Category Archives: Architectural Theories

This post is the second part of an article about the first chapter of Gilbert Simondon‘s  L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1964), entitled Form and Matter.

After exploring the text itself and its critique of the Aristotelian hylomorphic (form/matter) scheme to think about objects, I would like to introduce a second architectural interpretation of Simondon’s essay. Indeed, not only the hylomorphic paradigm fails to describe materially the energy that operates within the fabrication of an object, but it also categorize the humans involved in this operation in two distinct categories: those who think the object and those who make the object. The former virtually impose an abstract form on a material while the latter, who have a deepen knowledge about the material itself, are forced to manipulate it to achieve more or less skilfully the thought form. The following excerpt is the way Simondon describes it through his interest for the individualization:

(my clumsy translation): What is kept in an object, is the matter; what makes it being itself, is the state in which its matter describes all the events that this object was subjected to; the form that is only a fabrication intention, a composition will, can neither grow old nor become; it is always the same as an intention, for the conscience of the one who thinks and gives the fabrication order; it is the same abstractly, he wants them to be all the same, of the same dimension and following the same geometry.

(original version): Ce qui se conserve dans un objet, c’est la matière ; ce qui le fait être lui-même, c’est que l’état dans lequel est sa matière résume tous les événements que cet objet a subis ; la forme qui n’est qu’intention fabricatrice, volonté de disposition, ne peut vieillir ni devenir ; elle est toujours la même, d’une fabrication a une autre ; elle est tout au moins la même en tant qu’intention, pour la conscience de celui qui pense et donne l’ordre de fabrication ; elle est la même abstraitement, il les souhaite toutes identiques, de la même dimension et selon la même figure géométrique.

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French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) is very likely to join Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault in the list of philosophers that influence the writings on this blog. It has been a while now that I would like to expand my conclusion for the essay Abject Matter: The Barricade and the Tunnel that I already published here. This little piece of text was an interpretation of Simondon’s first chapter of L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (the Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual ) to make an argument about the landscape of insurgencies and architecture in general. This chapter is called Form and Matter and I would like to archive the translation of the first half of it that Taylor Adkin made for his excellent Fractal Ontology (edited with Joseph Weissman). All excerpts in English included here comes from this translation. A second article, less descriptive and more interpretative will come in the next few days.

In this text that opens his book, Simondon undertake to critique the Aristotelian paradigmatic scheme: hylomorphism. This scheme describes each object and body as a combination of form and matter, and Simondon, through the very extensive and detailed description of the fabrication process of a brick, affirms that this scheme misses a very important aspect of this process: the energy involved to transform the “formless” clay into a parallelepiped brick:

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