We live in the shadows of forms. Ideas, perfection of realities made through abstraction. Extracting something’s essence through philosophical clinical distillation. The objects and ideas from our world, dreams of what something could be in their most perfect articulations if it were alleviated of physics’ forces and external impositions – petit utopia. The real distilled into a pure absolute, forms function as both symbols: concepts to make sense of and communicate the world around us, and ideals to strive towards as standards upon which we match and measure our actions.
Formalism is the ideological pursuit of actualizing forms. To take these heavenly ideals into tangible existence, to grasp them in our hands. To be led by formalism is to chase a state of bliss, to live amongst perfections. Form is the decisive filter when taking action – priority. Blinders on, to lead by forms to live unphased by context, to believe in the dream of how reality itself could transform if these essences were brought to life. The bliss of living in possibility, reality suspended.
But, cursed by their own premise, forms and formalism can never be realized. By nature, forms exist untouched by the corrosive carbon dioxide we exhale, untainted by the flaws, randomness, and unpredictability that define reality. Abstractions, forms evade physicality’s burdensome weight – cellular turnover, enlivened microbiomes, intertwining bone and fascia, and the pump of breath and blood – and entropy’s immutable, relentless pull. Unburdened by gravity, they float above the real. Seeing the world illuminated by forms’ heavenly light, the real’s complexities are soothed. Under their spell, the real’s textures are tamed, made consistent and standard to best suit the needs of the form we wish to attain. The real becomes a standard of a controlled context, a lab-scenario rather than a reality.
It’s this total control, non-negotiable to set their habitat’s terms and conditions at the cost of the very churn that makes life alive, that makes formalism a futile pursuit. To prioritize form is to consciously choose stasis and sacrifice potential. It demands living blind to the idea of context and external life, to try to be a-temporal and stable, consistent and unmoving. Hiccups and the unplanned are denied existence. This rejection of life renders forms impossible to enact as the moment they enter our atmosphere Newton’s laws irreversibly and impossibly tainted.
They become the source of both their own and our degradation and demise. When forms are pulled from the heavens, they must reckon with their surroundings, capitulating to contexts’ demands, contending with competing other forces – each striving to realize their own utopian potential. And the exposure to the winds and whims of reality that occurs in our attempt to wrestle them into this realm, to cradle them in our hands, causes irrevocable change. The instant they’re seized and enter our atmosphere, they transform—forced to acclimate to an earthly environment, morphing to fit reality’s limits and finitude—becoming something else entirely. The form we find in our hands, beaten by this world’s forces as it fell from grace, is inevitably a disappointment. Expectations far too idealistic, they crumble, their perfect veneer and shape shattering to a million pieces before our eyes.
Part of their fall is due to their inherent subjectivity—not decreed by an objective, greater good that all can equally strive toward, but born from specific ideas of how the world should look, shaped by someone’s vision and ideal. They’re curated through a selection process. That which is deemed aspirational, exemplary, and good is kept while the unwanted or undesired is discarded, ensuring the purity of the form as it crystalizes. They are often dictated—decreed—by those in power, molded to align with their norms, their desires, and their dominion over what is considered worthy in their eyes. Their morality dictates the light cast upon society at large, the forms’ shadows themselves.
And it’s under the conditions of defined hierarchies where forms feel most graspable. States with concentrated authority, structured by rigid parameters and singular ideals, with a clear doctrine for the collective body to follow are the closest we have to form’s lab conditions. The fragile myth of forms is only feasible when societies are able to magnetically unite individuals around a common vision and shared value system—whether decreed by singular force or agreed upon by collective consensus. When narratives and values were once collective, they wove together a unifying world and language, allowing us the imagination of a future. Forms, as universal standards, became a galvanizing force. A North Star radiating a guiding path to a shared utopia, a silver light, which provided a single thread of evidence of forms’ attainability. The stability created from top-down power maintains the illusion that they might become real—a glow of hope.
Poly-, our crises span vast scales, from quanta to hyper, across varying magnitudes of time and space, in sync and juxtaposition, layering upon each other in antagonistic entanglements. Its destruction is both ferocious and delicate, unfolding over centuries and in an instant. Its facets collide in paradox, forming a fourth dimension of crisis. Counterintuitively, flames burn hotter in the presence of rains that herald their demise. It warps cuisine and culture, tampering with traditions, accelerating their dissolution into history,transforming anthropology into archeology.
It defies expectation and logic, lying far beyond our intellectual grasp. It constantly subverts concepts we hold as fixed, rupturing concepts of “growth,” “damage,” and “life” through unexpected interruptions and reinterpretations. Where the world feels both familiar and unrecognizable – uncanny. Suspended in limbo, steeped in ambiguity, uncertain of what comes next. The polycrisis resists containment, defies prediction, unraveling beyond our grasp.
It’s in this world of applauded neoliberalism and polycrisis where forms lose their collective weight. Formalism once defined individuals through their roles in a greater system, but as institutions crumbled, so did these guiding values. Survival became an individual burden, leaving forms to be framed through individualism rather than the collective.
To attempt classical formalism is impossible and irresponsible amidst polycrisis. The idea, and purity, of a collective North Star implodes under the weight of forms’ impossibilities and forced fracturing, and neoliberalism’s and polycrisis’s unignorable influence. To escape into the world of forms, to attempt to bring them to this Earth, is an act of egotistical ignorance and imposition, a refusal to acknowledge that utopia is no longer shared, no longer collectively imagined.
Formalism is both subject to and as itself a crisis within the greater polycrisis, both in response and practice. Form, long a stabilizing force, now entraps us, freezing movement in an unstable world. By clinging to past futures and nostalgic utopias, classical forms trap us. We strive for restoration rather than adaptation, the familiar rather than the possible—an attempt to control what defies logic by our desire to understand and control the world with crystal clarity and precision.
Form becomes a tool and response for the neoliberal subject in polycrisis. Fuel for forced agency. Clinging to forms is a survival tactic, an illusion of that control can be attained amidst the unpredictable, multiplying chaos. That order can be willed into existence. Split between God and the body—one must blindly believe in oneself, in the ideals of form, in order to power through, blissfully ignoring the magnitude of looming threats in order to survive.
There’s an irony in how we confront polycrisis. An inevitably complex, sublime assemblage of small hyperobjects, it overwhelms logic, yet we continue to confront it solely with arcane anthropocentric logic, attempting to contort its crises into formalist confines. Ignoring the conditions of the problem at-hand, their natural cadences, their intelligence and rationale. Forms leave frozen in blissful ignorance.
The subject, its agency and perspective, in polycrisis becomes central. Forced to engage with external forces—weather, movement, time—form is forced to reckon with reality, shoved into constant flux, hoping to strike equilibrium. Rather than fixed, quantified to binary, or contorting to match a heavenly ideal, form returns to its origins: the real, to its source in lived experience rather than suspended in the heavens of rigid ideals. The subject is the center of an ongoing negotiation between an assemblage of numerous micro-organism, their constant cycles of survival, of shedding and regenerating, as it attempts to synthesize them into one cohesive entity –– a true holobiont.
As each cell turns—new skin in weeks, a new liver in months—the idea of stable forms, like the subject itself, sheds away, revealing itself to be an intricate balance of intertwined cells in a continuous process of adjustment, survival, and transformation—the stubborn essence of survival. True adaptation requires working within chaos rather than against it. Within the illogic of polycrisis, surrendering control is not a radical act, but a requirement. To admit shortcomings, our unknowns, and to humbly study how the environment around us moves is a tactic for survival allows us to surf the waves of crisis with dexterity—our knowledge of its temper mentality as a tool to sharpen our approach to thriving within it. Not to contain, but to flow—to move with polycrisis and, in doing so, weaponize it against itself.
Forming, the ongoing balancing act of striking equilibrium; form emerging from this fight, a fleeting moment when equilibrium strikes, only to evolve a moment later. Working in one moment and to be reevaluated in the next, allowed to float freely without the expectation that will ever be fully here on Earth. It’s this embrace of instability, time, and context from which survival emerges—inconsistencies as a means of conditioning, this practice of shifting and adaptation creating a stronger core essence, potent and elastic, over time.
Forming, its cadence of becoming and living nature, presents a new tactic to understand and contend with polycrisis. A new modus operandi—an active, living process shaped by movement, repetition, and shared experience—in a time of ever-complexifying crises. It arises not from imposed structure but from an organic collision of interpretations, behaviors, and perspectives. A meeting point where disparate elements coalesce, carving reality over time. This is a shift from utopia to melee, from rigid ideal to dynamic engagement—a continuous negotiation between forces, motivations, and histories, an assemblage always in flux.
But architecture, trapped in formalist stasis, clings to the belief that it can shape life, imposing stability through structure. It ignores terroir and reality’s randomness, forcing nostalgic futures onto shifting landscapes. Contained systems—models, CAD, drawings—offer the illusion of control, detached from lived experience, but once physical, unpredictability emerges, revealing formalism’s blindness. To create this way is to deny reality, a selfish utopian imposition. In polycrisis’ chaos, as permanence dissolves and conditions cease to churn, architecture faces a crisis of purpose: what remains of its pursuit of forms?
If polycrisis is ceaseless, disorienting, and catalyzes further chaos, Isidoro Michan-Guindi’s practice subverts polycrisis’ uncanniness through play, turning overwhelm into wonder. Instead of succumbing to polycrisis’ exhaustive demands, fanning its flames by trying to overcome it—“adding, adding, adding; labor, labor, labor”—small, casual interventions work undercut its daunting scale. Leisure, the quotidian and local, is employed to both familiarize polycrisis and open new possibilities to what the world can become in the midst of its presence.
If polycrisis renders the world nonsensical and uncanny—familiar yet off, normal yet absurd—Isidoro employs architectural intervention to further push the limits of its otherworldliness. The uncanny offers a means of moving forward. Rather than striving to “solve,” he adopts the role of provocateur, seeing the uncanny’s destabilizing effects as an opportunity to open our eyes to what could become.
Rather than succumbing to polycrisis’s desire to elicit sternness and severity—telling us each familiarity is now capable of causing our demise—he adopts a tone of play. Energetic and effervescent, play becomes a tactic for reanimating the familiar. “Humor is the most important thing in a sort of way. A little mischievous, approaching the polycrisis in a mischievous way.” Sharp innocence and tactical mischief uncut polycrisis’s ability to freeze us in fear. Play, its movement and excitement, as a means of re-enlivening potential in the familiar – lithe and nimble, a survival made into a game of adaption.
As a site of play, architecture is used to pry open the familiar and spark active participation – a tap on the shoulder, asking for others to play. Surrealist play becomes an arena for wondrous interrogation, for subverting, crashing, and colliding forms to see what worlds these new relationships create and what solutions and interventions have yet to be explored. Design and relationships become tools for phenomenological ergonomic experimentation, taking the familiar and twisting it to see how one can shift the participant’s perspective and what responses it elicits. In unsettling the stability of our expectations of the familiar—of classical forms—these subtle changes pry open the expected façade, opening for discourse and movement. Friendly invitations for participants become part of the process. The nonsensical suddenly a valid means for sense making. The familiar reframed entirely new, teeming with the potential of radical futures.
To employ classical forms to survive, combat, and understand polycrisis is a futile pursuit. Like the biological world around us, polycrisis—an assemblage—adapts and transforms as it needs to survive its environment: it’s left the world of forms behind, definitively in a state of forming. Approaches like Isidoro’s offer new approaches to the future through their ability to see potential by embracing life’s ceaselessly unfolding nature. Bayesian in nature, polycrisis becomes a source of energy rather than fearful threat—a practice of conditioning and toning, the subtle movements made in the process of constant adaptation building muscular tone. With heightened awareness of the subtle movements beneath one’s feet, it presents a way to walk into the unknown world of polycrisis’ unyielding change with wondrous eyes of what could be seen anew. Nimble and lithe, receptive and present–a state of forming.
The notion of form has never been more vital both in its disruption and our reconception. In this decisive moment where an uncertain future unfolds, it is not enough to simply know one’s value system, but to engage with the world and one another’s to find an honest understanding of each others’ becomes crucial in how the world will be shaped in the future. This requires an ongoing exploration of what form can be within this new world of varied ecosystems.
