Towards a Taxonomy of The 21st century Architectural Practices in the age of Sustainability and Technology

Abstract

The architectural practices witness drastic transformations in the 21st century globally, which put the architectural community in a situation of crisis; facing challenges to identify different trajectories and their characteristics for a reliable evaluation of the approaches and strategies. Conferences and research laboratories started to seek a philosophy interpreting new practices, mostly known is the 2003 Pompidou exhibition in France discussing “Non-standard Architectures”. This research investigates the interrelation between architecture, and the most-two dialectic terms of the age “sustainability and technology”, linking influencing beliefs and philosophies with the design approaches and strategies through a comprehensive design theory. It emphasizes the paradigm shift from modernism architecture that tied the design to craft to a richer knowledge paradigm ties design, technology and craft in a complex-system. This has more impressive and complex drivers corresponding to the reflects of “The Knowledge Power” coined by Foucault that shapes the whole cultural paradigm and its sub-systems of any society across history. Such a philosophy can reach a meta-theory about current practices of architecture seen as isolated islands or fragmented practices through revealing the radical drivers of current iconic projects and identifying hypothetical boundaries that interprets these typologies and their relevancy to each other promoting a new holistic paradigm of architecture.