Non-Referential Architecture

Non-Referential Architecture is the architecture of the 21st century. It is distinct of the architecture of postmodernity in as much as Non-Referential Architecture is a response to a non-referential world. Non-Referential Architecture is liberated of a vocabulary of fixed semantic images, symbols, and historical connotations. Buildings of Non-Referential Architecture are based upon themselves – they are based on architecture-inherent qualities such as architectural space and form and the experience of space they cause in the inhabitants and visitors. Buildings of Non-Referential Architecture are distinctly different from their precursors of modernism and postmodernism because they are not the outcome of extra-architectural concepts and ideas, such as importations and thematizations, for example, taken from the realms of the economic, the ecological, or the political.

In the book Non-Referential Architecture, Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati and USA-based Swiss architectural theoretician Markus Breitschmid write: "Non-referential architecture is not an architecture that subsists as a referential vessel or as a symbol of something outside itself. Non-referential buildings are entities that are themselves meaningful and sense-making and, as such, no less the embodiment of society than buildings were in the past when they were the bearers of common social ideals."[1]

Non-Referential Architecture is a response to a contemporary societal current that increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, political and otherwise. While ideologies were the innovation of modernity and postmodernity, the non-referential world is increasingly devoid of ideologies or it rejects to order the world in ideological ways. Valerio Olgiati has worked on the possibilities of a Non-Referential Architecture for years. The first documented use of the term Non-Referential in architecture appears in a reprint of an interview between Olgiati and Breitschmid in the Italian architecture journal Domus.[2] In 2014, Breitschmid publishes a rebuttal titled "Architektur leitet sich von Architektur ab" (Architecture is Derived from Architecture) in the Swiss journal Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, thereby responding to an architectural claim made by others that attempts to imbue meaning into architecture from the extra-architectural, such as the economic, ecological, political. [3] Architect Christian Kerez investigated the limits of referentiality and speaks of "non-referential space" as a quality of his contribution for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.[4] In the same year, architect Peter Eisenman points out that architecture has been moving toward a “non-referential ‘objectivity’” for some time, in as much as architectural form is increasingly reduced “to a pure reality.”[5]

In 2018, Olgiati and Breitschmid published the architectural treatise Non-Referential Architecture, a book that has been in the making since 2013. It analyses the societal currents of the early 21st century and argues that those currents are radically different from the epoch of postmodernity.[6] The book proposes a new framework for architecture and defines the seven underlying principles for Non-Referential Architecture:[7] 1) Experience of Space; 2) Oneness; 3) Newness; 4) Construction; 5) Contradiction; 6) Order; 7) Sensemaking.

One of the hallmarks of Non-Referential Architecture is that each building exists for itself. Each building is governed by an architectural idea – and that idea has to be form-generative and sense-making.[8] Non-Referential Architecture states: "Non-referential architecture denotes but it refuses to explain or narrate, and it leaves behind any vestiges of a theatrical mode of persuasion and propagation."[9] Describing the intent of the exhibition ‘Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech’, held at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 2018, K. Michael Hays argues that today’s architecture presupposes “not a particular meaning, but a specific kind of potentiality — a non-semantic materiality, a non-referential construct that can be developed into an actual architectural project.”[10]