Urban Correlationism: A Genealogy of Architectural Logics

In this Thesis, I problematize the relation between architecture as a material-discursive practice and correlationism. To do so, I deploy a series of minor questions that wish to examine it from multiple points of view: an architect’s access to a world, the ways it represents it and the ways that it attempts to manipulate it. Each of these singular points are understood as transformations of a problematic field: architectural logics, the conceptual apparatus of a material-discursive practice, as they individuate along the individuation of the architectural subject that deploys them and the architectural object that affords them. The aim of the Thesis is neither to proclaim the hegemony of a particular mode of architectural thinking and doing, nor to provide an alternative. Quite the contrary, the aim is to determine the relays, the singular points that could assist in a reconfiguration of the problematic field of architecture in order to discover its productive capacities. When and where architects access a world? How do they represent this access? For what purpose do an architectural subject and object stand apart in the first place? How could they be considered as one? Where is the architectural input coming from, how is it processed, when does it produce an output? These are the minor questions that in this Thesis populate architectural thinking and its problematic field. However, the questions alone do not suffice: they need to encounter what could provide them with a level of consistency that would not make them appear arbitrary.Therefore, corresponding to each of the singular problematic points that deal with architecture and correlationism, a number of trajectories are unfolded. Vitruvius, Alberti and Le Corbusier aid in understanding how architecture is bifurcated and how architects assume that they can access this bifurcation; the entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands outline the possibility of an architectural mind that moves beyond the thresholds of representation; Simondon, Uexküll, a stilus and a sign reconsider the ways architects approach their environment; finally, the city of Athens speculates on the possibility of a non-correlational architectural thought. In Athens, moving beyond urban correlationism, I extrapolate on an architectural subject that becomes one with its environment; not an architecture of a priori narratives or a posteriori typologies but an architecture on and of the limits, an architecture a praesenti and au milieu.