:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE ATRIUM AFTER THE ALGORITHM: CONGESTION, PREDICTION, MIGRATION AND THE ARCHITECTURES THAT TURN GLOBAL DISORDER INTO AN INHABITABLE IMAGE

Friday, July 17, 2026

THE ATRIUM AFTER THE ALGORITHM: CONGESTION, PREDICTION, MIGRATION AND THE ARCHITECTURES THAT TURN GLOBAL DISORDER INTO AN INHABITABLE IMAGE

Rem Koolhaas recognized that metropolitan life could no longer be understood through the classical unity of composition, programme and civic representation: the contemporary city had become an unstable accumulation of elevators, shopping, infrastructures, media, finance and incompatible temporalities whose very congestion generated new forms of order. Louise Amoore locates a comparable instability inside algorithmic systems, where decisions emerge not from complete knowledge but from probabilistic judgments about uncertain futures. Maurice Blanchot carries thought toward the outside, where language persists after sovereign authorship has weakened.

Wu Chi-Tsung makes image technologies confront the material traditions they appear to supersede, while Simon Denny turns hardware, diagrams and corporate narratives into archaeological evidence of platform power. Susan Leigh Foster treats choreography as a mode of thinking through bodies whose movements are culturally trained rather than naturally given. William Harvey’s description of blood circulation displaced the body from a collection of separate organs toward an internally connected system. Akira Kurosawa constructed cinema through weather, movement and conflicting viewpoints, making perception itself dramatic. Paul McCarthy converts domestic, theatrical and commercial imagery into grotesque machines whose excess reveals the violence concealed inside entertainment. Jorge Oteiza empties sculpture so that absence becomes an active spatial substance. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls for epistemologies capable of recognizing forms of knowledge suppressed by colonial modernity. Elías Torres works with light, public space and Mediterranean materiality, whereas Lu Yang constructs posthuman avatars in which Buddhist iconography, neuroscience, gaming and digital performance converge. Paul Robbins examines ecological problems as political formations rather than failures of neutral environmental management. Petra Hroch asks how design, health and material relations might become ecological practices of inhabitation. Carol Farbotko studies climate displacement and the injustice of representing island communities as populations already destined to disappear. Christoph Willibald Gluck reformed opera by binding music more closely to dramatic action; Heinrich Schütz gave sacred language spatial and emotional intensity through vocal architecture. Marcello Piacentini transformed architecture into an instrument of Fascist state representation, demonstrating how stylistic order can naturalize political authority. Satyajit Ray answered monumentality with attentive observation, allowing gestures, sounds and domestic thresholds to reveal historical change. Faig Ahmed distorts carpet patterns until cultural continuity appears as material mutation. Aaron Betsky approaches architecture through exhibition, criticism and the dismantling of stable disciplinary borders. Pan Daijing composes sound as a bodily and architectural pressure. Michael Fried’s defence of absorption and medium specificity encounters its limit in practices whose meaning depends precisely upon the spectator’s physical presence. Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s figures, plants and crystal-like structures establish a pictorial world where Sudanese modernism, spirituality and feminist experimentation intersect. Mire Lee makes machines leak, pulse and hang like damaged organisms. Joel Mokyr interprets economic transformation through cultures of useful knowledge, while Edgar Pieterse reads African urbanization through informality, infrastructure and unequal governance. Yinka Shonibare turns Dutch wax textiles into unstable signs of empire, class and fabricated authenticity. Lily van der Stokker covers walls with decorative colour, domestic language and apparently naïve motifs whose optimism challenges the gendered hierarchy of seriousness. Shahidul Alam makes photography an instrument of political testimony and institutional resistance. Liv Bugge examines power through animals, prisons and embodied relations. Daniel Defoe’s fictions connect individual calculation to trade, colonial expansion and the emerging capitalist city. Théodore Géricault’s shipwreck transforms governmental negligence into a monumental arrangement of abandoned bodies. Apollodorus of Damascus joined engineering, military logistics and imperial representation in bridges, forums and monuments whose technical accomplishment cannot be separated from territorial power. Laura Lima turns exhibitions into lived situations involving bodies, animals and unstable social agreements. UNStudio develops architecture through diagrams of movement and programme, seeking formal continuity within complex flows. Charlotte Posenenske made modular structures that rejected rarity and privileged reproducibility. Grace Schwindt choreographs bodies within architectures marked by political memory. Florin Tudor examines postsocialist space, labour and contested historical narration. Shakir Hassan Al Said joined abstraction, Arabic script and Sufi thought through the search for an interior dimension. Paulo Bruscky used mail, photocopying, the street and communication networks to circumvent institutional containment. West 8 treats landscape as a large territorial apparatus shaped by water, infrastructure, ecology and metropolitan desire. Dante Gabriel Rossetti fused image, poetry and medieval revival into an aesthetic environment of symbolic intensity. Li Hui’s installations use lasers, reflective materials and technological light to render invisible fields spatially perceptible. Mikhail Larionov fractured pictorial space into radiant energies. László Moholy-Nagy understood photography, typography, film and industrial material as components of a new sensory education. Lorenzo Pezzani follows migration across seas through forensic maps, satellite images and legal evidence, exposing borders as technological environments. Erik Satie’s repetitions and pauses dissolve musical monumentality into minor, eccentric duration. Clarissa Tossin connects architecture, commodity circulation and extractive histories across the Americas. Jan Kaplický imagined buildings as aerodynamic organisms shaped by advanced fabrication. Domenico Ghirlandaio placed sacred narratives within the garments, rooms and social hierarchies of Renaissance Florence. Oskar Kokoschka converted portraiture and landscape into nervous psychological fields. Fernando Botero’s expanded bodies turn volume into satire, tenderness and political witness. Baya Mahieddine created an Algerian pictorial universe of women, plants, architecture and ornament resistant to colonial expectations. Josefa de Óbidos made still-life objects, sweets and sacred matter occupy a concentrated theatrical space. foundationClasscollective transforms artistic education into a struggle against institutional exclusion, treating access not as benevolent admission but as collective restructuring. Paulo Nimer Pjota samples mythology, graffiti, domestic objects and art history across expansive painted surfaces. Raffaello D’Andrea makes autonomous machines perform coordination, balance and responsive behaviour, disclosing both the elegance and the political ambiguity of robotic control. Iain Boyd Whyte traces modern architecture through the manifestos, institutions and technologies that gave it intellectual authority. Alan Guth’s inflationary cosmology imagines the early universe through an extraordinary acceleration of space. Theodosius Dobzhansky joined genetics to evolutionary theory, making variation central to biological history. Percy Julian transformed plant chemistry into medicines while confronting racial barriers within scientific institutions. Torsten Wiesel mapped the neural organization of vision, revealing sight as an active construction rather than a passive reception. Stephanie Kelton challenges the analogy between state budgets and household finance. Peter Evans examines development through relations among states, markets and social institutions. Susumu Kuno analyzes linguistic structure across Japanese and comparative grammar. Liang Qichao converted journalism, historiography and translation into instruments for political modernization. Al-Suhrawardi constructed a philosophy of illumination in which knowledge appears through graded intensities of light. Itō Jinsai returned Confucian thought to everyday ethical relations and the precise interpretation of language. Fernanda Melchor writes violence as a collective atmosphere produced by poverty, misogyny, rumour and fractured speech. Daphne Koller develops probabilistic models through which machines reason under uncertainty. Kellie Jones reconstructs Black and Latinx artistic genealogies dispersed by migration and institutional neglect. Loretta Lees exposes gentrification as class restructuring rather than urban improvement. Alva Noto reduces sound to pulses, errors and electronic signals that occupy space with architectural exactitude. Samson Young investigates sound through war, national ritual and technologies of listening. Ochy Curiel develops a decolonial feminism attentive to race, sexuality and the colonial production of social categories. Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns ordinary interiors and communication technologies into thresholds of diffuse terror. Zach Gage designs games whose simple rules generate strategic complexity and emotional compulsion. Manthia Diawara moves between cinema, African intellectual history and diasporic identity. Zarina Bhimji films buildings and landscapes as repositories of migration, colonial violence and absent bodies. Margaret Mead made cultural variation central to public understandings of human development, although anthropology’s authority remains inseparable from unequal relations between observer and observed. Shu Lea Cheang transforms networks, biotechnology and sexuality into collaborative systems that refuse the supposedly immaterial neutrality of digital space. Harry Francis Mallgrave links architectural theory to embodiment and the cognitive experience of built environments. Benoît Peeters studies comics, narrative form and the imaginary city. John Waters converts bad taste into a critical weapon against bourgeois normality. Alissa Quart examines the economic precarity hidden beneath narratives of merit and professional success. Fatima Mernissi questions patriarchal authority through Islamic history, sociology and feminist interpretation. Laura van den Berg builds fiction from estrangement, travel and unstable realities. Viet Thanh Nguyen makes war memory answerable to the uneven distribution of narrative power. Gruppo T treated optical and kinetic art as collective research into perception, time and variation. Mohsen Makhmalbaf uses cinema to confront revolution, poverty, censorship and the ethical ambiguity of representation. Miren Agur Meabe makes Basque language carry bodily memory, gender and intimate fracture. Ugo Foscolo joins exile, nationalism and mortality within the political transformation of European letters. Andrea Branzi understood the city as a diffuse territory of commodities, interiors, information and continuous adaptation. Marcel L’Herbier explored cinema as a synthesis of architecture, design, rhythm and technological vision. Leila Ahmed reconstructs gender within Islamic histories while exposing the colonial uses of feminist rhetoric. Omar Victor Diop restages portraiture to connect African history, migration and self-representation. James Welch writes Native American life against narratives of disappearance, returning identity to land, memory and contemporary experience. José Emilio Pacheco transforms the city into an archive of ecological loss, political disillusion and vanishing everyday worlds. What holds these trajectories together is not the celebration of congestion as spectacle, but the recognition that density has become the condition through which power hides and knowledge must operate. The shopping centre, refugee route, database, museum, opera house, neural network and river delta are all architectures of selection: they regulate what may circulate, what becomes visible, where delay occurs and who is permitted to remain. Contemporary disorder is therefore never merely chaotic. It is actively composed by standards, financial incentives, algorithms, historical exclusions and material infrastructures whose operations often disappear behind seamless interfaces. A critical architecture must not restore a fictitious unity to this world. It must make its discontinuities inhabitable and its systems perceptible. It must reveal the labour beneath automation, the territory beneath data, the colonial route beneath the decorative object and the political decision beneath environmental inevitability. Only then can congestion cease to be an alibi for power and become instead a field in which incompatible histories remain present, relations can be renegotiated and collective intelligence acquires spatial form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html

Anto Lloveras
Socioplastics — LAPIEZA-LAB

WITH

Rem Koolhaas, Louise Amoore, Maurice Blanchot, Wu Chi-Tsung, Simon Denny, Susan Leigh Foster, William Harvey, Akira Kurosawa, Paul McCarthy, Jorge Oteiza, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Elías Torres, Lu Yang, Paul Robbins, Petra Hroch, Carol Farbotko, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Heinrich Schütz, Marcello Piacentini, Satyajit Ray, Faig Ahmed, Aaron Betsky, Pan Daijing, Michael Fried, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Mire Lee, Joel Mokyr, Edgar Pieterse, Yinka Shonibare, Lily van der Stokker, Shahidul Alam, Liv Bugge, Daniel Defoe, Théodore Géricault, Apollodorus of Damascus, Laura Lima, UNStudio, Charlotte Posenenske, Grace Schwindt, Florin Tudor, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Paulo Bruscky, West 8, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Li Hui, Mikhail Larionov, László Moholy-Nagy, Lorenzo Pezzani, Erik Satie, Clarissa Tossin, Jan Kaplický, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernando Botero, Baya Mahieddine, Josefa de Óbidos, foundationClasscollective, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Raffaello D’Andrea, Iain Boyd Whyte, Alan Guth, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Percy Julian, Torsten Wiesel, Stephanie Kelton, Peter Evans, Susumu Kuno, Liang Qichao, Al-Suhrawardi, Itō Jinsai, Fernanda Melchor, Daphne Koller, Kellie Jones, Loretta Lees, Alva Noto, Samson Young, Ochy Curiel, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Zach Gage, Manthia Diawara, Zarina Bhimji, Margaret Mead, Shu Lea Cheang, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Benoît Peeters, John Waters, Alissa Quart, Fatima Mernissi, Laura van den Berg, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Gruppo T, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Miren Agur Meabe, Ugo Foscolo, Andrea Branzi, Marcel L’Herbier, Leila Ahmed, Omar Victor Diop, James Welch, José Emilio Pacheco.