Indeterminacy In Architecture Essay

The concept of indeterminacy was proposed by a new generation of architects in the sixties and seventies as a way to assume and address the problem with the uncertainty of change during the life of a building. Seminal ideas, proposed in the sixties by the Archigram and its allies, promoted a novel architecture sympathetic to uncertainty, incompleteness and emergent situations. This shift in architectural discourse was further developed in the Seventies through proposing indeterminate kinetic structures able to adapt to change.

According to Simon Sadler, between 1961 and 1964, through a series of talks, unpublished papers and his project for the Northwick Park Hospital in London, John Weeks brought the word indeterminacy to architectural discourse.4 For Weeks, the strategy of indeterminacy was the method to “cope with the increasingly rapid growth, change and obsolescence” of buildings. He acknowledged that the requirements of future users, and thus size and unequal growth of the buildings, are uncertain factors, difficult to predict during the design process. Therefore, he proposed that change and obsolescence should be assumed instead of envisioning ideal and static solutions that “would quickly …show more content…
They relate several ideas, developed in the sixties in construction, engineering, planning, robotics and aerospace, which implied control and shape modification through mechanical.2 Indeterminacy is understood here in relation to the uncertainty of change, of future unknown situations For Zuk and Clark, architects have traditionally proposed their buildings assuming a particular problem in time, when in fact it is just an arbitrary point in a continuous process of change. Architecture can be defined as a “three-dimensional form-response to a set of pressures” and therefore kinetic architecture is the mechanical modification of the shape according to the change on these