Dispositional productions: Architectural design beyond the visible and tangible

Discourses surrounding the design and production of buildings and building materials are finally moving beyond the artificial limits and authorial mythologies of the architectural project, re-coupling its outputs with the wider spatiotemporal ecologies upon which they depend, and with the real-world effects of design decisions.
However, the paper warns against a simplistic understanding of causality according to which such effects would be assumed to be natural and objective, or solely evidenced by legible causes, actions, and reactions—by what is visibly or tangibly “modified, transformed, perturbed, or created.” On one side, I consider how to approach the production of what philosopher Gilbert Ryle calls dispositional properties—not a “particular state,” but the fact of being “bound or liable” to be in that state “when a particular condition is realised.” On the other, I argue that regimes of visibility and causality, and the associated horizons of responsibility, are themselves constructed by architectural projects, and therefore in need of examination.