Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies

In the last decade the attention of architectural designers and theorists has been primarily directed toward the descriptive geometries with which architectural space is written. To the extent that geometry is the preferred language for architectural communication, its interrogation has become the dominant form of writing in architecture. More precisely, the majority of both spatial and theoretical innovations in architecture have become increasingly dependent on geometric conflicts. These developments are superlatively described by Mark Wigley in his introduction to the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition and publication as a conflict within and between forms.’ Wigley’s essay on architectural form depends on the belief that geometric conflict presents a new form of writing. Architecture’s recent investment in geometric conflicts can be seen as an internal response to the critique, by philosophy, that writing is essentially an "antiarchitectural gesture" defined against geometric purity. The interest in formal conflict positions Wigley and others on a common trajectory inaugurated by Robert Venturi with the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966.1 Of the many similarities and significant differences between these theorists of formal conflict, the most important suggests that the now dominant practice of eliding cultural difference with formal conflict as a method for writing in architecture is becoming progressively suspect. Yet the exclusion of architecture from writing persists, demanding a further interrogation of geometry. If indeed geometric conflict is becoming bankrupt as an urban organizational model, what are the alternatives to the transgression of geometric order available to archi-