Tectonics, like many semantic appropriations posited within both academy and profession, is often used as a catchall term concerning the processes involved in the production of the architectural object. But what is tectonics, and how does one process its core meaning as considered within the narrative of architectural manifestations?
How, within disciplines rapidly morphed by image-based digital ways and means, can the etymological roots of the word meaningfully—critically—participate in a processual path in step with the currency of cultural entropy and the commodification of form. Should they?
If tectonics is syntactical, and if one agrees that architecture is at its core based in tectonics, then the question arises: can an architecture—any longer—emerge as an intact systemic grammatical form – a culturally imbued material narrative, a language?
As a material/physical phenomenon, tectonics resists the controlled outcomes digitization relies on. Building tectonics go hand in hand with materiality; to be more attentive to the nature of materials is to be more concerned with assemblage, with behavior and differentiation, as chefs are with their ingredients. Architectural production, unlike food culture, has transformed: in our discipline “cooking” digitally is standard practice in which performative graphical fidelity trumps the seams, joints, assemblies and tolerances that constitute the reflective “reading” that has constituted architectural tectonics.
The tension between the precisions of tectonics and the ambiguities of program has long been a source of meaning—knowledge—in architecture. Tectonics implies methods of assemblage, of a dialog between material elements embedded into the heart of construction and consequentially, architecture. In parallel, historical concerns with the control of spaces i.e. the fear of disorder, saw program shift from its original self-regulated sense of a “public proclamation” to something far more prescriptive (as in a computer program — “to cause to be automatically regulated in a prescribed way”). Today's almost pathological over-programing of space, particularly public space, is a manifestation of the politics of control, or perhaps more depressingly, marks a nearly complete loss of confidence in architecture’s symbolic (semantic) aspirational role in society. Are things so far gone that the generative relations, the contradictions and rubbings between program and tectonics are no longer meaningful?
Countless conferences and forums have addressed similar questions with politely multifarious outcomes. AR/Architecture Research 2025 revives questions regarding the intwined relationship between program and tectonics. In a data-sphere where program is often a byproduct of cultural commodification, can it render enough formative matter to generate a tectonic order, a constructional syntax, or does it—form itself—fall victim to the superficies of one-to-one tropes and hyper-productivity?
The editors of AR/Architecture Research 2025 are calling for papers that are concerned with the dialectical, symbolic, and constructional, relationship between Tectonics and the definition of Program.
AR/Architecture Research 2025 is guest edited by Professor Christopher Bardt.
Christopher Bardt is an architect, theorist, artist, writer and professor of architecture.
He is a founding principal (with Kyna Leski) of 3sixØ Architecture, named by Architectural Record as one of 10 leading vanguard firms worldwide in 2002. His extensive professional experience includes residential, commercial and institutional commissions, furniture design, and planning studies ranging from small urban interventions to large-scale metropolitan development.
Bardt has been a member of the Architecture faculty at RISD since 1988. His pedagogical innovations center on introducing architecture students to an artists’ or material-based design process in the development of architectural thinking at the intersection of poetic sensibility and sensuous reasoning. Full biography here: https://www.chrisbardt.com/bio/