We hope to return to the fundamental material nature of what we do… Architecture is essentially all the immaterial processes of society solidified in physical form.
BJARKE INGELS, Materialist Manifesto for Domus 2025
Introduction
Different interpretations are possible after the quotation above, made by the talented Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, on the occasion of the presentation of his ‘materialist manifesto’, as the guest editor for Domus 2025:[1] architecture, which is material, is essentially the product of the immaterial. Ultimately, that means that architecture is, at the same time, material and immaterial, which is a known fact for architects. This article is devoted to the elucidation of ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’ in connection with the meaning of ‘reality’, ‘realism’, and ‘new realism,’ which is the direction I call for at RSaP, with the intent to complement material and immaterial aspects of reality, and, at the same time, of architecture as a part of reality. Concerning Ingels’ direction, the first four issues of the magazine dedicated to stone, earth, concrete, and metal, and the forthcoming issues dedicated to glass, wood, fabric, plastic, plant, re-source, and digital, are an unambiguous statement about the material side of architecture, with the possible exception of the abstract information we find behind the digital (realm).
Independently of interpretations, I see what Bjarke Ingels means: years ago, in the paper ‘From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture as a Way to Handle the Increasing Complexity and Connectivity of Real World Systems’, I expressed an analogous wish — the hope to return to the fundamental material nature of what we do — speaking about a turn from space to place for architecture, where I considered space a more abstracting notion with respect to the more concrete and material notion of place. Therefore, instead of ‘matter’, as proposed by Ingels in the manifesto for Domus 2025, for me, it was ‘place’ the instrument for that change of mindset: place as a way to return to the grounding concreteness of particular situations and dynamics.
Apart from that difference – matter vs. place – in no way my call or Ingels’ call for a more ‘material’ (pragmatic?) approach to architecture are avant-gardist positions: in the ‘60s, ‘70s and the ’80s, at first, as a reaction against architectural modernism, and, later, as a reaction to architectural postmodernism and deconstructivism, architects such as Aldo van Eyck, Herman Herzberger, Giancarlo De Carlo or Christopher Alexander, just to name a few architects, and architectural historians and critics such as Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth Frampton, more insistently, convincedly, and with more echoes than others advocated a return to a more pragmatic and direct approach to architectural and urban phenomena and, specifically, to the fundamental material nature of architecture by appealing to the concrete, existential and experiential qualities of places (Norberg-Schulz, van Eyck, and Alexander, especially) and proposing a critical regionalist approach to architecture sympathetic with its tectonic tradition (Frampton); even Frampton’s position was grounded on a sympathy for place and the material aspects of architecture, rather than on the more abstracting and alienating characters of space – whose alienating properties, regardless existential and phenomenological attempts to revive and transform the concept far beyond its purely abstract dimensional and conceptual origin, were considered the cause for the loss of place according to both Norberg-Schulz and Frampton (I totally agree with them).[2]
Circumstances have changed, and, a few decades later, I think Ingels might agree with me if I say that, this time, the call for a return to the fundamental material nature of what we do, as architects, is driven by two major events that almost transformed the common feeling of society and architecture in the last few couples of decades: first, the advent and capillary diffusion of the immaterial realm of information, behind which we find information technology (from the use of CAD systems to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence into design processes); second, the even more impactful environmental question (impactful on the conscience of people and the dynamics of the Planet Earth), which we might summarize in the advent of the concept ‘sustainable development’, a collective socio-economic phenomenon that is reshaping the human relationship to nature from many different perspectives.[3] It is those two major events or forces that require a reformulation of the fundamentals of design professions, and their different perception with respect to past experiences and interpretations. Is ‘materialism/matter’ the most appropriate conceptualization to approach such relevant structural changes for design disciplines, in primis architecture? In this article, I will consider the extent of ‘materialism’ in general, as well as my call for a ‘new realism’ to see different ways through which architects might approach the apparent dualism between nature and culture, which is the grounding territory of the present discussion, in the end; an issue which is redefining the boundaries of design practices at the beginning of a new epoch for mankind—the Anthropocene.
the apparent dualism between nature and culture, which is the grounding territory of the present discussion
1. Words: ‘materialism’ and ‘new realism’
Is common-sense terminology exhaustive enough to set up a rigorous theorization in whatever field of human knowledge? I believe the appeal to linguistic and philosophical analysis can be helpful in both precision and extension of thinking, allowing us to focus on aspects that may escape common-sense analyses and terminology. To begin with, we need to offer an explicative framework to the terms we are using – ‘materialism’ and ‘realism’ (and the declination I propose as ‘new realism’). Those -isms immediately redirect us to the meanings of ‘matter’ and ‘reality’ (and to the attribute ‘new’: ‘new’ respect to what?). All of those terms inevitably confront traditional philosophical debates out of which their primary meanings emerged or were elucidated so that their specific philosophical sense sometimes merges with common sense.[4] I will make an attempt to see: 1] to what extent the words we are using – ‘materialism’ and ‘new realism’ – can be traced back to more technical, philosophical meanings to gain insights on the phenomena we are analyzing with specific reference to architecture and urbanism; 2] in parallel, on the base of that, we will see how such words – ‘materialism’ and ‘new realism’ – might impact on design practices.
More in detail, I am going to consider the meanings and etymologies of ‘materialism’ and ‘matter’ as described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and two common philosophical sources such as the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (OCP)[5] and an online public resource – the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Then, I will refer to a few articles on this website focused on the analyses articulated by the American philosopher Ivor Leclerc, former president of the American Society of Metaphysics, and interpreter of Whitehead’s philosophy; those articles are important for our argumentation since, by proposing a return to the Philosophy of Nature and rejecting the dualism between scientific and philosophical thinking, they show how scientific discoveries of the past century and related philosophical speculation are promoting a new understanding of nature and, in parallel, a new understanding of the concepts of space, place, and matter, among others (Concepts of Place, Space, Matter, and the Nature of Physical Existence, Place, Space, Matter, and a New Conception of Nature and Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature). Following the same procedure, I will consider what is meant by ‘reality’, ‘realism’, and ‘new realism’. Taken together, such findings should give us the opportunity to consider ways through which design professions can make proficient use of notions such as ‘materialism’, ‘realism’, or ‘new realism’, and go beyond ordinary thinking and traditional understanding of spatial and material concepts (with respect to concepts of place, space, and matter, ‘traditional’ is the meaning derived from classical physics, which is the common standard of knowledge).
2. Matter and materialism
Materialism: Basically, the view that everything is made of matter… Materialists strictly speaking say that only matter exists.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
That’s fine… ‘But what is matter?’[6] That is the immediate observation that comes to everybody’s mind. It is clear that we cannot elucidate the meaning of materialism and what materialists sustain if, before that, we do not refer to the meaning of ‘matter’. However, we are immediately confronted with two orders of problems: first, if we go beyond ordinary thinking, it is hard to find consensus about what ‘matter’ or ‘materialism’ means, both within a specific disciplinary field (e.g., philosophy) or across different disciplines (e.g., philosophy, physics, architecture, the social sciences, etc.). Second, very often, our understanding of the same concept changes over time: this holds for the concepts of space and place (we have already seen that, in many previous articles at RSaP), as well as for the concept of matter or other fundamental concepts that help our analyses of the phenomena of reality (e.g., concepts of time, force, motion, body, mind, etc.). For instance, the passing of time and the accumulation of knowledge may also contradict the original meaning of words and concepts, as in the case of the term ‘atom’, which, if we stay at the original meaning and its modern interpretation, is everything but ‘atomic’. Therefore, the sense of a concept may change with the changing of knowledge and the meanings of words change accordingly. However, this unsteady epistemological ground conditioned by language cannot prevent us from inquiring into the meaning of concepts and associated terminology; this especially holds if we theorize about fundamental concepts such as ‘matter’, ‘space’, or ‘place’.
In his materialist manifesto, Ingels focuses on architecture in terms of matter, while, here, I am focusing on it in terms of place and space. For me, the two perspectives are complementary and, taken together, exhaustive. Place, space, and matter are primary concepts for architects: metaphysical, other than physical and conceptual tools; everything else is derivable from such ‘tools’.
2.1 Ordinary and philosophical meanings
What does the Oxford English Dictionary say about the entries ‘materialism’ and ‘matter’? Concerning ‘matter’, the OED denotes the term as ‘[i] building material, timber, hence stuff of which a thing is made, [ii] subject of discourse or consideration, [iii] also (in philosophical use) “matter” in contradistinction to “mind” or to “form”.’[7]
From the OED, we see that the common-sense meaning of the term in ‘purely physical applications’ (in the sense of physical/corporeal constituent of an object) is immediately confronted with the philosophical meaning in the Aristotelian/scholastic and Kantian senses. This is what the OED proposes: matter can be understood as the bare essence of a thing or being – i.e., prime matter – which requires a particular ‘form’ to become a specific existent or entity (i.e., a physical object, we usually say), in the Aristotelian sense. The same complementary model is also present in Kant, where ‘matter’ (let’s say ‘the hardware‘) is the element of knowledge supplied by sensation, while ‘form’ (‘the software‘) is determined by the categories of understanding, i.e., mind and its processes.[8] If we limit ourselves to a denotative level of considerations, those ‘philosophical’ senses of matter are in apparent agreement with its common-sense understanding as that which is physical or corporeal (the hardware) in contraposition to what is ‘immaterial or incorporeal substance (such as spirit, soul, mind, etc.)’ or even in contraposition to ‘qualities, actions, or conditions’ (the software).[9] However, with a deeper analysis, we see that both philosophical models presented by the OED (Aristotle and Kant) say something different: the complementarity of two parts is necessary – the physical and the ideal, matter and form – to have an appropriate understanding of things or phenomena (i.e., to have an understanding of reality which is not deceitful or, others would say, which is as less deceitful as possible). That is: we cannot separate the physical/corporeal/material aspect of reality from the ideal/mental/immaterial aspect. Then, if we stay at the interpretation originated by philosophical speculation, it can be a fallacy (of misplaced concreteness) to abstract matter from form and believe we can have an appropriate cognizance of worldly phenomena, either we speak of objects (broadly speaking, we can include architecture between things or objects), happenings, or events. Then, in this case, to speak in abstraction about matter (that is, in abstraction from form – which, by analogy, is correspondent to the physical in abstraction from the mental or the hardware disconnected from the software) may result in a partial understanding of complex phenomena. In architectural terms, to rely on ‘matter’ in order to have an answer about its meaning, I think we’d better ask: what is the matter of architecture? That ‘matter’ – the matter of my question – the OED denoted as [ii] subject of discourse or consideration, which is a metaphorical mode of understanding matter, i.e, an alternative possibility to speak about matter, in addition to its ordinary physical or material sense.
Concerning the elucidation of the word ‘matter’, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – (SEP) proposes the same argument briefly advanced by the Oxford English Dictionary, that is, the distinction between matter and form, according to the argument advanced by Aristotle: ‘substance’ (another term for ‘matter’ which originated a lot of debates), i.e., that which subtends existence in general or ‘as such’, can only rise to the status of a definite physical existent (either as a particular or a universal being—e.g., a red chair, the idea of the red chair, or even the more abstract idea of ‘chairness’) through its ‘information’, that is, only if matter has been impressed with a specific form through which it can actually present itself to the world of other objects (as a specific chair—e.g., the red chair) and subjects (the red chair as an object of perception – i.e. the material chair – or even the idea, memory, or hallucination related to the chair—i.e., the immaterial chair).
Image01: Based on an Aristotelian model of explanation, the nature of the ‘physical existent’ (‘physis’) embraces both material and immaterial aspects, actuality and potentiality, at the same time. Matter( )form are complementary parts defining the reality of objects, which includes objects thought by subjects. We tend to divide existence (that which exists – the ‘physical existent’) in parts or moments, for the sake of description, even if reality is one and indivisible, a unique whole: ( ) = O. Its division in parts or moments is just the human attempt to grasp the complexity of reality.
The model I have described is a possible interpretation of the traditional Aristotelian vision of matter within the system of thinking known as ‘hylomorphism’, according to which ‘every physical object is compound of matter [hyle] and form [eidos or morphe],’[10] which means that matter alone (i.e., what we ordinarily understand as the ‘physical’) is not enough to have an accurate understanding of what a definite physical object is if it is not complemented by form. Therefore, I am saying following Aristotle’s hypothesis, given that any accurate discussion of reality should comprise the physical (matter) and the ideal (form) – or the material and the immaterial – as counterparts or complementary modes of understanding, our knowledge of matter as ‘prime matter’ or ‘substance’ must be necessarily ambiguous, in the sense of embracing both material and immaterial dimensions.
Reporting this philosophical argumentation in architectural terms, in the case ‘matter’ is only accounted for the ‘physical’ it just means ‘glass’ – or ‘stones’, ‘bricks’, ‘concrete’, ‘metal’, ‘wood’, etc. – while in the case ‘matter’ is accounted for the physical meeting the ideal (in-formed matter), in addition to ‘glass’, ‘stones’ or ‘bricks’ it also means ‘numbers’ or, to stay in the realm of the immaterial, ‘memories’, ‘dreams’ ‘values’, ‘ideals’, beliefs, ‘stories’, ‘emotions’, ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘concepts’ – that is ‘information’ – etc. Of course, by making a selective choice, we can deliberately decide to focus on a part of the phenomenon to delve deeper into it (e.g., architecture as a purely material fact, as in the intention of Ingels), even if complex phenomena necessitate as many different perspectives as possible to be accounted for, exhaustively.
If I should stay at the direct interpretation of Ingels’ words about architecture as the ‘immaterial processes of society solidified in physical form’, which is a traditional form of wisdom every modern architect agrees on, I interpret that proposition as correspondent to a view sympathetic with an understanding of matter in its most extended meaning of ‘prime matter’, ‘a matter’ which is not separated from ‘form’ (or ‘mind’); therefore, a matter as ‘prime matter’, which is, at the same time, ‘material and immaterial’ given that architecture ‘solidified in physical form’ represents the material side of architectural reality (the reality of architecture made of stones, bricks, concrete, metal, wood, glass, etc.) while ‘the immaterial processes of society’ represent one of the immaterial sides that put a condition on (give form to) architecture, which, apart from glass, stones, bricks, concrete, wood, etc. is also made of, or shaped by values, beliefs, ideals, memories, dreams, imagination, geometrical spaces, words, etc. In this context, a couple of consecutive and ‘divergent’ popular texts written by the same author, the English architectural historian Adrian Forty, come to my mind: ‘Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of modern Architecture’ – where the author speaks about the importance of language in architecture and how words ‘direct the ways we think of and live with buildings’; the other is ‘Concrete and Culture: A Material History’ where the author gives a practical or material turn to the immaterial processes of society – i.e., culture – to say it with Ingels. Also, on the specific role of language as a material for architecture, in an extended sense, see ‘The Words Between the Spaces: Building and Language’ by Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron.[11] For me, that encompassing view of matter, which includes both aspects of reality, one concrete, the other abstract, also responds quite effectively and appropriately to the matter-based question about architecture we raised above: What is the matter of architecture? Glass and numbers, as the representative aspects of its concrete and abstract nature.
Here, at RSaP, I am proposing to include and extend Ingels’ dictum (architecture as the solidification of ‘the immaterial processes of society’) and say that architecture is the all-inclusive and grounding solidification of physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes. Independently of any interpretation of Ingels’ use of spatial or material terminology and his ‘materialist manifesto’, this proposal of mine has already been implemented in many recent architectural productions by Bjarke Ingels Group or even by other architectural firms working, like BIG, on the front line of the discipline. I believe the ‘pragmatic’ turn of architects is mainly a consequence of the paradigm shift I pointed at a decade ago – From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture – which is ultimately caused by the emergence and diffused reception of ecological or environmental issues in the last few decades. Despite that pragmatic turn, which is going in the direction that I talked about a decade ago and accepts many instances inherent in the proposal of place understood as a system of processes, it seems to me that studies that make this turn explicit, elucidating its main points and procedures to adapt to the new environmental reality, are not as frequent as they should be. Moreover, it seems to me there is not yet a complete awareness of what that extension means or entails: an ethical or moral extension before than a technical or disciplinary extension. In parallel, it concerns how we should understand concepts of place, space, and matter (which are the basic tools for architects as well as basic conceptual tools to understand the spatial, material, and spiritual values of the environment) according to the new vision of reality; a vision that should definitely surpass any remnant of past anthropocentric views suggesting how to adapt concepts and human activities to the new understanding of nature.
Slideshow 01- Images 02, 03, 04: BIG’s recent production is self-explicatory about the conception of architecture as the solidification of interwoven physicochemical, biological, ecological, socio-cultural, and symbolic processes. For example, these projects (Gelephu Mindfulness City, Gelephu, Bhutan, 2023; The Plus, Magnor, Norway, 2022; Hungarian Natural History Museum, Debrecen, Hungary, 2024) are exemplary cases with respect to the architectural implementation of the concept of place as system of processes which I am elucidating at RSaP (Images from BIG / Bjarke Ingels Group website).
As a brief digression consonant with what I am saying about ethics, I report the words pronounced these days, on a popular Italian newspaper, by the Italian Professor Andrea Rinaldo, credited with the prestigious Stockholm Water Prize, in 2023—the world’s most prestigious water award given to people and organizations ‘for their extraordinary water-related achievements.’ [12]Professor Rinaldo says: ‘We must anticipate radical changes in the traditions of places, in economic and social assets, and leave behind anthropocentric perspectives that only look at Homo Sapiens and their interests.’ [13] Of course this is the sentiment of an epoch (which I also had expressed in many occasions at RSaP) even if there are still many contrasting forces to win before that sentiment becomes ordinary thinking, not just ordinary thinking for the activity of architects.
Here, it is not a question of proposing or re-proposing what others have said about ‘place’, ‘space’, or ‘matter’ a couple of millennia ago, a century ago, or a few decades ago; it is a question of understanding which vision of reality (i.e., which vision of nature) holds at present, a vision which is a compound of considerations from different perspectives, but which inevitably have scientific theories and philosophical speculations as grounding determinants. The ‘extension’ of architectural knowledge that I am supporting through the philosophical and physical (i.e., from physics) use of concepts that go against the classical tradition,[14] and which, at the same time, is an ethical extension of responsibility towards the Planet Earth, should not be the variable of a project for architects, which in some cases can be adopted and in other cases rejected; more relevant than that, it should be the constitutive thinking of architects, i.e., the ‘philosophical’ statement that architects embrace to propose a new modality of dwelling and, therefore, of building (i.e., architecture), at the beginning of a new epoch for mankind. The ‘new’ vision of material and spatial concepts that I am supporting at RSaP is the fruit of a new understanding of nature which can be facilitated by considering the natural and the cultural entangled within the all-encompassing aegis of place; that means that we share the same places with all living beings, and it implies the passage from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision, or, even more extendedly and inclusively, to a cosmocentric vision, i.e., an environmental cosmology of the kind delineated, for example, by Alfred North Whitehead.[15]
The ‘extension’ of architectural knowledge that I am supporting through the philosophical and physical (i.e., from physics) use of concepts that go against classical tradition and entail the development of a new ethic should not be the variable of a project, in some cases adopted and in other rejected; more relevant than that, it should be the new constitutive thinking of architects—a ‘philosophical’ statement that we should follow to propose a new modality of dwelling and, therefore, of building (i.e., architecture), at the beginning of a new epoch for mankind.
To summarize what we have seen so far concerning matter and materialism, in a vague sense – i.e., the ordinary sense – we tend to identify ‘matter’ with the concreteness of things or objects, which is not as the same sense the philosophical interpretation of matter (as ‘prime matter’ or ‘substance’) may require: the common sense meaning of matter is a simplification of the more attentive philosophical view. That simplification can be an obstacle to the appropriate analysis of phenomena. In this respect (the ‘extended’ understanding of matter beyond its ‘physical sense’), as we have briefly mentioned in the opening part, the OED also speaks about ‘matter’ in terms of ‘subject of discourse or consideration’, which substantiates the possibility of understanding linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of matter (i.e., abstract dimensions): e.g., matter as ‘material for expression’, ‘something to say’, ‘material for writing or speech’, ‘the subject of a book or discourse… or study’, ‘an event, circumstance’, ‘an affair or business’, and matter used in various idiomatic expressions – e.g., ‘what is the matter with…?’, ‘a matter of…’, or ‘for the matter…’, etc.[16]
Always, when we focus on the meaning of words and their related concepts, we can gain some insight from etymological analyses. What does The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE) say about ‘matter’– about its origin? It says that ‘matter’ comes from the Latin māteria which denoted the ‘hard part of a tree, timber, stuff of which a thing is made… matter in opposition to mind or form (philosophical rendering Greek ὕλη), originally substance of which consists the māter (MOTHER), i.e. the trunk of a tree regarded as producing shoots.’[17] That is a beautiful image: the biological organism, mother, gives the name to everything that can be created, and, as such, it is made of/from her: derived from ‘mother’, ‘matter’ becomes the primordial substance for creation. From the physical/material to the philosophical sense (also in the wider cosmological horizon concerning creation as such), the passage is almost immediate: both the OED and the ODEE take account of that. Again, the opposition matter vs mind, or form, is mentioned as a central argument; however, Aristotle explained it, such opposition is nothing other than a mode to complement two parts of the same reality – the real object – indirectly suggesting to us that is it can be misleading to abstract parts – either matter or form – from the whole (the real object) and believe such parts are really existent.
Image 05: According to Latin, ‘matter’ – i.e., māteria – originally denoted the substance which the māter (‘mother’ in English) consisted of, i.e. the trunk of a tree regarded as producing shoots. ‘Matter’ was the equivalent term for the Greek ‘hȳlē’, which literally meant ‘wood’, or ‘timber’, and was used by Aristotle, as an analogy, in a specific philosophical sense, to indicate the primary substance – i.e., prime matter –which things are made of, e.g., a violin, a bench, a table… If wood or timber is the prime ‘matter’, we need a ‘form’ for that violin, bench, or table to exist concretely or ‘materially’ according to common-sense terminology. Then, is really everything that exists exclusively made of or characterized by ‘matter’?
The ambiguity behind a univocal and undisputed meaning of matter and the intimate relationship between the common-sense meaning and the philosophical meaning is immediately exposed by the Oxford Companion to Philosophy with a linguistic joke: ‘What is matter? – Never mind. What is mind? – no matter.’[18] This joke expresses the difficulty of saying what matter really is, if not by a direct contraposition of senses – as we have already seen. And if we resort to the concept of ‘substance’ to establish the ultimate ontological category of what exists – the OCP continues – things can be even more frustrating since ‘matter’ is not the only candidate: ‘common-sense ontology holds that there are two substances, matter and something else, mind, soul or spirit, the main characteristic of which is that it is non-material!’ [19] We already know that since we hypothesized a circularity between the material and the immaterial when we introduced the concept of ‘prime matter’, by Aristotle, to characterize the category of the existents—objects, things, bodies, elements, etc. (‘prime matter’ is just another name for ‘substance’, i.e., ‘proto hule’ or ‘proto-hupokeimenon’, in Aristotelian terms). Again, we are pointing at a direction that is everything but univocal concerning the meaning of matter and what is fundamental for the category of existence. Sometimes, ‘mind’ or the immaterial (e.g., forms, ideas, spirit, words, etc.), can be seen as even more fundamental (that is, more substantial) than ‘matter’ itself, as Plato (Theory of Ideas or Forms) or Descartes (Cogito ergo sum) maintained. We’d better remind that as an alert. From a different perspective, the OCP says, if we associate our idea of matter to the search of the Pre-Socratics in terms of primary physical substances that constitute all that exists (e.g., water, air, earth, fire) we may arrive at some definite, non-contrasting account of matter as that which is preserved during processes of physical change, which is what Aristotle tried to figure out via the introduction of the concept of ‘prime matter’, a position which – the OCP continues – has some echo in the contemporary scientific view of matter ‘as both what is fundamental in existence and what is conserved in change’, even if, according to contemporary physics, the common image of matter is changing: matter has been ‘dematerialized’ – it is becoming immaterial – replaced by the seemingly more abstract concepts of energy and field.[20] It is the metaphysical dualism proclaimed by Descartes and the privileged role accorded to mind against matter as the fundamental category of existence that resulted in the triumph of idealism in modern and contemporary philosophy. And, it is the overtly unbalanced power of the mind to the detriment of matter and, therefore, to the detriment of the body (and the related categories of feeling, sensation, or other bodily values such as passion, pleasure, etc.) that favoured the resurgence of ‘materialism’ (in both philosophical and ordinary sense) and the materialist proclaim that ‘everything is made of matter’ or, strictly speaking ‘that only matter exists’ to oppose idealism.[21] This ‘ideal’ or too ‘abstract’ view of reality did not leave untouched architecture and this is probably the fundamental reason why, from time to time (going back to the period after the diffusion of the International Style) architects call for a more material or pragmatic approach to the discipline.
But, again, this call of ‘materialists’ evidenced by the OCP leaves an aura of ambiguity and confusion on what matter really is, and, more importantly, on what reality is or is made of (i.e., ‘a matter of’…). In another passage just mentioned from the OCP, we have hinted at the different conception of matter devised by contemporary physics, according to which matter is going into a process of ‘dematerialization’, questioning the ordinary meaning of matter as simply ‘physical.’ At RSaP I pointed out that specific issue on different occasions since matter is intimately connected to our visions of place and space; in addition to other considerations (philosophical, historical, linguistic, architectural, humanistic, psychological, social, ecological, artistic) it was properly the vision of contemporary physics that, from the very beginning of my research on the spatial nature of reality, conditioned my vision of matter, which I identified as a state of place – a physicochemical state of place, to begin with (see Image 02 in the article Preliminary Notes). What is a physical field (this is the way we should understand ‘matter’ according to contemporary physics) if not a place—a physical state of place, precisely? This holds not only from the perspective of physics but also the perspective of ordinary language and the perspective of philosophy, through the linguistic chain ‘field>chōra>place’ (ordinary language revisited by Plato and Heidegger are the main references, here: chōra was the ancient meaning for a ‘field’, as a concrete territorial expanse, before becoming a metaphysical conception in Plato; and the metaphysical conception of field as chōra is a concept present in Heidegger – as the room necessary for the presence of things – in his existential analysis of spatiality, which has place as its starting point). In this regard, it can be opportune to remember the illuminating words by Einstein on the meaning of matter and its relation with the field concept: ‘… what are the physical criterions distinguishing matter and field?… From the relativity theory we know that matter represents vast stores of energy and that energy represents matter… By far the greatest part of energy is concentrated in matter; but the field surrounding the particle also represents energy, though in an incomparably smaller quantity. We could therefore say: Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy is small. But if this is the case, then the difference between matter and field is a quantitative rather than a qualitative one. There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other…There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality.’[22]
Very important for the argumentation of this article and the core argument of this website, thanks to the original contribution of contemporary physics (and Heidegger’s elucidation of the relationship between things and spatiality) we can see the intimate relationship between matter and place–a relationship which can facilitate the change of paradigm of architects from matter to place. In fact, it is my contention that ‘fields’ – and, from the physical perspective, the set of fields that constitute the fabric reality: gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear fields – are just another name for ‘place’. That’s what reality is: a place, either we regard it at the microscale of subatomic processes, or the macroscale and the mesoscale of astronomic and human-scale processes. This is what reality is: a place—a place of processes. So that we can replace the traditional vision of reality seen as the constitution of matter with reality seen as the constitution of places—the place of processes (physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, symbolic processes). As I had to say elsewhere, reality-as-place has a fractal nature: wherever, at whatever scale we look at, we find places (‘… the spatial and temporal continuity of processes acting on lands and territories can also be evoked by the image of a fractal: Independently of the scale of intervention – objects, architectures, streets, quarters, cities, regions, nations, continents, or even planets -, the four basic classes of processes are always present…’ in The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society; see also the article Places Everywhere, which explains in accessible terms a naïve metaphysical introduction to the analysis of places). Places within places, within places…
Image06: Places have a fractal nature in the sense that at whatever scale of reality we are zooming in or out, we always find places; what changes, according to the level of magnification, is the specific status of a place we find: at microscales, we will merely find places determined by physical or physicochemical dynamics and their respective boundaries, while at superior scales, e.g., at the human scale, such dynamics are complemented by biological, sociocultural and symbolic dynamics and their respective boundaries. All other dynamics we may think of (psychological, physiological, ecological, architectural, urban, economic, political, technological, literary, etc.) are derivative from those primary dynamics (see On the Structure of Reality). At the utmost, superior, and inferior levels of magnification, the place of actualized processes recedes into a potential state – i.e., the place where processes wait for actualization, a chaotic place, indeed (the place of Chaos, the potential matrix of existence out of which the ordered Cosmos emerges, as the place of actualized physicochemical, biological… processes).[23] According to this perspective, the Archytas’ problem – ‘Is there an edge to the universe?’ – [24] is solved, and regressio, but also progressio, ad infinitum is solved as well; also, the quagmire that haunted Aristote’s definition of ‘topos’, and his interpreters, at the threshold between place and thing – a boundary properly – is solved. Reality is a place, everything is a place-a place of processes, whether such processes are actualized or not (see Places Everywhere-Everything Is Place).
But I wouldn’t stop here concerning ‘alternative’ (with respect to classical physics) and more contemporary visions of matter. I will skip the reference to Heidegger through articles such as Being as Place… and What is a Thing?, (even if the metaphysically-based argumentation drawn from Heidegger may be a contribution to elucidate these questions), and I would focus on the work of the American philosopher Ivor Leclerc, who, basing his studies on the historical elucidation of the concepts of matter, place and space (among others), on philosophical speculation (Whitehead’s philosophy of organism incorporating elements of Aristotle and Leibniz) and on contemporary physics, showed us that a holistic, systemic and organic, antireductionist and non-deterministic comprehension of nature and the physical existent is under formation. In the articles Concepts of Place, Space, Matter, and the Nature of Physical Existence, Place, Space, Matter, and a New Conception of Nature we have seen the immediate relationship between the concept of nature and concepts of matter via the Greek term ‘physis’ (literally, the physical existent or the Greek term for the Latin ‘natura’, whence the English nature). Through the relationship nature-matter via the Greek physis, apart from explaining the origin of the direct, modern association between ‘matter’ with that which is ‘physical’ – an attribute that obviously derives from ‘physis’ – we have seen how close and dependent are our visions of nature with respect to our understanding of matter: to a certain conception of matter corresponds the conception of nature of a certain epoch. In those articles, by analysing the historical passages from the pre-Socratics and Aristotelian understanding of matter to the modern understanding of it, we have seen how matter, from the possibility of denoting both concrete and abstract possibilities, both ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ domains through the complementarity between matter and form (actuality and potentiality), it came to define something conceived as itself substance, atomic, solid, changeless, fully inert, and movable. The ‘new’, modern characters of matter were merely determined by external changes due to motion (loco-motion, motion of material particles from place to place) – i.e., material or corporeal atomism, the notion at the base of the modern, ordinary conception of matter. That conception entails a vision of nature where only ultimate elements (atoms or particles) are considered the real existents, while aggregates (e.g. compound bodies or even organisms) are mere phenomenal entities whose functioning or character is ultimately understandable in terms of (reducible to) motions of its composing elements. This classical, traditional, physicalist, mechanic, and reductionist vision of nature (reductionist in the sense that everything is reducible to the locomotion of elements explained according to physical/mechanic laws) is a vision that also implies a physicalist notion of space, and of place as part of space, which are scientifically and philosophically outdated notions even if many disciplines structured on spatial notions (e.g., design or artistic disciplines, social sciences) still rely on such traditional notions.[25] This classical vision of matter and nature (and of related concepts of space, place, and time) is not useful anymore to give an appropriate explicative framework for the systemic complexity of today’s world. Against such traditional vision, together with Leclerc, we have seen the possibility for different scientifically updated and philosophically consistent visions of nature and matter (philosophical speculations consistent with the new science) – a matter which is not merely ‘concrete’ or physical in the sense of material or corporeal atomism, but which contains in itself the possibility of internal change, of becoming, of potentiality (these are characteristics specific of contemporary physics Leclerc says referring to the work of Heisenberg)[26] and of considering compound objects as themselves ‘physical entities’ i.e., ultimate realities and not merely phenomenal entities. Those are all instances of a new conception of matter that is not merely ‘physical’ in the ordinary sense but which recovers ‘abstract’ or ‘potential’ and ‘dynamical’ aspects already considered in the philosophies of Aristotle, Leibniz, and Whitehead (potentiality, change, becoming, organic or systemic relation between parts and whole – these are all new characters concerning the new understanding of matter and nature that complement the old vision).
What does it mean to speak in terms of ‘rethinking’ concepts? The enterprise of our current epoch is ‘rethinking’ concepts ‘against’ classical tradition—a tradition that entails a mechanic, reductionist and deterministic vision of nature to which we must oppose (in the sense of integrating as a complementary view, and not in the sense of rejecting what we have acquired so far through classical physics)[27] a holistic, organic, systemic, antireductionist and probabilistic vision of nature that reintroduces the realm of potentiality and becoming to complement actuality with potentiality, matter with form, place with space, the physical with the ideal, the concrete with the abstract, being with becoming, particle and wave…; ‘with’ and ‘and’ as the antidote to dualisms, so that we can have a new vision of matter and nature that is able to recompose, into a more unitary framework, the dualisms that haunted the human understanding of nature in the modern epoch. As suggested by Leclerc, we should make interpretative efforts to let different views converge into a new philosophy of nature, for a more exhaustive understanding of reality, where both philosophy and physics are necessary and complementary, offering other disciplines a safer, all-embracing grounding territory. These new modes of understanding concepts and nature go beyond analyses from fixed or univocal points of view – this is especially relevant for a discipline like architecture which synthesizes many different worlds into one single object-the building. This fact calls for a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge as an important asset for contemporary research.
To summarize these new conceptions of matter and nature, Leclerc shows that contemporary physics and some philosophical aspects drawn from the philosophy of Aristotle, Leibniz, and Whitehead may help our understanding of this new horizon: matter is not merely ‘physical’ as material or corporeal atomism suggested (classical physics) but, by including potentiality and becoming, and, also, by considering compound bodies as true physical existents and not as phenomenal or noumenal entities, matter acquires a more complete status where complementary aspects – actual( )potential, being( )becoming, concrete( )abstract… – become the new distinctive traits of matter, recovering certain aspects from the old Aristotelian vision.[28] This new meaning of matter implies a shift of paradigm in the conception of nature (the two meanings – matter and nature – are correlated): from mechanic, deterministic, and reductionist to organic or systemic, probabilistic, and irreducible to the parts of a whole (i.e., irreducible to the ultimate particle of physics and their explanation in terms of locomotion). The first view of nature entails that everything is reducible to ‘physical matter’ and, ultimately, to physics, i.e., to physical laws– which are laws of motion (so, for instance, all scientific disciplines such as chemistry, biology, or medicine are ultimately reducible to classical physics and its laws of motion). The other vision of nature rejects that hypothesis since concepts such as complementarity, probability, emergence, complexity, systems, etc. – which are all derived from the mechanisms through which nature works according to contemporary sciences (quantum mechanics, complexity sciences, general system theories, chaos theory, ecology, etc.) – describe a completely different horizon irreducible to classical physical laws.
The contemporary view of matter is so different from the classical tradition that the very current use of the term matter is highly questionable, as Leclerc wisely observed (my idea to think about reality in terms of place and processes rather than in terms of matter is consistent with this view, which is, after all, the view of contemporary physics, as also observed by Einstein–see note [22], above). According to the extended vision of matter we have just presented, framed on the background of the original sense of the Greek ‘physis’ (from the verb ‘phuein’ to grow, to generate, to bring forth, hence the Latin ‘natura’, English nature, from the verb ‘nascere’, to grow, to be born) the important connection between matter and nature comes to the fore again, as in the original traditional of Western thinking. Everything that belongs to nature is ‘matter’ as a physical existent: then, not merely rocks, bricks, concrete, and glass are physical existents (i.e., THINGS); also plants, animals, or even human bodies, that is living organisms or complex bodies, are physical existents (i.e., LIFE); or even more complex forms of aggregations, such as groups, families, flocks, packs, institution, clubs, associations, etc. are also physical existents (i.e., SOCIETY); until we arrive at the most complex and ‘immaterial’ forms of aggregation of the physical existents—all that is derived from the human mind, from its intellectual and psychological agency, such as values, beliefs, numbers, words, concepts, artistic, literary or scientific ideals, etc. (in one word, SYMBOLS).
If we report that to architecture, then, the matter of architecture, both in a denotative and connotative sense, is basically represented by the four categories of physical existents-as-matter that we have just listed: according to this perspective, buildings become the complex activity of putting together, layer upon layer, as if they were bricks, THINGS, LIFE, SOCIETY, and SYMBOLS into a meaningful whole irreducible to its parts. Nature, or reality, and architecture as a characterizing phenomenon of it, understood as the interwoven agency of things, life, society, and symbols. From the perspective of architects, that means the synthesis of all processes (physicochemical, biological, socio-cultural, and symbolic) into the conception of building-as-place. This all-embracing conception of place (i.e., place as the systemic emergence of entangled physicochemical, biological, ecological, etc. dynamics) implies the conception of a total environment as the new subject of study for architects.
Image 07: The matter of Architecture: THINGS (i.e. the place of physicochemical processes), LIFE (the place of biological processes), SOCIETY (the place of sociocultural processes), and SYMBOLS (the place of intellectual/symbolic processes). Together, irreducibly to each part taken separately, they constitute the corpus of Architecture as a meaningful whole.
Now that we have a more exhaustive understanding of the different meanings of ‘matter’ it is easier to focus on the different perspectives of ‘materialism’ – its meanings – either according to ordinary language or philosophical sources.
So, if we refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, it immediately exposes the ‘philosophical’ side of the question according to which materialism is ‘the opinion that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications’- a perspective we have just considered which corresponds the ‘atomistic’ or ‘corporeal’ understanding of matter (and therefore of nature) according to the traditional vision of science, back to classical physics and its laws (of motion); in fact, the OED continues, ‘in a more limited sense, [materialism is] the opinion that the phenomena of consciousness and will are wholly due to the operation of material agencies.’[29] Thanks to the previous analysis, it is easy to see the mechanic (first part of the definition) and reductionist (second part of the definition, where everything is reducible to the agencies – i.e. motions – of the ultimate elements) blueprint of man behind the description of nature in materialist sense described by the OED.
However, the OED continues, there are other ‘transferred uses’ of the term ‘materialism’: in a theological sense (as a reproach to views that ‘imply a defective sense of the reality of things purely spiritual’), in the domain of art (‘the tendency to lay stress on the material aspect of the objects represented’), or in the ordinary sense of ‘devotion to material needs or desires, to the neglect of spiritual matters’.[30] Finally, the OED concludes, ‘materialism’ is also ‘the system of material things; the material universe’, proposing all concordant visions deriving from the classical understanding of matter as something concrete, ‘material’ indeed, according to the provisions of classical science/physics.
Of course, concerning the entry ‘materialism,’ we do not gain much insight or fresh information from the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology given that it is immediate the association between materialism and matter from the Latin ‘materia’,[31] which we have already considered above (see Image 05).
Coming now to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy – OCP –, much of the information contained in it about ‘materialism’, we have indirectly seen introducing the meaning of ‘matter’. Here, the ‘materialist’ vision is immediately associated with the first materialist ever, properly, Democritus of Abdera (V century BC) who believed the world was entirely made of atoms ‘tiny, absolutely hard, impenetrable, incompressible, indivisible, and unalterable bits of stuff, which had shape and size but no other properties and scurried around on the void, forming the world as we know it by jostling each other and either rebounding or getting entangled between each other because of their shapes.’[32] Remarkably, this is a vision of matter that still holds, at least in ordinary thinking. However, the new physics — Einstein and quantum physics, we have seen that — contributed to its dismissal as a profitable physical notion: replaced by mass, which is interchangeable with energy, according to the famous formula E=mc2, and associated with the field-notion (‘a distortion of the space’ the OCP says, which is a floppy way to depict the field concept, generating confusion in those, possibly non-physicists, who still rely on physicalist notions of space for their theories). However (inexplicably), the OCP continues, the new vision of matter ‘has had remarkably little overt effect on the various philosophical views that can be dubbed ‘materialism’ [given that] materialist philosophies have tended to substitute for “matter” some notion like “whatever it is that can be studied by the methods of natural science” thus turning materialism into naturalism’. [33]
According to the OCP, part of the debate on materialism and materialist views hinges on the already considered problematic relationship between ‘matter and mind or spirit or consciousness, or the contents of these entities (ideas, etc.)’;[34] if the reality of body is accepted as unproblematic by the materialist, the question of mind or consciousness is not, even if, in the end, materialists say that ‘minds do exist but not as something separate from matter’ and that ‘mental phenomena, like pains or thoughts, are identical with phenomena going on in the brain’, which means that such phenomena can be ultimately reduced to same kind of material exchanges acting in the brains.[35]
The characterizations of matter we have seen so far suggest a distinction between three kinds of realms or worlds —The Oxford Companion to Philosophy continues — some of which are accepted by materialists while others are not; these three ‘realms’ or ‘worlds’ are: [i] the world of material things (atoms, rocks, glass, trees, etc.); [ii] the world of psychological things (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. and the minds that produce these); [iii] the world of abstract things (number, classes, categories, truth, sometimes values, etc.). ‘Materialists —the OCP concludes— strictly speaking, say that only matter exists’, that is, only [i] exists, denying the existence of [ii], and, in a few cases, admitting a moderate realism of [iii].[36] These prevailing accounts of materialism are structured on material atomism, i.e., the conception of nature/matter derived from ancient atomism, translated into modern thinking by classical physics, and ultimately diffused into/accepted by ordinary thinking.
Finally, let’s see what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) says about ‘materialism’. Actually, ‘materialism’ is not exactly the entry with which the SEP presents the argument: instead, ‘physicalism’ is the term they use, the difference being in that one term, materialism, is best used in connection with metaphysical/philosophical argumentations, the other, physicalism, is more directed to physical explanations. Apart from that, the two terms can be used interchangeably – the SEP says – given that ‘physicalism’ is related to ‘physics’ as well as to ‘physical object’ which is very closely connected with ‘material object’ via ‘matter’ so that we arrive at the other side of the same coin–‘materialism’. A brief historical explanation gives reason to that difference after the introduction of the more recent term, physicalism, in the ‘30s, in the Vienna Circle of positivists – notoriously allergic to the domain of metaphysics and whatever could be related to it, such as the term ‘materialism’… A difference that quickly faded away after the fall into disgrace of the positivist philosophy, that’s why the two terms are now used interchangeably. The term ‘materialism’ (or ‘physicalism’) – we have already seen it – is as old as Democritus; it was revived in the early modern period before its success was decreed by the philosophies and scientific theories of Hobbes, Gassendi and Newton, and, after them in the XVIII century when everything – human beings included – could be seen as some ‘sort of machine’ –the quintessence, I am saying, of the materialist vision. The same ‘dialectical materialism’ of Marx and Engels, in the XIX century, was developed on the background of a materialist understanding of the environment. Still, in the XX century – the SEP continues – materialist theories are alive. Concerning the fundamental meaning of ‘materialism’ or ‘physicalism’ there are no relevant things to add with respect to what we already know (‘… physicalists hold that the real world consists of nothing but matter and energy, and that objects have only physical properties such as spatio-temporal position, mass size, shape, motion, hardness, electrical charge, magnetism and gravity. Exceptions are sometimes made for abstract entities such as numbers, sets, and propositions’) apart from the fact that technical discussions are raised to show positions in favour and against materialism/physicalism. With the help of the OCP, we can summarize these positions in the following way: principal arguments in favour of materialism/physicalism come from the successes of physics, which contributed to explaining a diverse range of phenomena in terms of a few fundamental physical laws (from chemistry to biology, including certain neurophysiological phenomena); [37] arguments against it – the OCP says – comes from theological observations, epistemology (the list of idealists, from Berkeley to Hume, from Kant to Hegel and Mill, according to whom everything, in the end, passes through the mental, is long), and psychology, back to Cartesian dualism; according to those critics we are ‘far from specifying neural states perfectly correlated with even one mental state.’ [38]
3. Reality, realism, and new realism
Given that I am proposing ‘realism’ or, better, ‘new realism’ as an appropriate contextual framework for design professions, I will immediately offer my perspective on ‘reality’, ‘realism’, and ‘new realism’, before confronting it with the same sources that we used to figure out the ordinary and philosophical meaning of ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’. I prefer to start presenting my own view on ‘realism’ since – it is my typical approach to things – at first, I always try to rely on personal or intuitive logic and naïve feelings dictated by the personal observation of phenomena; then, based on that, as the result of observation and basic speculation (i.e., ‘my’ point of view) I try to consider correspondences with existing sources to see similarities, continuities, differences and give more consistency to or reconsider my initial position. This means that I did not figure out the meaning of ‘realism’ or ‘new realism’ primarily by reading what others have said before me on the same argument or what encyclopedias have said; I just used those sources to test my naïve intuitions and eventually to reconsider them.
When I naïvely started reasoning on metaphysical questions about space and place (Places Everywhere-Everything Is Place) it was natural for me to ask what was ‘real’: space or place? Maybe, both of them? How could I discern that? Initially, for me ‘real’ was akin to that which is material, concrete, and actual in the ordinary senses of matter and ‘the physical’ that we have just seen. The ordinary sense of things is always the only starting point available to us for any type of theorization (we are always the product of a traditional culture and of a traditional mode of transmitting knowledge – by family and school). The ‘real’ corresponding to the ‘physical’–a strict materialist position, indeed: only matter exists... which means that only matter is real. I soon realized that it was a weak or a flawed position to maintain for me, too one-sided: to sustain that – i.e., to sustain that ‘only matter exists’ – for me would mean downgrading a great deal of what surrounds us, a great deal of the forces that move human beings and can hardly be considered ‘material’ or reduced to something material ultimately: feelings, indeed, but also ideas, belief, fantasies, creativity, projects, memories, etc. – ‘abstractions’ in one word. At that time, I knew nothing about the ‘subtle’ possibility of considering ‘minds’ and their activities – ideas, beliefs, memories, hallucinations… and all sorts of abstract ‘things’ generated by the mind itself or in combination with the body- could be reduced to the movements of ‘material particles or forces’, that is, reduced to matter and physical laws, ultimately. Later, when I discovered that possibility, I already had enough information to understand its philosophical and physical sense, and reject it, ultimately. So, I began to consider the correlation between the two moments – concretion and abstraction, matter and mind, actuality and potentiality, the physical and the ideal… – rather than their reciprocal exclusion or their reduction to mere physical laws or questions. For example, the will to raise my arm – that is, ‘will’ as something immaterial, mere potentiality – I can transform into my raised arm – a fact, a material fact, something in the act, i.e., actuality (to reduce ‘will’ to mere biochemical exchanges within brain and body, as traditional forms of materialism sustain, cuts out a relevant part of reality for me, other than misplacing effects – a biochemical concatenation of physical processes –with causes–my will, which is something different from neuronal states and processes). After all, we architects are very used to that horizon since our profession is inherently built on the correspondence between two very different moments: words and matter, abstraction and concretion, potentiality (‘everything’ is possible before starting a project) and actuality (everything turns into just one thing, project or building; borrowing the term from quantum physics, we could speak of architectural ‘decoherence’ in the passage from potentiality/ideas to actuality/realized projects or buildings). Extending such basic considerations to architecture, social feelings, and today’s environmental issues, if we want to change or give a different direction to the current state of the world (taking into consideration arguments such as the depletion of natural resources, pollution, climate change, decreasing biodiversity, etc. – i.e., a state of fact, material and actual) we can act so that our ideas, ideals, beliefs, potential projects, etc. are put into practice: a potential state represented by immaterial things (ideas, beliefs, values, potential projects, etc.) can be set into play transforming the actual state of fact, thereby transforming reality. Then, from a certain point of view, ideas, or architectural geometries created by the mind of designers, architects or engineers could be considered even more ‘material’ than matter itself without the necessity to reduce them to mere biochemical exchanges at neuronal levels… A true reality because they can be a real motor for change (later, I discovered that this is fundamentally what Plato sustained – i.e., platonic realism). A circularity between matter and mind, between actual and potential, concrete and abstract, physical and mathematical… where one brings forth the other: that is what I intuitively understood as reality, what is real. I began to understand this complementary state of reality as a whole composed of parts, and I began to envision this state of the world – this state of reality, properly – by means of the symbolism “( )” where the two apparently opposing brackets, in reality, work together to define a whole, a unique, single state: that is the state of reality, properly. Particle( )Wave, for contemporary physicists. Actual( )Potential, or Being( )Becoming, for philosophers. Place( )Space, for architects.
That vision of reality seemed to me a mode to bypass the dualisms that haunted modern thinking since Descartes. Instead of ‘either… or’, I take ‘both… and’. So, I began to see inconsistencies behind pure forms of idealism and materialism, even if I knew there were intermediate positions that complicate the question a lot. But given that architects go for hammers and pickaxes and not for scalpels, which are better for doctors and philosophers, I was content with what I found: that intuitive form of realism – where both concrete and abstract things could be accounted for being real – seemed to me a good compromise between idealism and materialism, escaping the extremisms intrinsic in both of them (it was naively ‘unreal’ for me to reduce the complicate, variegated and opposite phenomena of the world – glass and numbers, i.e., information, feeling and thinking – to reciprocally exclusive ideal or material existents, or forms of knowledge). So, while I was reading Heidegger’s account of ‘the thing’ (see the article What is a Thing?) I was particularly glad to find that Kant already took a clear position on the argument of ‘reality’ – a position which I found very consistent with what I was thinking about it; a position that elucidated the question of reality, actuality, and the meaning of reality itself. I will extendedly quote a couple of passages from Heidegger’s What is a Thing? to explain that. Talking about the Kantian principles of pure understanding in The Critique, Heidegger says: ‘We have to drop the currently familiar meaning of “reality” in the sense of actuality in order to understand what Kant means by the real in appearance. This meaning of “reality” current today, moreover, corresponds neither with the original meaning of the word nor the initial use of the term in medieval and modern philosophy up to Kant. Instead, the present use has presumably come about through a failure to understand and through a misunderstanding of Kant’s usage. Reality comes from [the Latin term] “realitas”. “Realis” is what belongs to “res”. That means a something [‘res’ is the Latin term for ‘thing’]. That is real which belongs to something, what belongs to the what-content of a thing, e.g., to what constitutes a house or tree, what belongs to the essence of something, to the “essentia”. […] All such is real, belongs to the res, to the something “natural body”, regardless of whether the body actually exists or not. […] Only Kant first demonstrated that actuality, being present-at-hand, is not a real predicate of a thing; that is, a hundred possible dollars do not in the least differ from a hundred real dollars according to their reality. It is the same, one hundred dollars, the same what (Was), res, whether possible or actual […] reality does not mean actuality. […] “Reality” as thinghood answers the question of what a thing is, and not whether it exists. […] the real in the appearance, in Kant’s sense, is not what is actually in the appearance as contrasted with what is inactual in it and could be mere semblance and illusion. The real is that which must be given at all, so that something can be decided with respect to its actuality or inactuality. The real is the pure and first necessary “what” as such. Without the real, the something, the object is not only inactual, it is nothing at all, i.e., without a what, according to which it can determine itself as this or that. In this “what”, the real, the object qualifies itself as encountering thus and so. The real is the first “quale” of the object.’[39]
We have to drop the currently familiar meaning of “reality” in the sense of actuality … Reality comes from “realitas”. “Realis” is what belongs to “res”. That means a something. That is real which belongs to something, what belongs to the what-content of a thing…“Reality” as thinghood answers the question of what a thing is, and not whether it exists.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, What Is a Thing?
To summarize, ‘reality’ – the real – is the attribute of the essence of a thing and not the reference to its physical presence (actuality) or absence (inactuality or potential presence); and given that there are both concrete and abstract things in the world – the essence of a thing can be concrete, e.g., the glass, or abstract, e.g., numbers and the information behind – both of them are real. And by extension, I add, given that I feel sentiments of joy, as well as of sadness, joy and sadness are real even if they are not material. Their realities affect my behaviour and with it the concrete constitution of the world (e.g., I believe Mr X and Mrs Y are inappropriate for that institutional role, and I will not vote them – the vote is a ‘material’ state of fact driven by my ‘immaterial’ beliefs, values or ideals that I matured over time). This is the way I understand what reality is – i.e. the pertinence to the thing, to its essence, the what of the thing, independently of the fact that the thing is present-at-hand (the red chair as I see it now) or ‘merely’ present in my mind (the idea of the red chair, my memory of it, or the idea of chairness as such) – and, consequently, what realism is and entails.
Annotation: for me, being a realist does not mean that the concrete and the abstract parts of reality have equal roles or importance. My understanding of realism is based on recognizing and respecting differences rather than erasing them. By seeing differences as continuities of opposing parts we build the possibility to reject dualisms and embrace reality as a whole, a complement of different parts. Within the perspective of realism, I understand both the primacy of natural facts, that is the primacy of those facts that do not depend on human agency or thinking (a position close to materialism), and the primary role of minds in giving shape to reality as abstract determinations (a position close to idealism) after mind becomes acquainted with natural facts. Then, in a certain sense, both moments are primary since the reality resulting from the two moments and their encounter is always a new reality continuously actualized by that encounter. That is the fundamental difference between realism and idealism or materialism, for me. Reality continually renovates and recreates after the encounter between matter and mind and no one part can be reduced to the other, as idealism or materialism say from diametrically opposed positions. It seems to me this position is very close to what Whitehead defined as ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ in Process and Reality (this explains my closeness to Whitehead’s processual philosophy in determining my understanding of reality as a place of processes).[40]
Coming to architecture and design disciplines, concerning the realism of place and space, they are complementary entities, they are both real according to the connotation of reality we are describing. They are both important or primary aspects for architects, but they are very different entities, and their importance must be acknowledged on the basis of their different roles: place is primary in the sense that it comes before space — place is the principle of existence (a naturalistic position); but space (the product of the mind, which, anyway, belongs to nature, it is an element of nature and not a separated part from it) is not secondary since, being ingrained in minds/human agency, as a part of nature, allows human beings to modify places creatively. There is a circularity between the two moments of understanding: place( )space. What is essential for architects (and not just for them) is not to mistake their different realities, one concrete and the other abstract, and their relative and specific roles, otherwise we cannot put into act efficaciously their complementarity, failing to understand reality in its extended range from concrete to abstract. If that does not happen, if we are not able to instantiate their difference and continuity, it goes to the detriment of reality itself or, better, to our understanding of it (so, for example, we’d better understand the streets and squares of a city as places that are spatially extended and not as the spaces of a place, or, even worst, as places in space, which means they are both conceived of as concrete entities). At RSaP, I have argued that many inconsistencies in the adequacy of design professions to deal with environmental questions, until the very recent past, have been caused by the mistaken interpretation of spatial dynamics of both the environment and design professions: space has been attributed a physical role (generally space is thought of as ‘physical’ by architects)[41] this fact implying a diminished attention and care to place, a confusion between place and space, and, consequently, a lack of ‘synthetic’ or holistic studies and theories of place, which, as the consequence of a traditional mode of understanding spatiality (traditional = subjected to interpretations deriving from classical physics and concepts), has often been interpreted and rendered in bits and pieces, thereby representing an obstacle to the appropriate, systemic understanding of environmental dynamics (and of design professions). Ultimately, I believe the ontological confusion between place and space – both of them understood as physical entities in the ordinary sense of ‘physical,’ whence the erroneous belief that spaces are in place (which I consider a common phenomenological and existentialist interpretation after questionable readings after Heidegger’s conception of spatiality–a frequent interpretation, in architecture, philosophy, and the domains of social sciences, which should alert us every time we read or hear of ‘experienced space’, ‘lived space’, ‘perception of space’, etc.; what we really experience, live, or perceive are not spaces, which do not exist as physical entities, but are environments, ambiences, atmospheres, things which are all concrete conditions of a place) or, even worst, that place is in space (a traditional physicalist interpretation of space derived from the physical notion of ‘absolute space’, i.e., ‘physical space’ properly) – implied the impossibility to instantiate the circularity that is intrinsic in nature/reality (actual and potential, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, body and mind) which is the premise for a correct approach to the analysis of a problem, from complementary perspectives, and its possible solution (this is especially the case for environmental questions). In this sense, a transdisciplinary approach to place and clear ontological and epistemological thresholds between space and place – i.e., a clear understanding of their different but complementary ‘reality’, function, and role – is a way to offer an opportune spatial framework to design disciplines and an opportune interpretation of spatiality in connection with environmental questions. Place and space are both important notions for the activity of architects, but we cannot mistake the territory (place), which is concrete and responds to laws ranging from natural to cultural, for its map (space), which is abstract and responds to mere symbolic laws, even if both territory and map are real (existents): focusing on the study of the map and on the ways to perfect it, believing it can be as faithful as the territory, we forgot to study the complex entangled dynamics of the territory and its meaning (place, i.e., the environment in both its natural and cultural dynamics). Similarly, for the lovers of gaming, we cannot confuse the experience of playing pinball on a physical cabinet with iron balls having weight, acceleration, friction, and rebounds responding to actual physical laws with the experience of playing the same game on virtual machines, or devices (tablets, mobile phones, pc, VR headsets, etc.) which respond to the approximate calculus of physical laws in a digital environment. We cannot confuse space, which is an abstract, conceptual notion, with a supposedly physical entity called ‘space’ or ‘absolute space’ existing out there (‘space’ is a concept rejected by contemporary physics). The entity existing ‘out there’ is always a place or an ensemble of things in a place, whose extension or abstract relations of position we name ‘space’.
Image 08: Making the Invisible Visible. In this highly engaging, immersive installation by the American artist Lachlan Turczan what is made visible, actually, is light and suspended particles (mist), not space.
In different articles at RSaP I mentioned the necessity for architecture and design disciplines to conform with a new realism. After having elucidated my position on ‘realism’ as such (reality= both glass and numbers), for me, the sense of that expression – ‘new realism’, that is the use of the attribute ‘new’ as determinant of ‘realism’ – emerged from the encounter of different and related circumstances, and not by its absorption mediated by theories devised by others (there are different forms of ‘new realism’ and we will see some of them in the next section). The first reason for that ‘new’, is the awareness that we are living a completely different epoch with respect to the past — a new epoch that is pointing to the determination of a new cosmology, i.e., a new representation of nature and its happenings by means of new physical laws and new philosophical conceptions which, by extending knowledge beyond the domain of physics, allow us to better understand the complexity of today’s world and its interwoven dynamics, from physicochemical to biological, from ecological to social and economic, from cultural and intellectual to symbolic.[42] This new condition, takes us to a second, no less important consideration: thanks to the advancements of physics, science, technology and the support of new philosophical theories and disciplines (e.g., system sciences, process philosophy, deep ecology, ecology, etc.) we have carefully analysed and, in many cases, realized the sense of the profound entanglement between nature and human activities discovering that we have endangered the natural environments causing its course to change at the scale of geological happenings, in an incredible short amount of time. That exceptional circumstance, under the push of many different social parties and a common feeling for reconsidering the human relationship to nature called for the adoption of a new name — the Anthropocene — to represent our present time as a new geological epoch which points out a discontinuity with the past epochs (the proposal has been recently rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences even if that does not change the nature of absolute novelty of what that word represents).[43] This new awareness concerning the human-environment interaction is the one that gave input to a new phase of social and economic development since the end of the ‘80s, characterized by what is known as sustainable development, which although a bit biased in its initial scope according to many (development over sustainability), generated positive environmental actions and policies at global levels that, in a way or another, are changing the human perspectives of many political, social and cultural agents on nature. Such new perspectives, inevitably include design professions and the building sector, in general. The overall indication behind the abovementioned happenings is that a new ethics is also necessary to adapt human behaviour and agency to the new conception of nature, with its systemic interconnections at any level of existence, which implies the passage from an anthropocentric to a biocentric perspective – where all forms of life deserve equal care and respect – or, even more extendedly, to a cosmocentric perspective – where the focus is equally distributed to the care for the physical environment and its inhabitants – a perspective that reconnects to the definition of a new environmental cosmology. The new ethics will also be necessary to confront with and manage responsibly present and future technological advancements in the new Information Age which, at any rate, is the dematerialized prosecution of past material ages – Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age – defined by the manipulation of matter as affirmed by Ingels in the ‘materialist manifesto’; this time, we have a completely new task to learn: how to manipulate immaterial matter.
So much for general considerations on the meaning and the necessity to introduce the attribute ‘new’ with respect to realism. Hence, ‘new realism’, according to this perspective, is different from other forms of ‘realisms’ or ‘new realisms’ invoked by past or recent philosophies, or even by artistic movements: for me, ‘new realism’ is more connected with the feeling and discoveries of a new epoch, or age, at a precise historical moment incomparably different from the previous ones, rather than with a ‘new’ specific philosophical doctrine.
In this connection, we come to two important circumstances that induced me to frame the phenomenon of architecture and design professions under a new perspective, on the background of a new realism – i.e., the consideration that we are living a new reality, a break point with respect to past:[44] those circumstances regard the proposal I am advancing through the pages of this website for understanding architecture as a discipline of place rather than a discipline of space, since it better allows the passage to a new understanding of nature and the new ethics (space is already contained within place, as a derivation from it, according to the formulation that places are spatially extended; that means that place is the physical entity – matter is place, i.e., an extended field we have learn from contemporary physics other than, more recently, from Heidegger, through the explicit pronouncement that ‘things are places’ – while space is the mental/conceptual/abstract entity, a dimensionally based entity, i.e., an extent or extension, that facilitates our comprehension of places and things as plases) as it has been said since the middle of the XIX century; from here emerges the necessity of a shift of perspective from space to place for architecture – see From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift for Architecture. Finally, parallel to that, or, better, functional to that shift, the proposal for a reformed understanding of place, in a processual and systemic sense, – i.e., place as system of processes – as a guiding notion for the integral transition and adaptation of architecture and design professions to the new reality, at the epoch of the Anthropocene (hence the call for a new realism for architects); a definition – place as system – which takes into account scientific and philosophical perspectives that are converging to a new definition of nature (and a new ethics) which must be taken as the grounding territory for any other sectorial or disciplinary consideration.
In the light of those considerations, in the past, in a few circumstances, I’ve talked about the necessity for architecture and design professions to confront with the new reality in the following sense: ‘the concept of place — in the broadest sense that I’m arguing for at RSaP — surpasses the traditional geographical and sociocultural dimensions alone, which are usually attributed to by architects, to include physicochemical, biological (hence, ecological), and intellectual or symbolic dimensions. Within this overarching compass of place, which comprises space as a symbolic dimension, nothing is left out: reality is place. Therefore, if architecture aims at being sensitive to places, lands or territories, it cannot avoid direct and conscious confrontation with all the processes and forces that are constitutive of reality as place [physicochemical, biological and ecological, sociocultural and symbolic processes]. This is a new realism for architecture, at the beginning of a new epoch — the Anthropocene’ (in the article What Is Architecture?). Similarly, by proposing architects a transdisciplinary approach to design professions to better adapt to the complexities of the present epoch with a view into the future, I was remarking the following condition: ‘… Transdisciplinarity would imply the emergence of architecture and urbanism as disciplines that go beyond their traditional limits to embrace the “total environment” as their new, common territory – the ultimate place of processes where nature and culture are co-determined. All design professions that intervene on the physical environment should be considered place-based professions: they should understand place as the evolutionary dynamics of interplaying physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural and symbolic processes, all at once. This is “a new realism” for the disciplines of design: it does not mean that they will lose their specificities and techniques; it just means that design practitioners should develop non-hierarchical visions between professions and modalities of collaboration to envisage an even more unified and synthetic vision of reality as “total environment”, which is seamlessly conditioned by natural and cultural dynamics’ (in the article A Theory of Place).
It is such global vision about reality and nature – which implies an epistemological change of paradigm for design professions –[45] that should guide the necessity to extend the boundaries of architecture, the request for a more profound integration between design professions, and the call for an even more profound and primal ethical critics to definitively surpass any remnant form of anthropocentrism (i.e., the reconsideration of the role of humans with+in nature). My reference to place as a ‘total environment’ is the realization of the existence of a unique, common, all-embracing territory of reality where natural and cultural dynamics complement each other; this new territory must be the subject-territory of design professions (interior and industrial designers, architects, landscape architects, urban planners but also engineers) requiring them to fuse into higher forms of integration with respect to the past to better respond present and future environmental, social, and economic challenges. To facilitate the possible transition towards a more synthetic unity between such professions the creation of new professional figures is also advisable–professional figures that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries by taking place, the concept of place with all its dynamics unveiled, as the instrument that allows the implementation of a real transdisciplinary dialogue.
3.1 Biological, Cosmological, Topological Realism
To linger a bit more on the question of realism in connection with design professions, a man ahead of his time, architect Richard J. Neutra, in the ‘60s, called for the necessity of a biological realism or biorealism – ‘the most practical sort of all realism, and its concerns include everything that is soul and body of man’ –[46] as a new method to extend the limits of architecture beyond the traditional stylistic discussions of that period and focus on the interaction between physiological, psychological and environmental processes, a message that is still timely (I’ve talked about that in the article The 3rd Skin: Survival Through Design). In that message, it was somehow implicit or preparatory the idea of a global attention that architects should have directed to environmental dynamics. With the same realist intent, I am trying to make explicit the necessity to understand environmental dynamics at 360 degrees: that’s why I am speaking of a ‘total environment’ as the new territorial reference for architects, and I am calling for a notion of place understood as a system of processes, as the referential notion for such total environment, stressing on the entire range of nature processes, rather than on selected parts of it, as the new focus of architects (from physicochemical to biological processes, from ecological to social, from cultural to intellectual and symbolic processes, and all other processes deriving from their interconnected dynamics). Now, many decades after Neutra, this total environment, which is nothing other than the Cosmos itself with its newly-discovered laws and all of its inhabitants connected in a global ecological chain of solidarity, requires us to keep biological realism in mind and extend it into a cosmological realism or topological realism – i.e., ‘toporealism’, the realism of place – given that we are rediscovering place as the most universal and fundamental entity that substantiates reality and all of its processes related to things, life, societies, and symbols. The elucidation of these notions allows design professions, which are intrinsically structured on places, to comply with the different aspects of reality, all at once and according to the new body of scientific and philosophical knowledge which is changing our understanding of nature in systemic, or organic, and holistic terms.
3.2 Reality, realism, and new realism: ordinary, and philosophical meanings
In the section above, I’ve directly presented my view on ‘reality’, ‘realism’, and ‘new realism’ starting from intuitive considerations and the association of logic to a basic linguistic reference (‘reality’ and ‘real’ from the Latin realis>res, meaning ‘thing’) discovering, later, that such view was consistent with what Heidegger, through Kant, said: reality concerns the nature of things, what things are, and not if such things are present (actuality) or not. That perspective is different from our ordinary understanding of reality, in the sense of actuality, which is a sense ‘We have to drop’, Heidegger continues, since ‘the present use has presumably come about through a failure to understand and through a misunderstanding of Kant’s usage.’ [47] Now, let’s see what traditional linguistic and philosophical sources say about ‘reality’, ‘realism’, and ‘new realism’.
Concerning ‘reality’ the Oxford English Dictionary speaks in terms of ‘quality of being real or having an actual existence… Correspondence to fact; truth… resemblance to what is real… real existence; what is real; the aggregate of real things or existences; that which underlies and is the truth of appearances or phenomena… that which constitutes the actual thing, as distinguished from what is merely apparent or external…’,[48] and other definitions that ultimately redirect us to the meanings of the attributes ‘real’ and ‘actual’, or to the nouns ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, which are all connotations very closely interlaced with the traditional view of materialism: only matter exists, therefore only material things (facts) are ‘real’ and ‘true’. This is confirmed when we look at what the OED says with respect to the attribute ‘real’.
Concerning the meaning of the attribute ‘real’, the first and most useful indication we can get from the OED is its etymological connection with the late Latin ‘realis’, from ‘res’ which means ‘thing’ –[49] as we have already seen. Ultimately, when we are speaking about ‘reality’ or what is ‘real’ we are speaking about ‘things’. As for the nature of such things, it seems only ‘actual’ things are ‘real’: most connotations exclude from ‘reality’ what is not objective (or factual) and not actual (this is the traditional sense that ‘we have to drop’). So, when we read what ‘real’ means according to the OED, we see it may mean ‘having an objective existence; actually existing as a thing’, and with respect to its philosophical sense ‘real’ is what is ‘applied to whatever is regarded as having existence in fact and not merely in appearance, thought, or language, or as having an absolute and necessary, in contrast to a merely contingent, existence’.[50] Similarly, a few lines later, we read that ‘real’ is that which is ‘actually existing or present as a state or quality of things; having a foundation in fact; actually occurring or happening’ so that ‘real’ is what is ‘genuine, undoubted.’[51] This characterization of the ‘real’ in opposition to other characters of existence is found also in the following definitions: ‘the real thing… as contrasted with imitations or counterfeits’, or when the OED speaks about the real as ‘that which actually exists, contrasted (a) with a copy… (b) with what is abstract or notional.’[52]
Given the frequent reference of the ‘real’ to the ‘actual’ in its definitions, it may be interesting to see what the OED says about the attribute ‘actual’ with the hope of avoiding the trap of circular definitions that, in turn, refer to the ‘real’… So, we read that ‘actual’, comes from the late Latin ‘actual-is… of or pertaining to action’, from the noun ‘actus’ meaning ‘acting’ which, in turn, derives from the verb ‘ago-ire’, to act.[53] Then, directly from its etymological source, we see the main sense of the ‘actual’ as ‘pertaining to acts; exhibited in deeds; practical, active… Existing in act or fact; really acted or acting; carried out; real; — opposed to potential, possible, virtual, theoretical, ideal… In action or existence at the time; present, current…’ and in phrases like ‘in actual fact’ meaning ‘in reality, contrary to expectation or appearance… really, actually, as a matter of fact.’[54] Fundamentally, according to the OED, the ‘real’ and the ‘actual’ have a more or less explicit and direct pertinence with ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’ often understood in opposition to what is not matter (e.g., appearance, notions, or abstractions in general); that is an ordinary sense which is quite different from the position I have argued for.
As concerns the origin of the word ‘reality’, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology confirms what we have already considered, redirecting reality to the late Latin ‘realis’ and to ‘res’ (thing), ultimately.[55]
Now, let’s see what we can get from the analysis of the word ‘reality’ undertaken by The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. First observation: the word ‘reality’ as such is not present as a direct referent, but it is A] indirectly present in the description of the word ‘real’. In the description of the term ‘real’ we read: ‘If “reality” is taken to be the sum total of all that is real, then for ‘real’ we do have to read something like “existent”’,[56] even if nothing is said about the nature of such ‘existent’, or, maybe, we should take for granted that the ‘existent’ is the ‘physical’ existent, given the abovementioned definitions about that which is ‘real’. But I ask: are things like atoms, chairs, and glass the only things predicate for existence or can we consider, for example, feelings, ideas, numbers, fiction, or information also ‘existents’? Without recurring to David Lewis’ explicit thesis of ‘modal realism’, which provoked ‘incredulous stares but few convincing counter-arguments’ (according to Lewis’ modal realism ‘non-actual objects do have fully-blooded existence, and differ from actual objects only in residing in other possible worlds’),[57] I’ve already expressed the thesis for which we’d better consider certain abstractions, e.g., ideas, are really existent given that by the minds we change the world, so that an indissoluble connection – i.e., a complementarity – between the existent in the body (that which is concrete, or physical, or material) and the existent in mind (that which is abstract, or mental, or immaterial) is established, rendering pretentious, if not fictitious in itself, any mode of thinking about their separation or non-existence. In the OCP, the word ‘reality’ is also B] directly analysed in opposition with the term ‘appearance’, speaking about this couple in terms of ‘problem’ (i.e., the appearance-reality problem);[58] that is traditional philosophical territory of debate and is exactly the harbinger of dualistic views I am trying to reject with my interpretation of ‘realism’ and ‘new realism’. It is starting from such question, ‘the adequacy of our representations and our ability to distinguish between the veridical and the illusory’, that epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, or even psychology begin their ‘constructive and critical projects’.[59] Personally, I would speak of appearance as a part of reality and not in opposition to it. After all, as also Heidegger showed in the essay What Is a Thing? appearance does not necessarily mean something deceitful, as in its ordinary and devaluative sense of the word (ordinary sense) but, remarkably, in its original sense appearance is intimately connected with the very existence of a thing, its ‘physis’ (the physical/natural existent) which should be understood as ‘the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance-in short, the emerging-abiding sway.’ [60] Ultimately, without appearance no-thing exists, Heidegger tells us. The fact that we may be deceived by appearances is another question that regards our epistemological and psychological difficulty in reading what is behind appearances (for example, the conception of place as system of processes and the identification of such processes is a mode to see what is behind the appearance of places-i.e., the phenomenon of place).
Now that we have seen some definitions of ‘reality’ (which, overall, are convergent with traditional views of matter and materialism in the ‘physical’ sense), let’s turn to ‘realism’. From what we have learned about that which is ‘real’, one would expect the complete devaluation of what is opposed to the ‘real’ (abstraction, or subjectivity for instance) but that is not always the case, since there exist some contrasting views (which are anyway connected to a different sense of the term with respect to the past, as also Heidegger explained in the passage I have extendedly quoted). Let’s see this question more in detail.
The Oxford English Dictionary immediately offers a philosophical frame to the question of ‘realism’, and the first connotation it gives to the term illustrates ‘realism’ as ‘The scholastic doctrine of the objective or absolute existence of universals, of which Thomas Aquinas was the chief exponent… Also in later use: the attribution of objective existence to a subjective conception’.[61] In a few words according to these connotations of realism, abstractions (i.e., ‘universals’) and subjectivity (‘subjective conception’) can be both viewed as ‘objective existence’, which is counterintuitive if judged with the ordinary modern senses of matter, materialism, and reality. The first position can be eventually traced back to Plato (i.e. Platonic realism – the theory of reality developed by Plato, according to which ‘mathematical entities subsist independently both of the empirical world and of human thought’).[62] Anyway, this is congruent with the image offered by Heidegger, when he said that reality completely changed its meaning, in modern times, after inaccurate interpretations of Kant’s Critique. So, the other connotations of ‘realism’ proposed by the OED are more congruent with what we have learned so far as the ‘real’, in the traditional or ordinary sense. Therefore, realism is the ‘belief in the real existence of matter as the object of perception (natural realism); also the view that the physical world has independent reality, and is not ultimately reducible to universal mind or spirit (opposed to Idealism)… In the 20th century, [realism] applied to philosophical theories reacting against 19th-century idealism which, while they agree in affirming that external objects exist independently of the mind, differ in their accounts of appearance, perception, and illusion. More recently the theory that the world has a reality that transcends the mind’s analytical capacity… Inclination or attachment to what is real; tendency to regard things as they really are; any view or system contrasted with Idealism… [and with reference to art and literature:] Close resemblance to what is real; fidelity of representation, rendering the precise details of the real thing or scene… A real fact or experience’.[63]
Concerning the etymological analysis of the word ‘realism’, even in this case, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology returns to ‘real’ from the Latin ‘realis’ and ‘res’ – ‘thing’ – with specific reference to philosophy, ‘in the sense adherent of philosophical realism’, dispelling any doubt on the fact that the coinage of the term, ‘realism,’ originated from philosophical debates (as also indirectly evidenced by the Oxford English Dictionary, where the first connotations presented are philosophical connotations). So, we redirect to The Oxford Companion to Philosophy to gain further insight into the philosophical meaning of ‘realism’.
Apart from introducing different kinds of ‘realism’ (e.g., mathematical realism, naïve realism, new realism, quasi-realism), which immediately give us the idea of the complexity and subtleties of the argument, ‘realism’ is described by the OCP in opposition to ‘anti-realism’, which is coherent with what we have seen so far, both with respect to materialism/matter (whose meanings were often elucidated in opposition to other concepts, e.g., mind, form, idea, etc.) and reality/real (often in opposition to what is abstract, conceptual, apparent, illusory, etc.).[64] The OCP speaks about realism/anti-realism in terms of ‘directions, not positions’, given that ‘to assert that something is somehow mind-independent is to move in the realist direction: to deny it is to move in the opposite direction.’[65] Fundamentally, we are moving into a hybrid territory where ‘No sane position is reached at either extreme. Not everything is in every way independent of minds [e.g., pain]… Not everything depends in every way on minds [e.g., the presence of the moon even if we do not look at it].’[66] Between the two extremes, there are different forms of realism, or, as the OCP says, the ‘bewildering variety of senses’, some of which we are going to consider.
Following a historical timeline, as we have already seen, in medieval scholastic philosophy, ‘realism was a theory predication opposed to nominalism and conceptualism’;[67] according to ‘realism’ the proposition ‘the snow is white’ is true if the substance-snow has the property of whiteness which is independent of minds (therefore, properties are properties of something independent of our minds, contrarily to what conceptualism and nominalism hold: conceptualism says properties are mind-dependent, while nominalism goes even further affirming theta properties – e.g., ‘whiteness’- depend on a particular language and not merely on thought).[68] Kant, the OCP continues, opposed ‘realism to idealism distinguishing transcendental and empirical versions of each. The empirical realist holds (like Kant) that we can have knowledge of the existence and nature of material objects in space and time. The transcendental realist holds (unlike Kant) that the existence and nature of the objects so known is wholly independent of our knowledge of them.’[69] There may be a combination of the two positions, which as far as I understand, is the position maintained by Whitehead in the end (the reformed subjectivist principle, which is a position I also maintain), according to which ‘my perception of the tree depends essentially on the tree, because I could not have had that perception without perceiving the tree…
There may be a combination of empirical realism (the position of Kant) and transcendental realism according to which perception depends essentially on the object perceived because I could not have any perception without the object (reformed subjectivist principle).
… After Kant – again we read from the OCP – realism meant above all the view that we perceive objects whose existence and nature are independent of our perceptions.’[70] According to the OCP, ‘realism’, in the latter connotation, may lead to scepticism because of the devaluation of the role of the subject (hence of perception, values, beliefs, etc.). This fact leads to anti-realist positions which may take many forms.
This ‘direction’ of realism is quite different from the direction I have taken which, I repeat, is close to that of Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle, that is: first there are objects – which is a realistic and materialistic position; yet, objects are/may be prehended or perceived by subjects or minds – which is an idealistic or subjectivist position; from the complementarity of the two moments, reality emerges as a whole, i.e., the holistic and systemic direction of ‘realism’ I support, or ‘new realism’ if we consider the novel historical context we are living – new physics, new cosmology, new Epoch and Age, i.e., the Anthropocene/the Age of Information, new ethics. Like in the past epochs, the human-nature relationship is conditioned by physical and cosmological visions which are still under definition, but are conditioned by the research for the ‘final’ unification of physical laws – the so-called ‘theory of everything’ – after Newton and Maxwell.
Among different forms of realism, I want to cite ‘naïve realism’ and, of course, ‘new realism’ which is the direction of realism I have spoken about, but which may have different senses and histories. Concerning the former, the OCP says that although ‘is often said to be the view of the person on the street’ is at any effect a ‘theory of perception [according to which] our ordinary perception of physical objects is direct, unmediated by awareness of subjective entities, and that, in normal perceptual conditions, these objects have the properties they appear to have’.[71]
As regards ‘New Realism’, first, it was used to describe an American philosophical movement formed by a collective of students of Harvard Professor Josiah Royce (1855-1916); they opposed the absolute idealism professed by Royce. Fundamentally, that movement, by means of a common manifesto and publications, ‘held a theory of direct acquaintance with physical objects.’[72]
More recently, the expression ‘New realism’ has been re-proposed by the Italian Philosopher Maurizio Ferraris and his younger colleague, the German Philosopher Markus Gabriel: when, in 2012, Gabriel ‘was planning an international conference on the fundamental character of contemporary philosophy’, asked for a possible title of that conference, Ferraris answered: ‘New realism’.[73] Ferraris immediately wrote articles and a book with that title – ‘Manifesto of New Realism’ – pointing out that the reflections developed in the book summarized his past twenty years of activity and that ‘New realism, in fact, is not at all “my own theory,” nor is it a specific philosophical current, and it is not even a koiné of thought. It is simply a photograph (which I deem realistic indeed) of a state of affairs…’.[74] In a certain sense, this is the position I expressed in a passage above concerning my intention to use the expression ‘new realism’ in connection with the new sentiment of an epoch completely divergent from the past (an epoch defined by a new physics, a new cosmology, new ethics, and new names-the Anthropocene, or even the Information Age), and not in the reference to a precise philosophical current (such as the one professed by the American philosophers or by Gabriel). Ferraris continues: ‘What I call “new realism,” in fact, is first of all the acknowledgment of a turn…a severe denial of what I regard as the two dogmas of postmodernism: namely, that all reality is socially constructed and infinitely manipulable, and that truth is a useless notion because solidarity is more important than objectivity. Real needs, real lives and deaths, not bearing to be reduced to mere interpretations, have asserted their rights confirming the idea that realism (just like its opposite) not only has implications for knowledge but also for ethics and politics.’[75] Ferraris also wrote ‘A Brief History of New Realism’ which is an accessible and interesting retrospective on ‘New Realism’ and also a view on its future perspectives.[76]
Ferraris’ colleague, German philosopher Markus Gabriel, is another active exponent in the promotion of a new realist perspective: he has dealt with the argument in different essays, most of them in the German language, and in the book ‘Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology’ offering his peculiar view of ‘new realism’ which occupies a middle ground between metaphysical realism (the world existing in itself, i.e., the world without spectators) and constructivism (the world of spectators, i.e., the world as a subjective and/or social construction) ‘recognizing the existence of perspectives and constructions as world-involving relations’, which is, fundamentally, a ‘middle-ground’ position I agree with.[77] In the book edited by Jan Voosholz from the title ‘Markus Gabriel’s New Realism’, directly through the words of Gabriel we read that ‘New Realism […] sets out from a thorough rejection of the idea that to be (real) is to be mind-independent. Minds, their aspects, and their artifacts (language, consciousness, perception, culture, theories, etc.) are fully legitimate denizens of reality. While some parts of reality are mind-independent in the sense of being maximally modally robust (they would have been the way we discover them to be even if we had never been around to discover them), other parts are the way they are only because we discover or produce them’;[78] again, a point of view I feel close to since it demands the consideration of all aspects of reality giving them different ‘weights’ and, therefore, specific ontological relevance. Translated into architectural language: according to this new realistic perspective, both glass and numbers are real, that is, both material and immaterial aspects of architecture deserve specific attention since reality, including architecture as a relevant part of it, is comprised of both material and immaterial aspects (therefore, in the end, immaterial realities such as feelings, ideals, memories, dreams, language, values, beliefs, etc. participate in the solidification of architecture the same way of stones, bricks, concrete, metal, wood, etc. even if from a diametrically opposed perspective).
I conclude this brief panoramic view on the different perspectives and meanings of ‘new realism’ by referring to art and architecture. In the first case, the reference is to the artistic movement (Nouveau Réalisme) founded in the ‘60s, between Italy and France by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein. Artists like Arman, Jean Tinguely, César, Christo, Daniel Spoerri, and many others adhered to the movement, appealing to a ‘new perceptive approaches of the real’;[79] that was a call for a return to reality through a new consideration of everyday objects, the products of industry, as well as waste, refuse and all other objects rejected by the mass consumer society and incorporated directly into their artistic expressions.
3.3 New Realism for Architects
Concerning the relationship between ‘new realism’ and architecture, we find a few precedents in a series of conferences held in Italy, which had the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris as the scientific coordinator or his Manifesto of New Realism as a conceptual motor; I am referring to the conferences ‘Nuovo Realismo e Architettura della Città’, held in Turin in 2012; ‘Nuovo Realismo e Razionalismo’, held in Turin in 2013; ‘La provocazione del Reale. Nuovo Realismo e Razionalismo, un Dibattito Architettonico e Filosofico tra Italia e Germania’, held in Menaggio in 2014; ‘Nuovo Realismo/postmodernismo: dibattito aperto fra architettura e filosofia’, held in Rome in 2014. Those conferences offered the always-welcomed call for architecture to adhere to reality after decades of postmodernism, deconstructivism and the digital derailings of the first decade of the new century. Those conferences were mainly Italian, internal academic debates (after the intellectual stimulation of Ferraris’ Manifesto of New Realism) focused on the interaction between architecture and reality on the background of architectural rationalism, which is a completely different perspective from the one I am figuring out in these pages.
Here, I sum up the main topics that, according to me, allow to speak about design professions in direct connection with a new realism: [i] the role of the new physics in our understanding of reality (i.e., a new reality, properly) and in changing the traditional concepts of matter, space and place, which are basic concepts for architects; [ii] the consequent determination of a new cosmology and a new understanding of nature with the passage from a mechanic to an organic or systemic world-vision, which, it is my contention, should be reflected in an analogous organic or systemic approach to design professions; [iii] the entrance into a new epoch, the Anthropocene, which is changing the perspective of architecture-nature interactions, thereby changing the core structure of architecture and other design professions, as the new paradigms of sustainability are showing; [iv] a need for a new ethical framework that goes beyond the anthropocentric perspective; the new ethics should be reflected in new design approaches and, most importantly, in the development and implementation of specific design tools inspired by those significant changes and enabling architects’ professions to adapt to these shifts effectively; I am speaking of: [v] the concept of place as system of processes; [vi] the related rejection of physicalist interpretations of space and its delimitation to a no-less important conceptual/cognitive (i.e., ideal) role, which is the consequence of interrelated scientific discoveries (new physics, psychology and neurosciences) and philosophical speculation; [vii] the understanding of matter as place, i.e., things are places (a derivation from contemporary physics which is also explicable in terms of Heideggerian spatial analysis), which means understanding architecture as place (a place of processes), rather than or before than a discipline of space; [viii] the necessity for architects to confront with and understand the environment as a ‘total environment’ (contemporarily natural and cultural, with all the gradients between them, i.e., ecological, economic, social, political, religious… ‘gradients’), which is a derivation from point five; consequently, [ix] the necessity for design professions to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to manage, take care of, and design with the multifaceted complexity implicated in such ‘total environment’. Finally, [x] the new tools and approaches are necessary to understand the sense of design disciplines in the new Age of Information (i.e., information technology, properly) where the threshold between the concrete and the abstract (the real and the virtual, the actual and the potential, the natural and the cultural-as-artificial) is becoming more difficult to be ascertained with the consequent risk that some irreducible and unamendable physical or natural instances of nature and its processes get out of sight and, conversely, some abstract ideal or virtual instances are misplaced for physical, natural or concrete (fallacy of misplaced concreteness) creating confusion – a lack of understanding, ultimately – on the nature of reality.
Conclusions
We have considered different perspectives on materialism and realism, their explicative possibilities regarding our understanding of the nature of reality, and, consequently, the extent of their applicability in design practices—above all architecture.
Taking Bjarke Ingels’ ‘materialist manifesto’ for Domus 2025 as a starting point, we have considered the different senses of matter and, consequently, of materialism taking a clue from the relationship between ordinary thinking and philosophical speculation, analysing different linguistic and philosophical sources. We have pointed out the historical relevance of the concept of matter for determining our understanding of the nature of reality, through the ancient Greek concept ‘physis’. If during the Greek epoch, and even later, ‘the physical’ — i.e., ‘physis’, the physical existent (today we would say ‘the thing’ or ‘object’) — was a correlative conception containing notions of matter and form, and principles of qualitative change and motion (this is fundamentally an Aristotelian model) with the modern epoch things completely changed: only matter was understood as the true physical existent and any other determination rejected. Matter was thought of as corporeal, atomic, solid, and unchangeable in itself, which are some of the characteristics that contributed to forming our ordinary conception of matter (i.e. ‘the stuff of which a thing is made’), identifying it with that which is ‘physical’ (and splitting everything else apart from the physical, thereby creating dualisms such as mind/matter or form/matter or, again, mind/body, abstract/concrete, potential/actual, physical/mathematical, etc.). This modern, classical conception of matter, where everything is subjected to the movement and order of particles in space and time, entails a mechanical, reductionist, and deterministic conception of nature and the irrelevance of that which is not physical (thereby ideas, ideals, values, belief, feelings, dreams, etc.) for explaining the nature of reality. This is the ultimate sense of the straight materialist vision according to which everything is made of matter and only matter exists. This also means that every explanation in nature can be reduced to ‘physics’, everything can be explained in terms of physical laws or processes (including mental states), ultimately. Alternatively, a bit different from the old model of Aristotle, and different from the traditional, classical, and ordinary model of matter (classical since it is a derivation from classical physics), we have considered another conception of matter, this time derived from contemporary physics (matter is ‘dematerialized’ according to relativity and quantum mechanics: matter is not material, ultimately) with some clues from old and new philosophical models (Aristotle, Leibniz, and Whitehead). This new model of matter, which puts together past with present thinking, scientific with philosophical thinking recovering the sense and the importance of the Philosophy of Nature, implies a systemic or organic model of nature (instead of mechanic), open to possibility (probabilistic rather than deterministic, thereby recovering the important concept of potentiality as a creative reservoir of the infinite possibilities of reality), irreducible to physical laws (i.e., irreducible to the possibility of explaining the complicate entanglement between systems in mere terms of motion and spatial order of elementary ‘material’ particles) and rejecting dualisms in favour of complementary modes of understanding reality (body and mind, actual and potential, being and becoming… particle and wave… place and space). This vision reconnects matter to nature according to the old Greek sense of ‘physis’, and, by extension, to the nature of reality as that which is comprised of actuality and potentiality, body and mind, concrete and abstract, being and becoming. In this way, the revised conception of matter and, consequently, of materialism can be seen in continuity with realism, and, specifically, with the declination of ‘new realism’ I have given. Through the revised meaning of matter, we have seen the possibility of understanding matter as place, and place as a system of processes, which are both working concepts for design professions; those conceptualizations cover any aspect of reality (from concrete to abstract, from physical to ideal, from natural to artificial, from material to spiritual, etc.) and indicate ‘place’ as the core concept for design professions.
Image 09: I see a continuity between materialism and realism, provided materialism surpasses the classical conception of physical matter as the ultimate explanation of reality, which is a position incapable of coming to terms with the systemic complexity of today’s reality, and provided ‘realism’ is intended as ‘new realism’, according to the original Latin (and Kantian) conception of the ‘real’ (realis) as that which pertains to things (res), independently of their physical presence (actuality) or absence (inactuality). That means that both glass and numbers are ‘real’ and ‘material’, complementary parts of the same, unique reality.
The explanation of the conception of reality I have offered does not refer specifically to already existing philosophical, artistic, or architectural realist doctrines but is a reference to the simple determination of reality understood as that which pertains to things according to its original designation (reality from the Latin ‘res’, which means ‘thing’), which is also the meaning attributed to by Kant, before modern interpretations obfuscated the original sense, as Heidegger showed. That means that reality is comprised of both concrete and abstract things or aspects (matter and mind, feeling and thinking, being and becoming, actuality and potentiality… glass and numbers) and that appropriate explanations and understanding can only occur if we can see the complementarity of such aspects. To put it differently, it means that reality presents both mind-independent and mind-dependent aspects and our focus must be fixed on both of them and their interactions. The attribute ‘new’ I have used in combination with reality, in the expression ‘new realism’, is due to specific, novel circumstances (a new physics, a new cosmology – i.e., a new conception of nature – a new epoch, the Anthropocene, or a new age, the Age of Information, new ethics, new concepts of matter, place and space) that oblige us to put a threshold between past and present circumstances or considerations and definitions. We have examined ten key points that illustrate how the new circumstances directly impact design professions and the necessity for architects to develop new theoretical tools and approaches to comply with the new reality. A new epoch, a new conception of nature, new disciplinary tools or concepts, and new approaches: this is why we advocate for a new realism for architects.
Notes
[1] Here you can read the manifesto.
[2] I’ve spoken about some of these approaches maintained by architects and critics in the articles ‘The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place, Part II: A Historical Enquiry’, ‘A Theory of Place’, The Eisenman- Alexander Debate, Place and Occasion.
[3] ‘Sustainable development’ has been initially elaborated as a too-biased anthropocentric perspective; current revisions of that concept must necessarily widen the horizon of that perspective in a cosmological sense thereby including a more concerted focus on things and all living beings – for me, this is the sense of the contemporary focus on regenerative practices as an extension of sustainable development.
[4] The question of whether the meaning of certain concepts derives directly from philosophical (and physical) investigation passing into common speech or, conversely, from the erudite analysis of scholars to common-sense terminology is open and difficult to establish a priori: each case (i.e., each term or concept) require a specific analysis.
[5] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[6] Ibid., 530.
[7] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1997 Additions), Volume IV, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, reformatted by Beatrice Shallot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 3015.
[8] Ibid., 3016.
[9] Ibid., 3015.
[10] Ainsworth, Thomas, “Form vs. Matter”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/form-matter/>.
[11] Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books LTD, 2012. Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron, The Words Between the Spaces: Building and Language’. London: Routledge, 2002.
[12] see The Stockholm Water Prize.
[13] From the Italian Magazine Corriere della Sera: ‘Dobbiamo immaginare grandi mutamenti nelle tradizioni dei luoghi, negli assetti economici e sociali, e abbandonare le prospettive antropocentriche che guardano solo all’Homo sapiens e ai suoi interessi’
[14] Ultimately, concepts of ‘space’, ‘matter’, and ‘time’ reunited under the aegis of ‘place’ – a concept that also includes the field of physics – rather than considered independent realities as in the classical tradition.
[15] An example or consequence of such vision is the inclusion of places within new jurisdictions that equate the rights of places (rivers, mountains, plains, etc. – i.e., the rights of nature, fundamentally) to the rights of people since – I hold, and the concept of place I propose, place as system of processes, is instrumental to that – there is fundamental solidarity between all different entities of reality/nature (they are all places, places of processes…). In the past, I’ve talked about ‘the identity of places’ and the necessity for places to have ‘identity cards’, just like persons have, to better understand or to start delineating the essence of places as true living entities in order to recognize their uniqueness and unique role in the constitution of nature – i.e., ecosystems of which we, as human beings, are also a part. On the argument you can see the articles Should rivers have the same rights as people? or even Taranaki Mounga: New Zealand mountain granted same legal rights as a person.
[16] Ibid., 3016-3019.
[17] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 562.
[18] Ibid., 539.
[19] Ibid., 539.
[20] Ibid., 539.
[21] Ibid., 530-531.
[22] In Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (London: The Scientific Book Club, 1938), 256-258.
[23] For details on the matrix of existence out of which the ordered Cosmos emerges, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
[24] Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space & Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1988) 124.
Image 10: Illustration from Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1888). The concept of place as system of processes offers a solution to one of the most debated physical problems in antiquity.
[25] therefore, coming to architecture, we should reject architectural theories founded on physicalist notions of space: if we can still affirm that architecture is a theory of space it is because space is the abstract imaginative structure that architects make us of to control physical places, and not because there exists an entity ‘out there’ called ‘space’; that entity, actually is just the dimensionality – an abstract notion – that is intrinsic to place or to the relation between things in place (yet, we are saying that with the new understanding of matter as field, things are places) which are all concrete notions.
[26] See paragraph 9. The Problem of the Physical Existent, and 14. Motion, Action, and Physical Being in the article Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature.
[27] Here ‘against’ reminds us of the Heideggerian notion of opposition which I have talked about in Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two (The Limitation of Being): without opposition, it is difficult to have an exhaustive understanding of phenomena, since opposition also means ‘unity’ according to Heidegger: the two opposing brackets – ( ) – define an internal unit, just like in a sort of yin-yang relationship where the whole – the unity – is made of two opposing parts.
[28] many contemporary physicists and philosophers of science noted similarities between the new science and certain arguments drawn from Aristotelian physics and metaphysics; different books and papers have been written on the subject.
[29] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2976.
[30] Ibid., 2976.
[31] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 561.
[32] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 530.
[33] Ibid., 530
[34] Ibid., 531.
[35] Ibid., 531.
[36] Ibid., 531.
[37] Ibid., 679.
[38] Ibid., 679.
[39] Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (South Bend: Gateway Editions Ltd., 1976), 222.
[40] Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 157, 160, 166, 167, 189.
[41] the consideration of space as a concrete entity – a modality I was also committed to – see the article Archi-textures – before going deeper into spatial questions from different and more contemporary perspectives.
[42] Symbolically, from the perspective of physics, the beginning of the new epoch, or, better, the beginning of the transition toward a new cosmology that will take us to the unification of physical laws (what, somewhat improperly, has been called a theory of everything) I would set in the year 1905, when Einstein presented a series of scientific papers that would have changed the human picture of the world forever, introducing mankind to special relativity and quantum physics (with his paper on the photoelectric effect). Einstein’s relativity, quantum physics, complexity sciences, general system theories, chaos theory, systems ecology, and other branches of science that are at the foundation of modern and contemporary scientific visions, mark a conceptual shift (a paradigm shift) with respect to the past: we are passing from a mechanic, reductionist and deterministic vision of the world to an organic or systemic vision, irreducible to mere physical laws, and, by its nature, probabilistic and complementary (at this regard, I would trade the complementarity between particle and waves for actuality and potentiality, being and becoming).
[43] This is the official statement released by the IUGS, after the proposal for naming the Anthropocene a new Geological Time Scale was rejected on March 2024: ‘Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG [Anthropocene Working Group] has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.’
[44] the analogy is with respect to two other breakpoints or periods in history: [i] Aristotle’s physics and Ptolemaic cosmology; [ii] Copernican cosmology and Newtonian physics.
[45] Nicola Emery, L’Architettura Difficile: Filosofia del Costruire (Milano: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2007), 167.
[46] Richard J. Neutra, World and Dwelling (New York: Universe Books, Inc., 1962), 10. See also The 3rd Skin: Survival Through Design
[47] See What Is a Thing?
[48] The Oxford English Dictionary, Volume V, 610-611.
[49] Ibid., 601.
[50] Ibid., 601-602.
[51] Ibid., 602-603.
[52] Ibid., 606.
[53] The Oxford English Dictionary, Volume II, 357.
[54] Ibid., 358.
[55] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1982), 743.
[56] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 746.
[57] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 257.
[58] Ibid., 41.
[59] Ibid., 41.
[60] See Chapter One- Section C. Phusis: the fundamental word for beings as such in the article Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One
[61] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 608.
[62] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 686, Platonism.
[63] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 608-609.
[64] The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 746.
[65] Ibid. 746.
[66] Ibid. 746.
[67] Ibid. 746.
[68] Ibid. 746.
[69] Ibid. 746.
[70] Ibid. 746.
[71] Ibid. 602.
[72] Ibid. 618.
[73] Maurizio Ferraris, Manifesto of New Realism, translated by Sarah De Sanctis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), xiii.
[74] Ibid., xiii.
[75] Ibid., xiv-xv.
[76] Maurizio Ferraris, A Brief history of New Realism, in Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (3), 2016.
[77] Markus Gabriel, Field of Sense: A New realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), viii
[78] In response to Charles Travis. In: Markus Gabriel’s New Realism edited by Jan Voosholz. Springer, 2024 e-book edition.
[79] From the manifesto signed on Thursday, 27 October 1960, we reed: ‘Nouveau Réalism= nouvelles approches perceptives du réel’
Cited Works
Ainsworth, Thomas. ‘Form vs. Matter’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/form-matter/>.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Einstein, Albert and Infeld, Leopold. The Evolution of Physics. London: The Scientific Book Club, 1938.
Emery, Nicola. L’Architettura Difficile: Filosofia del Costruire. Milano: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2007.
Ferraris, Maurizio, A Brief History of New Realism, in Filozofija i Društvo, XXVII (3), 2016.
—. Manifesto of New Realism, translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.
Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
—. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books LTD, 2012.
Gabriel, Markus. Field of Sense: A New realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Heidegger, Martin. What is a Thing? South Bend: Gateway Editions LTD, 1967.
Markus, Thomas A. and Cameron, Deborah The Words Between the Spaces: Building and Language’. London: Routledge, 2002.
Neutra, Richard J. World and Dwelling. New York: Universe Books, Inc., 1962.
Sorabji, Richard. Matter, Space & Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1988.
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1997 Additions), Volume II, IV, V, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, reformatted by Beatrice Shallot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Voosholz, Jan. Markus Gabriel’s New Realism. Cham: Springer, 2024.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality – An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press, Corrected edition, 1978.
Image Credits
Featured Image: What it Means to Be Real, collective composition, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, CC BY-NC-SA.
Images 02, 03, 04: Bjarke Ingels Group, on big.dk
Image 09: Passing Baton, on istockphoto.com
Image 10: The Flammarion engraving, on wikipedia.
All other images by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, CC BY-NC-SA.
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