Transductive Architecture

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This paper proposes a transductive architecture informed by Stiegler’s organology, and shows how such an organology exists already within the work of Le Corbusier. I show how his early work developed from a more conventional formal ontology, exemplified by his Artist’s Studio project of 1910, firstly towards a more playful compositional strategy in the Dom-ino house and the mass concrete houses of 1915, and then onto a fully organological approach where the relations between elements – existing and new buildings, inhabitants and environments – are primary (in transductive manner), and the terms of those relations (us, the building) come, as it were, afterwards. Citing Vers une architecture and analysing Villa Savoye as a tertiary protention that responds to the tertiary retentions of baroque and neo-classical Paris, I show how our ontology of architecture can profoundly change not only how we talk about it, but how we engage and become it.