectonics, which differs from that of cognitive science,
subject to the social and scientific reciprocity that is missing in the artistic object.

Sad Amir Arjomand establishes, in social science, an architectural base of the

development in knowledge between the individual and society when he recently
indicated: The challenge is to develop instruments of analysis for architectural
reconstruction of the social process, which is polyvalent, though directional from its
cultural signification.20

One approach to the theme, I think, is the specific characteristics of architecture of

basing itself in a sociophysical spacetime that is developed from an essential
psychosocial asymmetry: as indicates Jean Piaget, the first childhood intuitions in
spacetime are the last ones to be mathematized thematically by civilization. If space was
the crossing between nomadic displacement and sendentarism of the dilatation of
contemplative time, it is no surprise that this same space is what is used for the
inverted crossing between psychogenetic and sociogenetic development, just like
children show it in their imagined places. The backward questioning by E. Husserl in
his Origin of Geometry21 points to the same objective. The synthesis of Timaeus, I
believe, when it indicates, at the end of his dialogue, that for the reality of social and
physical spacetime: Now we must start again to crown the beginning, from this
ending22, is quite the same. In this manner the human mind obtains a continuous
Bing-Bang announced by my good friend Lewis Mumford when he wrote in 1974
that: The notion of an explosion and an implosion, a beginning and an ending,
may be only a very human metaphor, which the universe neither recognizes nor exhibits
... 23

Which consequences can we draw from all this? Maybe that at the end of the time
tunnel we will find our origin and that it is this truth that allows the development of the
game of imagination.24 Thus, the digital revolution brings us closer to the origin of
the mind, to the world and to history, the more we consider an unexpected and
transhumanistic future. If we advance in the digital world with the scientific,
aesthetical and ethical precision of a doctor, then why should we fear its impact? But it
is a dangerous toy in the hands of unscrupulous architects that first and foremost want
power and money. The toy, then, turns into a dangerous weapon because it seduces in
the same manner exploring seduces children until they are electrocuted.

The origin of madness is not to be found, then, in space, but in the non-correlation
between my space and the space of the other. This lack of correlation can be supported
by built architecture without knowing, in the same way that schools transmit a
spatialtemporal and psycho-socio-physical architecture, without being aware of it.

Cooperation, interchange and coexistence, so many times defended by Jean Piaget in the
nineteen twenties, before the First World War, is the best guarantee of mental health and

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knowledge in sociophysical space. Autism and dictatorship only lead to ignorance,
violence or madness. Therefore I am here among philosophers, me, an architect, to see
if the possibilities of my madness increase or diminish.

In diagram IX I have put a chronotopic and sociophysical classification of art, though

impossible, even when a center, Black Hole and Bing-Bang, of the mind, is
occupied with mathematics and geometry, where art is dissolved into science, but that
the digital world, reminding us of the world of a two year old child (diagram X), seems
to be capable of virtualizing all the senses in an architectonics where mind, history and
land melt together.

I am suggesting that the spatial and temporal inversion between psychogenesis and
sociogenesis is necessary in order to conceive our mental, social and territorial space,
because, as a last resort, this space measures our path between life and death
simultaneously, as a species, as individuals and as a part of the universal cosmos.

The digital revolution radicalizes this possibility and moves us to live closer and closer
to the existential Black Hole, origin and end of the human being. But this closeness
should not blind us, on the contrary, it should enlighten us. If a child starts with a
mental, functional and psychogenetic spacetime that is the last to be themasized
mathematically and sociogenetically: Does not the beginning of mathematization
seven thousand years back with letters-numbers and numbers-letters correspond with
the last phases of functional, psychogenetic spacetime, in the hands of artists of a high
mental level? Does not Euclid and his geometry occupy a crossing in this psycho-
sociogenetic overlapping, and, therefore, psychogenesis and sociogenesis coincide here
in a unique cosmic (astronomic) spacetime? Is it not so that between evolutionism and
creationism the proposal of Jean Piaget is more subtle, when it accepts an auto-creation
in the heart of an evolution and an auto-evolution in the heart of an experimental
process that is creative up to a certain point?

Thus, there still is between mind, land and society a presence, a material, social and
mental reality that, as I indicated above, Jacques Derrida asked Peter Eisenman to have
in mind, in the last dialogue for years between architecture and philosophy that
concluded sadly in a radical disagreement.25

Derrida urged Eisenman to abandon empty spacetime made of absences, as the aim of
his innovative architecture, because that meant a progressive abandonment of the
fundamental problems of social spacetime: poverty, technology, antijudaism, religions,
etc., that is, spaces of presence. Peter Eisenman answered him saying that he had not
understood the proposal, because he was not an architect, and not being able to
understand that this empty space without functions made of absences is the best promise
for a better world of future presences. A dream for Eisenman, a nightmare for
Derrida, architecture still raises passion. What for Derrida was a distancing between
virtuality and reality, was for Eisenman a guarantee of the opposite, of a reconciliation,
for a better future.

Antoni Gaudi said that to be original is to be close to the origin, if he had lived today
perhaps he would had helped us to understand the exit from the labyrinth. We have had,
however, a great architect: Enric Miralles, he died too early in 2000, 45 years old. He
wrote his own epitaph for his grave in the cemetery of Igualada, Spain, which he

8
himself designed: To build architecture with invisible threads, so when I wake up in
the morning I feel like walking to the corner bar for a cup of coffee.26

A dream of reason, then, but not a digital nightmare, a daily nature without
rhinoceros. Then space is the limit (as the invisible thread) where mind, territory and
society live together peacefully, with health and with intelligence.27

Health, peace and sustainability of nature come together, then, both in digital
virtuality and in architecture in the real world. Our psychosocial equilibrium needs
both worlds, because each cosmic spacetime (place) must have a specific psycho-
sociogenetic crossing. That is precisely what is shown in diagrams I and II, which are
like an ending that crowns the beginning of this text, pointing to a better architecture...
This is what I call: the specific modernity of architecture.28 I understand this specific
modernity, as something very close to the heterchronic model that my friend Jonas
Langer from Berkeley defines when he finds the bridge between ontogeny and
phylogeny in the human development of knowledge.29 Also here, exactly, Bakhtin
placed his concept of chronotope.

The digital revolution would allow project, territory and society to shape a better future,
optimalizing the heterchronic capacity in education, politics and architecture. If
instead we do not cease to build Babel towers, we should not blame the digital when
the dream of reason makes rhinoceros. Let us blame, then, our particular skill to
design nightmares.
1
Muntaola, J. Mens Space Architecture: The Semiologies of Brain and Machine Confronted. Quattro
Venti. Urbino, 2000. LEspace dans lImage et dans le Texte. (Pierre Pellegrino ed).
2
Muntaola, J. Topognesis uno, dos y tres. Oikos Tau edicions, Vilassar, 1980. Topognesis. Hacia una
arquitectura viva. Edicions UPC, Barcelona, 2000 (original in French in Anthropos, Paris, 1996). La
arquitectura como lugar. Edicions UPC, Barcelona, 2000.
3
See Ricoeur, P. Architecture et Hermeneutique/ Arquitectura y Hermenutica. Arquitectonics n 4,
Edicions UPC, 2002, Barcelona. (Unpublished texts in Spanish by Paul Ricoeur on architecture).
4
See Topognesis. Hacia una arquitectura viva. Opus cit note 2.
5
Lillyman; Neuman; Moriarty. Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture. Oxford University
Press.1994.
6
Data published in Spanish in: Topognesis. Hacia una arquitectura viva. Opus cit note 2. In Los nios
evaluando su ciudad. City Hall of Barcelona, 1992 (texts in English, Spanish and Catalan).
7
Muntaola, J. La arquitectura como lugar. Opus cit note 2.
8
Muntaola, J. Architecture, Hermeneutics and Semiotics: Timaeus Revisited. In Semiotics Around the
World. Mouton. 1997. (Rauch/Carr editors).
9
See Lerup, Lars. Building the Unfinished. Sage Pub., California, 1968 and Searle, John. La
construccin social de la realidad. Paids. 1997.
10
Los nios salvajes. A. Sanchez Ferlosio ed/Alianza editorial. Madrid, 1973.
11
See Camic-Joas eds. The Dialogical Turn. Rowman. 2004.
12
See Muntaola, J. ed, Arquitectura y transhumanismo. Edicions UPC, Barcelona, 2000.
13
Lecture by M. Novak at the meeting of European Schools of Architectue (EAAE-AEEA) in Crete in
September 2005.
14
It is not science fiction, a study on children of 2-4 years of age that watch television more than two
hours a day has shown an exponential increase in physical accidents and social disorientation due to this
cause of confusing reality and virtuality.
15
Excellent work Vamik D. Volkan and Salman Akhtars The Seed of Madness. International City Press,
1999.
16
It should be very interesting to relate this to the triple dimension of the Sera de gran inters
relacionarlo con la triple dimensin de la evolucin de las especies segn expertos en heterocrona.
(Muntaola, J. Las formas del tiempo. (In press). Ver, as mismo, Langer, J.; Rivera, S.; Schleswiger, M.;
Wakeley, A. Early Cognitive Development. Ontogeny and Phylogeny en Handbook of Developmental
Psychology. Valsiner, J.; Conrolly, K. eds. Sage. London, 2003.

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17
Ricoeur, P. La Philosophie de la Volont I. Aubier, Paris, 1949.
18
Both in Le Temps et le Rcit, and La Memoire, lHistoire et lOubli, in the crucial moments of synthesis
on what is to imagine that, in narrative configuration, Ricoeur cites and uses the categories of Bakhtin
as the best way to follow, with voices, views and chronotopes. He pointed out to me the necessity of
going more deeply into Bakhtin, in relation to architecture, in a direct conversation in Barcelona. (See
opus cit note 3).
19
On this: Ricoeur, P. Les Parcours de la Reconnaissance. Stock, Paris, 2005.
20
Opus cit note 11.
21
Husserl, E. LOrigine de la Geometrie. Translation and introduction by J. Derrida. PUF, Paris, 196
22
Opus cit note 8.
23
Mumford, L. My Work and my Days. Harcourt. New York, 1978.
24
Ricoeur, P. Lectures in Paris in 1973, published in Italian by Rita Messori. Palermo, 2002.
25
Ver opus cit note 5.
26
Muntaola, J. Arquitectura 2000/Architecture 2000. (Text in English and Spanish). Edicions UPC,
Barcelona, 2004. See opus cit note 5.
27
The work of Pardo, J.I. Las formas de la exterioridad. Pre-textos, Valencia, 1997, I think, follows a
similar path ...
28
See opus cit note 4.
29
See note 16.

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Diagram I: The three architectural transparencies

(prefiguration)
(design)
cosmic the BODY historical
transparency conscious of transparency
(cosmic itself (historical
time) time)

(refiguration) (configuration)
the BODY and the BODY and
the other bodies nature
(social dwelling) (construction
and territory)

mental
transparency
(mental and vital time)

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Diagram II: The three professions that need architectural wisdom because they must foresee the future
somehow or other (according to Aristotle).

Topogenetic
Cronotopo
chronotope
topogentico

The legislator The educator

(who makes the (in general)
constitutions, the
laws, etc.)

Historical-social
Psychogenetic chronotope
chronotope

The architect

12
Diagrama III: The body-place at the age of three

13
Diagram IV: The place at the age of four

14
Diagram V: Ontogenesis of space (we are all sleeping). (Between three and four years of age)

15
Diagram VI y VII: Dialogical and monological dimensions in childrens conception of places to live in

Monological cities built without Dialogical cities with socio-

dialogue between children, sexes, physical dialogue between boys
age groups, public and private and girls, theater and
spaces, etc. architecture, age groups, private
and public, etc.

16
Diagram VIII: Architectural Organisms by Marcos Novak

17
Diagram IX: Chronotopic Structure of Intersubjective and Intertextual Communication

Dance Music Architecture

Scenography Virtual Reality

Social Interactions
Axis
Drawing Mathematical/ Sculpture
Painting Geometric
Photography Chronotopes
Cinema Opera

Language Song (Voice) Theatre

Space/Time
Axis

18
Diagram X: Digital City by a two years old child

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