natural purpose, digital design, and reflective engagements

‘Why not ...first to find out where the
stranger in natural science, the concept of
natural purposes, may lead us? ‘
‐ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment 301.
Within the discipline of architecture, natural is a persistent term which, through its history of redefinition, has acquired the potential to relocate the designed.1 The term identifies challenges to architectural practice, describes production, and situates the architectural object. In a strange parallel, digital design is currently asserting the same potential to induce “the transformation of the meaning of the architectural object”.2 This paper examines the current relationship between nature and the architectural object as mediated by digital design processes towards a speculation on user inhabitation of so designed space.

It infers that the broad theological framework that has been the unifying ground for theoreticians with respect to computer‐aided design practices – Deleuzian material theory – is insufficient when it comes to understanding the new blurring of distinction between natural and designed, and that this dependency is robbing digital design of its experiential potentials.3 The need to reconcile the virtual architectural object with the real architectural object transcends theoretical discussion hinging on form‐based discussions and the nature of the computer design environment, without rejecting the importance of such interrogation. Formal emphasis produces architectural space that represses the user’s sense‐based experience. Current oppositions to formalist architecture through digital design, such as Greg Lynn’s Animate Form, highlight a tendency to resolve issues through time‐based discussions, excluding space.4

Neo‐Kantian interpretations will provide as an alternate framework to disrupt the determinism underpinned formalism. While Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appears to endorse formalist architectural space as emphasised by digital methodologies, the later Critique of Judgement – with particular reference to the treatises on Natural Purpose and Reflective Judgment ‐ can provide an examination of embodied space.5 The Critique of Judgment is a fertile architectural text due to its capacity to force out relations between theory and action.6 Setting up a Kantian interrogation allows the paper to formatively straddle broader architectural  questions of nature, aesthetics, surface/structure, metaphysics, sublime, and immateriality.