It is a manifesto for the latest movement. The exhibition 'Architectures Non Standard' in Centre Pompidou (Paris, 10 December to 1 March) presents work by a dozen architects who excel in their use of computers. The concourse of Centre Pompidou sets the scene for Trans-ports_MUSCLE by Oosterhuis.nl - sensational as a computer image, but once realized, it is just an ordinary blue tent which moves interactively in response to the public. The gulf exposed here between the virtual design and the final execution sums up the problems affecting much of this architecture.

What these architects have in common is experimentation with computer applications that are now standard equipment in architecture studios and training schools. The significant difference is that this group's fascination with the software results in a definite style, with rounded corners, organic shapes, complexity and the (inevitable) use of metals. This expressive form language is a worthy, by no means inferior, successor to deconstructivism.*1 It shares the same sculptural approach to architecture as an autonomous object, the same wish to avoid references (above all to modernism) and, alas, the same preoccupation among the movement's thinkers with pseudo-scientific theorization.

According to the exhibition's curator Frédéric Migayrou, known for the successful Archilab exhibitions held annually in Orleans, the increasing use of computers in architecture is not just a matter of style or form. We are now witness, he proposes, to a radical upheaval which is testing architecture's definition and frontiers.*2 A revolution, no less. Migayrou's basic attitude is both formalistic and Hegelian: in the unstoppable march of history, architecture, reduced to sets of forms, skips from style to style on its way to its ultimate Historic Mission. For Hegelians, as is apparent from the exhibition, details like context and function are really side issues; architecture is a matter of development in time, of abstraction, of the connoisseur's all-embracing gaze that surveys the centuries. Towering on that plinth, Migayrou forces his twelve architects into a tight, tortuous corset: that of compulsory proof of his hypotheses. To accomplish this, he pulls out all the rhetoric stops of the postmodern French philosophy. Part of the argumentation includes a screen showing architectural history (remodelled for the occasion) as a process of biological evolution, developing form by form towards its latest metamorphosis, nonstandard architecture.

The exhibition's title is a mathematical reference: 'nonstandard mathematics proposes a dynamic structuralism, an abstract semantics that ensures the interrelation of phenomena and their meaning; it establishes a general and formal hermeneutics capable of going directly to the heart of a general physics of phenomena'; and so on, and so on.*3 Taking reference to the exact sciences to an absurd extent has long been a chronic problem in French philosophy. But hadn't the American physicist Alan Sokal put a waggish end to all that?*4 Anyone trying to fathom the texts of Migayrou and his co-authors Zeynep Mennan and Mark Burry must fear that the writers have ignored these polemics.

What is the nature of the 'radical upheaval' of architecture that the curator predicts? Firstly, production: it is now possible, following Le Corbusier's standardized houses as 'machines to live in', to produce nonstandard buildings by sending software-prepared drawings to the factory across the Internet. The Variomatic catalogue project of Oosterhuis.nl, in which a purchaser designs his own house on the Internet, is a good illustration of this.

Secondly, form. What is the purpose of this revolution? To finally dispense with those boring, omnipresent right angles. I quote: 'Far from unanimously partaking in the cult of the right angle, we see the best of these representatives blithely digging into the inventory of forms (lines, spirals, ribbons, imprints, shells).'*5 An example is provided by Greg Lynn FORM's renovation project for the Kleiburg flats in the Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam. The poverty of the project exhibited here as the scale model is inversely proportional to the pretentiousness of the text supplied to boost its credibility. No, we may not see steel screens hung before the modernistic facades as aesthetic disguises, instead, we have to understand this façade as 'decomposed in a cinematographic sequence reminiscent of the chronophotography of Etienne Jules Marey, and the undulating path of these sails affirms a system in search of a fragmented time where, in a state of equilibrium, discrete space and continuum combine.'*6 Saddled with terminology like this, 'nonstandard architecture' runs the risk of being associated with the weakest instances of conceptual art. Rhetoric and wordplay take the place of analysis and description. The most irritating thing about anti-rationalism is that it is so undemocratic: texts such as these, made up of successions of word games, render themselves immune to substantive critique and are exclusive in their effect.*7 What does the catalogue of the exhibition 'Architectures Non Standard' do? It extracts architecture from the public domain and from public debate (i.e. from reality) and transfers it to the ivory tower of hermetic philosophy (i.e. language). Nobody wants that, and it is hard to imagine that the architects themselves could be happy with abstract theories in which project designs are reduced to interchangeable illustrations.

The possibility of a different critical approach exists. The recently completed Maison Folie in Lille, to which Lars Spuybroek has applied the 'computer style', is in an awkward situation from an urban planning viewpoint has a tricky social context and includes both reused and new buildings. A cultural programme replaced the former industrial function of the existing building, which was required to remain recognizable in the district and therefore to break with the mediocre modernism that was also present. The architect and the client consulted with local residents and modified the programme according to their expressed wishes. These were all concrete preoccupations, aesthetics, use, context, history, social function, to be answered by this building, and the computer - finally - was used to make the complex formal design possible. The exhibition included no indication of the context or architectural history of this realized project, but represented it by an isolated form, a scale model. Apart from Nox, UN studio and R&Sie, the architects made little effort to present the intermediate stages of what were in some cases intriguing project designs. With those models that do have some life in them, those before which you pause for a longer look because you can follow the fascinating development towards the final version, the creative process is also clarified by objects, by rough models and sketches, made before the computer took over. The utmost care was naturally taken to omit such drawings from the catalogue.

© Steven Wassenaar

*1. This is also apparent from the fact that representatives of the two movements sometimes come up with almost identical solutions, such as the 'roof conversation' in the Falkestrasse (Vienna, 1988) by Coop Himmelblau and the Bankside Apartments (London, 2002) by dECOi Architects.
*2. 'un bouleversement radical de l'architecture, qui remettrait en cause sa définition et ses frontières', from the symposium programme for Thursday, 11 December 2003, accompanying the exhibition, and 'une nouvelle identité de l'architecture et de ses métiers' from the catalogue Frédéric Migayrou, Architectures Non Standard, Centre Pompidou, 2003, p. 13.
*3. 'La mathématique non-standard propose un structuralisme dynamique, une sémantique abstraite qui assure une interrelation entre les phénomènes et la signification. C'est l'instauration d'une herméneutique générale et formelle qui peut s'impliquer directement au coeur d'une physique globale des phénomènes.' Frédéric Migayrou in the catalogue, p. 26.
*4. Sokal published an anti-rationalist parody 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' in Social Text (46/47, 1996) and then, together with Jean Bricmont, pilloried the use of pseudoscience in French postmodern philosophy in the book Impostes lntellectuelles, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997.
*5.'Loin de communier unanimement dans le culte de l'angle droit, on voit les meilleurs de ses représentants piocher allégrement dans l’inventaire des formes (lignes, hélicoïdales, rubans, empreintes, coques...)'. From the programme of the symposium accompanying the exhibition.
*6.'Décomposé en une suite en cinématographique évoquant les chronophotographies d'Etienne Jules Marey, la trajectoire ondulée de ces voiles affirme un système en quête d'un temps fractionne où se combinent, dans un état d'équilibre, espace discret et continuum'. From the catalogue, p. 96.
*7. Postmodernist philosophy is not enamoured of democracy. Concerning this, see Luuk van Middelaar, Politicide: De moordop de politiek in de Franse filosofie, Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1999.