La determinazione delle specie. Incandescenza e piano tipico

Abstract

OMA’s Typical Plan seizes the notion of type by developing it into its exact opposite. If such a concept had mostly been linked to an analysis of architectural history to be expressed through a series of different species, the shift from type to typical seems to completely subvert its mechanics: the typical plan is not about difference and variation but rather works through indetermination and deprogramming. In The Incandescent, French philosopher Michel Serres offers an image of a somewhat similar mechanics. If evolution is about the proliferation into a multiplicity of different species and nuances, incandescence is instead the ability to invert such a process and to lose any specificity. What appears to be a regression is instead the access to a higher generality. The one of Serres is not just a poetic illustration of human nature but first and foremost an account of a mechanics that follows contemporary physics. The colorful spectrality that evolution produces and the pale incandescence of its inverse are modeled upon entropic ladders of differentiation and of de-differentiation that do not produce absolute and positive values. Measurements emerge instead through sounding limits that are objective as much as arbitrary – simultaneously read-and-written. Such a physical and mechanical model can perhaps shed light on the Typical Plan that emancipates it from a merely historical and critical reading and, conversely, revive the notion of type that would be able to provide an architectonic image of physical accounts.