ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an alignment between “Performance” and “Function,” arguing that although the original notions of function emerge from biology and are more about performance, the meaning has shifted today. These early notions of function, and what we today might call “performance,” have roots in basic notions of survival as put forth through Darwin and others. The text traces these notions of variation and fitness, form, and function, as they were borrowed by the architectural disciplines from the “Romantic Pensionnaires” in the nineteenth century, to Jakob Von Uexküll and James Gibson in the twentieth century, and asks if performative architecture today may need to supersede its high-tech reputation with a more basic survival mode in which ecological and relational questions of form, orientation, and material operate at a fundamental level.
