A THEORY TO STAND ON

There is little doubt that technical developments of the last 3.0 or so years have had, and will continue to have, radical impacts on the form of our societies and on its institutions. The Brazilian-Czech media critic Vilém Flusser posited in 1993 that the computer has ushered in a new species of humanno longer Homo Faber, man the maker, but now Homo Ladens, man the player, as our ages-old ability to grip becomes less important than our newfound facility with our fingertips on a keyboard (and now, with the advent of motion-sensing systems, our gestures in space). Fittingly, next year's annual conference will be entirely dedicated to architecture's newly developed "digital aptitudes." In these times of drastic disciplinary transformations, it is good for us to remember that the institutions that.govern architecture - the schools, the practices, and the professional bodies- are all less than 200 years old, with many dating only from the last century, and all products of the series of revolutions that at that time ushered in the modern world. At such times when institutions come under new pressures to adapt to changing societal conditions, we will all have to ask ourselves: Where do we stand? CA After presenting a theoretical positioning of the expanded scope for architecture, based closely on Rosalind Krauss's influential 1979 paper "Sculpture in the Expanded Field." White presented several design research projects by Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab that operate as clear examples of this expanded scope. Most interesting, though, wasthe tide of his talk: "Architecture After Discipline." The title implies a radically changed view of architecture, one in which we see architecture not as a discipline linked to the study of buildings, nor as a profession linked to the production of buildings, but as a set of practices that are available to be applied to multiple situations and scales. The architect in this postdisciplinary framework is defined not by technical knowledge, but by a collection of modes of operation. This is a significant shift in thinking. While attention has been paid at ACSA conferences in the recent past to architecture as a discipline, seeking to consolidate disciplinary knowledge and to operate in interdisciplinary or cross- disciplinary modes. White points to architecture's transdisciplinary potential; architecture as a set of practices transcends disciplinary knowledge. These practices also include actively redefining the discipline, as well