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Case Study: Rolex Learning Center, SANAA
Text: Deleuze and the Genesis of form, MANUEL DELANDA
What does the genesis of form and structure involve? If they were created then the creator employs resources beyond the capabilities of the material substratum of the same forms and structures, sometimes imposing explicitly transcendental defining forms on infertile materials. Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics appreciates morphogenesis where matter is an active material agent and form is not an external imposition. Form simply emerges from minimizing energy. SANAA translated a single fluid space in the Rolex Learning Center (“EPFL Learning Centre”). The space flows from gentle slopes to terraces around internal patios. The patios open the building to the sky and the street and foster circulation, ventilation and natural light.
Realizing a possibility does not add anything to a predefined form except reality. The distinction between virtual and actual does not involve resemblance but subverts identity.
Henri Bergson saw the mechanical and linear view of causality and its implied rigid determinism as a obstacle to truly innovate. True innovation is impossible if the future is not left open-ended. The past and present are made pregnant with possibilities which become real and more importantly virtualities which become actual. The physical reality’s biggest canvas is the built form. In EPFL the walls are replaced by hills and valleys, an architectural landscape. Organised meetings are suggested through clusters of glazed bubbles. The edges of the building are invisible. Taking the architecture as a singularity it remains to be seen if the social component, a consistent aggregate of heterogeneous elements, will generate a new social class. The virtual diagram would shift to generate a new mesh of the ecosystem. But for an ecosystem to exist must not the architect allocate equal importance to the animal species within the scope of the project or simply wait for an appropriate interaction between the built and the excluded nature?
Geology boasts the oldest actualisations of virtual operations. Granite and other igneous rocks are formed not from cementation or sedimentation like sandstone but from cooling magma. Our reality is a spontaneous mesh of material and energy flows. It is important that architecture as a socially constructed world does not become an inert receptacle for external form but rather a world pregnant with virtualities that can be immortalised in literature, art and music.