Guido Campi
How does history impact design? This was one of the central questions in Marina Waisman’s extensive work. The Argentinian architectural historian and critic is one of the most relevant voices in Latin American architectural thought. From the 1950s to the 1990s, she redefined the history of architecture with new perspectives rooted in Structuralism. In this presentation, I specifically examine the role of systems sciences and cybernetics in two of her most important books.
In The Historical Structure of the Environment (1972), Waisman attempts to reincorporate history, hardly questioned after World War II, into the design process. She engages with systems thinking and proposes a design method not only to understand architectural history but also to enable design practitioners to use it as an active design tool. She argues that a historical structure exists in which environment and knowledge organically intermingle. Design, she explains, occurs as a critical operation within this historical feedback loop: designers extract a design object from it, critically modify it, and feed it back into the system as a new design contextualised in a specific time and place. Waisman urges us to think globally about the whole, in a continuous process where political questions about the fate of the environment, design, and the act of designing emerge.
In Architecture, Decentered (1995), Waisman approaches the phenomenon of fragmentation caused by the dissolution of the modern values of rationality, objectivity, and universality. Her method, a holistic approach towards the creation of urban memories within the fragmented metropolis, calls for a design culture that includes caring practices within a limited world.
In her writings, Waisman seeks to make sense of architecture, asking why, if the sciences had discovered a science of order such as cybernetics, architecture should not follow suit. Many of her thoughts, inspired by feedback mechanisms, thermodynamics, entropy, and emergence, are valuable insights on how design engages with history through design methods and systems thinking. One of her central questions concerns the impact of knowledge on design and how useful knowledge for design is fundamentally a historical co-creation. Waisman’s world offers a fresh way of being in the world—present, alive, and interconnected.
Keywords: Marina Waisman, history of architecture, design methods, systems, cybernetics