Dr.ir. A. (Andrej) Radman

Dr.ir. A. (Andrej) Radman

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Room: 08.00OOST410

Profile

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, a founding editor of the TU Delft OPEN Publishing Ecologies of Architecture Book Series, and the Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed architecture theory journal Footprint (2011-2024). Radman is a co-editor of Critical and Clinical Cartographies (2017), Architecture of Life and Death (2021), The Space of Technicity (2024), and Noetics Without a Mind (forthcoming). He is the author of Gibsonism (2012) and Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (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, he was honoured with the Mark Cousins Theory Award presented by DigitalFUTURES. This award recognises leading theorists in the field of architecture and design who have demonstrated forward-thinking perspectives in the field. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8914-1197

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.

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Expertise

Publications

Courses 2024

Courses 2023

Media

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Prizes

  • 2023-7-30

    Mark Cousins Theory Award

    Andrej Radman is the recipient of the 2023 DigitalFUTURES Mark Cousins Theory Award. These awards are given to exceptional architects, designers and researchers, who have made significant, innovative and impactful contributions to the fields of architecture and computational design. The Awards Ceremony took place during the Closing Ceremony for the DigitalFUTURES online workshops on Sunday 30 July 2023. The Theory Award presentation starts at 2:14:16: https://www.youtube.com/live/PBmige0uXwU?feature=share

    Closing Ceremony for the DigitalFUTURES online workshops

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Ancillary activities

Contact

Room: 08.00OOST410