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R.M. Villa:
"Architectonics of the Mirror: Between Project and Speculation";
Talk: Scaffolds International Symposium, Brussels; 2018-11-22 - 2018-11-23.

Aim of the paper is to look at the figure of the mirror as a peculiar `space´ of architectural invention. Since Renaissance, perspective drawing has been established as the most `objective´ way to represent a `subjective´ point of view; it is precisely through the reflective surface of a mirror, as the space in which the self can be objectified, that such invention takes place. The apparent contradiction of an `objective subjectivity´-which most of modern science builds upon-can be properly investigated only if such space of `speculation´ is addressed as an excluded, invisible element of a triadic setting. The paper will then try to look at modern `rationality´ as a `projection´ arising from such exclusion and externalisation-to inspect the space of the mirror as an architectonics of information. It will do so by looking at a range of examples-from architecture to philosophy-in which this third is consciously questioned, or where it is instead `invisibly´ at work. The outline of such a "transcendental topology" (Coccia, 2005) will then perhaps provide the tools to address in a novel way notions such as the one of learning: not as the accumulation of `objective data´, but rather as the ability to make `tabula rasa´, while still `remembering´ (encrypting) the dispositions of what is `actively´ forgotten. Furthermore, such insight might also help to consider digital contemporary techniques such as architectural rendering not in opposition to a so-called `analog´ method, but rather in the common `convergence´ of the two (Schmitt´s "complexio oppositorum"); the metaphorical reading of `computational space´ as a new kind of `mirror´ in which forms are encoded might therefore be a way to cast a `bridge´ between the discreet and the continuous.

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_273605.pdf