Buildings are not Processes

A Disagreement with Latour and Yaneva

Abstract

The classic and traditional source on actor-network theory and architecture is a co-authored and wellknow 2008 piece by Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva («Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An Ant’s View of Architecture). They argue, based on dynamic-ontology, against viewing buildings as static objects or entity and in favor of treating them as dynamic flux or trajectory that can be broken into fully-formed individuals only through the abstractive sickness of the human mind, however necessary abstraction may be for the practical necessities of life. In this paper, arguing from the standpoint of my OOO (object-oriented ontology), I note some problems and paradoxes of Latour and Yaneva’s approach and I propose a possible solution focused on “relation”: every form of knowledge amounts to telling us either what a thing is made of or what it does, the world is not just the correlate of knowledge.