Abstract - Patrik Schumacher
Formfinding and Tectonic Articulation - Making Performative Logics Speak
The demarcation between architecture and engineering rests on the distinction of the built environment’s social functioning from its technical functioning. While the technical functioning considers the physical integrity, fabrication constraints, on site constructability and physical performance of the building in relation to its users understood as physical-biological bodies, architecture must take into consideration that a building’s social function, i.e. its function as ordering and guiding communicative frame, is functioning via its appearance and legibility. The core competency of architecture is thus the task of articulation. The use of structural form-finding logics disciplines the spatial morphologies in ways that are advantageous for the task of articulation, i.e. the task of elaborating a systematic spatial language. Tectonic articulation is here proposed as the concept for the strategic articulatory utilization of the morphological differentiations that emerge from engineering logics like structural engineering, environmental engineering and façade engineering.
