Tirana Architecture Week 2020 - Conference Proceedings: Science and the City. In the Era of Paradigm Shifts

n his famous book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962), the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, coined the notion of ‘paradigm shift’, intended as a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. In opposition to the activity of ‘normal science’, a ‘shift’ occurs when the current predominant paradigm, under which scientific activities are conducted becomes incompatible due to new phenomena, facilitating the research – and adoption – of a new theory or paradigm. We can also assume that, such a critical change is often driven by a ‘crisis’, a transitional moment where the appearance of new technologies, en- vironmental conditions (ex. climate change), or political situations (ex. migration phenomena), requires the a drastic rift from the past and opens the way to a reformulation of the notion of the so-called ‘Modernity’. Indeed, according to the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard: «Modernity ... is what transforms crisis into a value, a contradictory moral, says Baudrillard, for it gives rise to an aesthetics of rupture». The history of Architecture and Design itself, can be also interpreted as a consequential stream of changes following the research of a new para- digm. The Industrial Revolution deeply influenced the work of professionals during the whole XX Century, leading to the appearance of an architec- ture that could be a response to the industry preferring a free and functional arrangement of bodies rather than typological preset; transparency rather than opaqueness, points structures rather than tectonic configurations. [...]