Precise diffuse limits: paradoxical architectures in the postCOVID era

Abstract

The emergence of COVID-19 in a digital and open society with fuzzy limits, as Toyo Ito indicates has caused an immune reaction of the opposite sign with precise closings, without ceasing to be hyperconnected. This cohabitation of the viral and the neuronal in the words of Byung-Chul Han can only find accommodation in a hybrid reality structure that we could call the paradoxical paradigm. “Less is more” was the oxymoron that defined modern architecture, a binomial of plausible opposite terms, and present in many of the implausible expressions that founded the profound transformations that renewed the culture of the 20th century. A convulsive and contradictory period where uncertainty and fear are related to the current pandemic. Understanding this radical and productive mechanism opens other ways to redefine the new ways of living in indeterminate and vulnerable contexts such as those that await us in the postCOVID era. From the crisis of the high-density model of the current city to the management of the confinement and distancing spaces that configure housing as a duality of autonomous room groups, COaVitation, center-decentralization mechanisms in educational and socio-sanitary spaces, in summary, relations of opposites in a paradoxical architecture consistent with the new normality.