Designing in the Context of Time: Why Annetta Pedretti’s Cybernetic-architectural Practice at 25 Princelet Street Matters

The article explores the less-known work of Annetta Pedretti’s cybernetic-architectural practice at 25 Princelet Street. It maps a thread across her career—from her experiments in design writing to the long-spanning project of repairing and re-making the house at Princelet Street—which points towards how she mobilised her practice to counter various forms of ‘oppression.’ For Pedretti, ‘oppression’ was a process through which the ‘implicit ordering’ of living systems, i.e., self-organising systems, are negated or overruled in favour of explicit ordering imposed from the outside. Oppression became a word to define the processes she witnessed daily within the multicultural politics of heritage and transformation in her East End neighbourhood. Pedretti found a vocabulary to explore the complex relationship between transformation, change, implicit ordering, and recursive feedback in living systems through cybernetics. Cybernetic ideas about self-organisation and language were already present in architectural practice and knowledge discussions around that time. However, Pedretti’s work was marked by an ‘everydayness’ that points towards a different ethics and politics of engaging reflexive feedback in everyday improvisations such as writing, repairing, caring, and conversing. Thinking through Pedretti’s project becomes particularly helpful at present, where there are many obstacles to thinking in time, as problematic forms of a techno-modern ontology strengthen the runaway feedback loops between practices of making and markets. It is often the case that ‘clock time’ is so easily taken as a given that the thought that alternatives exist does not even register. But Pedretti shows us that an alternative is possible and that it begins with our own practices.