Tirana Architecture Week 2020 - Conference Proceedings: Science and the City

Abstract

Dear participant of Tirana Architecture Week, In his famous book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, coined the notion of ‘paradigm shift’, intended as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. In opposition to the activity of ‘normal science’, a ‘shift’ occurs when the current predominant paradigm, under which scientific activities are conducted becomes incompatible due to new phenomena, facilitating the research – and adoption – of a new theory or paradigm. We can also assume that, such a critical change is often driven by a ‘crisis’, a transitional moment where the appearance of new technologies, environmental conditions (ex. climate change), or political situations (ex. migration phenomena), requires the a drastic rift from the past and opens the way to a reformulation of the notion of the so-called ‘Modernity’. Indeed, according to the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: «Modernity … is what transforms crisis into a value, a contradictory moral, says Baudrillard, for it gives rise to an aesthetics of rupture». The history of Architecture and Design itself, can be also interpreted as a consequential stream of changes following the research of a new paradigm. The Industrial Revolution deeply influenced the work of professionals during the whole XX Century, leading to the appearance of an architecture that could be a response to the industry preferring a free and functional arrangement of bodies rather than typological preset; transparencyrather than opaqueness, points structures rather than tectonic configurations. In the last thirty years, with the development of computers and ICT technologies, another paradigm has raised and changed these disciplines from their inner structures. The IT Revolution has imposed itself as the central element for a new phase in all of architecture, and information hasbecome the essential component of a new way of designing and a new urban environment. A whole generation of architects has been dealing with the purpose of transferring the dynamic interconnection at the heart of IT from the digital world to a new reality of reactive, sensitive, interactivearchitectures. The aim of Tirana Architecture Week 2020 is to draw current research and design practices, as well as theoretical speculations on therelationship between the paradigm shifts in science and urbanism; in other words about the science and the city. Such mandate will be addressedin multiple scales and contexts, and from different perspectives within different fields of interest, directly or indirectly related to design, architecture, urban studies, sociology, environmental research, engineering, education and pedagogy.