The Knowable and the Ineffable: an object-oriented reading of Enric Miralles’ design approach

Abstract

Since the early 2010s, Graham Harman’s Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) has drawn significant attention to architecture, whose influenced areas have reconfigured its methods, principles, and value systems around discourses centered on reality in itself, autonomy, and aesthetics. This means that architecture and its projects are specific ‘realities’ in their own right that transcends any epistemological consideration. Besides, each reality can manifest itself in multiple ways through its ‘qualities’ – some known, and most unknown. However, each of these manifestations (or their sum) is incomplete in the fullness of its reality. In this double condition of a unitary reality surrounded by multiple features/profiles, the (architectural) object emerges as an ambiguous entity for the senses and the intellect, given that it can never be objectively defined because it can never be fully apprehended. Faced with the impossibility of an ontological knowledge of the project, contemporary architects attached to OOO have explored various aesthetic regimes to instill multiple understandings in the audience1.