Lars Spuybroek gave a talk in the school recently entitled the radical picturesque which accompanied his new book continuity in architecture. The book was written in such a way as to emphasis the need and lack of the written word in recent architectural discourse, during his introduction one of the few things that hit a note was that in order to address questions of digital architecture the twentieth century should be ignored which would allow us to find a middle ground between as he put it the Hadids and the Fosters in the worlds. The larger part of the lecture spoke of returning to Ruskin and Semper and a few quick mentions of meaning in architecture as shown through his own work. What was interesting was his use and application of the concepts of agency, which is a theme that has been running through the studio recently like wild fire and personally I believe we’ve been applying incorrectly. Mainly, due to a tendency to tackle the issue in a purely procedural and technique based understanding of the term agency. We’ve all seen the projects that employ ‘agents’ that navigate a field condition and generate usually some form of pattern based diagram, and recently due to the introduction of the software Massive, which through a simple interface allows the user to control a large population of agents with programmable brains the diagrams being generated have become increasingly intricate and advanced yet remain an underlying diagram for some sort of direct formal output. Lars introduced agency on a far smaller scale in work such as Otto’s wool thread tests (or his own version of them) which allowed me at least to view agency as a tool that ties back in to material systems and Delueze’s ideas of moving matter and directly related to questions of the diagram and its formal and affective implications. Again though at the end of the day the question still arises to what end due you apply the tool, since if you don’t fall into the trap of allowing the technique and the tool to drive your work, what problem does agency solve or at least address beyond the technique.

tomorrow is the first day in the two day reviews of the third and final year of parametric urbanism with some interesting projects and guests should be good, if anyone is intrested it will run on the 22 and 23 of January between 10 to 5 at the main AA building at 36 Bedford Square london