Expertise

Architecture Theory | Affect Theory | Affordance Theory | Radical Empiricism | Ecologies of Architecture | New Materialism

Research

My research relies on Radical Empiricism as a means of tapping, not into the solipsistic world-of-design, but into the relations of exteriority or the design-of-world. This anti-representational disposition resonates strongly with the ethico-aesthetic realist approach that seeks to circumvent obstacles in the formal structures of power in favour of an affirmative constructivist (meso)politics of matter. It concentrates on the notion of priming, which occurs not on the level at which actions are decided, but on the pre-subjective and impersonal level at which the very capacity for action forms. As Robin Evans, the architectural progenitor of the Affective Turn, surmised, the goal-oriented action (volition) cannot in any serious way be used as a design criterion because “freedom of action is never a de facto established condition but always a nascent possibility.” This antecedent level of potentialisation (desire) is proto-epistemological, yet already ontological, in that it concerns change in the life-form’s degree of enablement in and towards its umwelt. The onto-topological commitment stipulates that experience is not an event ‘in the mind’. Rather, the mind emerges from the interaction with the milieu. The life-form never pre-exists an event, hence the prefix ‘life’ or, more to the point, the urban-life-form. Simpler still, action, perception and environment are located on a continuum. It is from this plastic perspective of Relational Thinking that we need to challenge the predominant homeostatic principle of substance in architectural thinking, in favour of the metastable – ‘anexact’ yet rigorous – transversal principle of process.

Teaching

My architectural practice has always influenced my work as a theorist beyond the facile qualification of practice as an application of theory or, conversely, as its inspiration. This double bind has served me greatly with respect to my capacity to develop architecture education programs that meet both the rigorous demands of research as well as the strenuous requirements of professional design training. After all, the only non-totalising and hence immanent theory is the one in becoming, as sense is never given but must be made. To paraphrase Spinoza, we do not yet know what architecture can do.

Biography

Andrej Radman is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and coordinator of the Ecologies of Architecture research group at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Over the past two decades Radman’s research has focused on the nexus between Architecture and Radical Empiricism. He is a member of the National Committee on Deleuze and Guattari Scholarship, and the production editor and member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint. Radman is a co-editor of Critical and Clinical Cartographies (EUP, 2017), Architecture of Life and Death (RLI, 2021), and The Space of Technicity (RLI, 2023). He is the author of Gibsonism (TUD, 2012) and Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (EUP, 2021). He is also a licensed architect with a portfolio of built and competition-winning projects. Radman received the Croatian Association of Architects annual award for housing architecture in Croatia in 2002. In 2023, Radman was honoured as the recipient of the Mark Cousins Theory Award presented by DigitalFUTURES. This award recognises leading theorists in the field of architecture and design who have demonstrated the future thinking of the field. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8914-1197

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