Ruby, "Beyond Form: Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproducibility" in Digitalreal, 206–213; here 211–213)
xi. Though to be fair, some younger practitioners recognize the necessity for translation, following a slightly different trajectory than Eisenman's. Consider, for example, the practice of Reiser+Umemoto, an architectural firm directly inspired by Kwinter's conception of “computational coextensivity." The firm seeks to engage media “in the so-called solid-state," that is the state in which “material formations are inextricably linked to the computational logics inherent in materiality itself" (Jesse Reiser, Solid State Architecture).
In projects like the Yokohama Port Terminal and the Kansai Library Project, Reiser+Umemoto seek to catalyze the "lateral communication" between building structures and components as a means of allowing architectural materiality to express its potential. In the case of the Yokohama project, this was achieved by opening up the truss structure to the potential forces that are “inherent within" their definition as structure, but remain untapped without the "provocation of some outside force (of an adjacent structure)." In the proposal for the Yokohama Port Terminal, the structural system begins as a set of repeated trusses conceived as flexible at their control points. Subsequently, as other systems (e.g., roads, gardens, etc.) pass through them, they are deflected from their original structural function. This yields what Reiser provocatively calls a “resonance across elements," a resonance of material potentialities catalyzed solely through the extrafunctional “intermixing" of structural elements. Now Reiser specifically characterizes this practice in terms of its double engagement with media: as a material substance in its own right and as a virtual or informing potential.
To the extent that these two notions of media are folded together in the concept of the diagram, they operate the participation of architecture in what Reiser calls a “universal structure": the “dynamical diagram which has no essential origin and can be incarnated in multiple materials, scales and regimes." Whatever resonance there is between this conception and Kwinter's perspective is, as I have said, not accidental, but Reiser's effort to apply a continuous conception of the material flux to concrete problems of architectural design introduces something not found in Kwinter: the necessity, in a “second" stage, to rematerialize the diagram “in the stuff of architecture with all of its attendant phenomena." As Reiser recognizes, this modelization of architecture as a system in perpetual individuation "demands a renewed recognition of the integration of matter and effect."
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