The Plasticity of the Real: Speculative Architecture

Abstract

Von Samsonow argues that architecture can play an important role in the framework of contemporary speculative philosophy as it is founded on geology. Speculative philosophy might engage architecture to rediscover and reintegrate the geo-historical foundations of being as well as of architecture. Contemporary architecture is critizised being largely driven by a feeling of resentment towards the earth. Architecture is of ontological interest because it borrows its key function from geology; from the arrangement of various materials, offering spaces or biotopes. In contemporary architecture however, this function got lost. Whereas old architecture seeks to ground dwelling in the earth and invites our bodies to understand what the earth can be to it, contemporary architecture disregards the body and is fixated on the eye, making architecture an issue of vision. Contemporary architecture is pure pornography; it simulates sensations and affirms the logic of capitalism. It degenerates the original earth to dirt and replaces it with an artificial earth, that is erected upwards in the form of an overground, which forms the anti-thesis to the earth. Von Samsonow calls this the 'takeoff strategy' of contemporary architecture. Because it is driven by a theoretical pre-oedipalization, speculative philosophy may play an important role in the regrounding of contemporary architectures takeoff strategy. To understand this we have to look at Meillassouxs concept of the ancestral object, that gives us the existence of the earth prior to thought and knowledge. Von Samsonow interprets this ancestral object as a symbolic mother, in order to open up the possiblity of thinking the earth in terms of universal generation. From the point of view of the earth itself, it is filled up with objects generated by her; there is no distinction between organic and inorganic or between (natural) generation and (technical) production. Von Samsonow calls the quest for ancestrality the gaia-istic turn in speculative philosophy. This turn has revolutionary potential.