SEAN LALLY

Sean Lally is an architect based in Switzerland and a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. At the heart of his work, he is dedicated to engaging with today’s greatest pressures: a changing climate and advances in healthcare and consumer devices that are redefining the human bodies that occupy our environments. He expands on these interests as the host of his podcast NightWhite Skies

Sean Lally

©Jordi Teres

In your podcast, Night White Skies, you often talk about science fiction. Is there a fictional world you would love to be living in right now?

I started NightWhiteSkiesbecause I thought that the podcast was a great way to meet people, read people’s work, and have conversations that I wasn’t having at the time.

I think that, for the most part, architecture likes to think that its most closely tied profession – to sort of prove its worth and their value – is that of the engineer. We often tie ourselves to the structural, mechanical or the civil, in an attempt to show that we have a kind of professionalism of worth and value. That’s quite real and important, but I also think we maybe have more in common with the science fiction author, because those of us in the discipline of architecture, in a very uncomfortable way, are not the masters of anything. In many ways, we’re the last great generalists of the humanities. If you created a Venn diagram, all these other professions and disciplines would overlap and produce a bounded area that makes up what architecture is. And I think we have a history of trying to create an autonomous subset area within that space that shows that architecture has value by saying, “No, there is a place in that diagram that’s very unique to architecture” – an air bubble in the Venn diagram that we try to designate as architecture. Instead, I like the idea of being able to step back and say that what we do is a little bit like science fiction. We encapsulate many trends and ideas that are a part of all these peripheral disciplines and we synthesize them in ways that none of them would or could ever do independently.

Maybe a kind of quick pick up on something that I’m doing now with NightWhiteSkiesis actually trying to move it onto a video game platform that will make it visual for the audience. And this is something that I’ve been working on now for almost two years, but hopefully by this fall, we’ll start producing these videos. And these sapces will have designs by me and the office, while conversations happen within them, because I do think it’s important to actually take stabs at imagining what the future will be and try to understand how those spaces operate and how interaction and spatial typologies will evolve.

I wouldn’t be putting so much time into this if I didn’t think it was valuable to speculate on the future through design – not because I’m under the delusion that it’s about getting it right, but because it’s about building a conversation and discourse. It’s about foreshadowing opportunities and limitations that only come about through the synthesis that design is capable of revealing – a little bit like science fiction, which isn’t intended to predict the future, it’s intended to lay out possible or plausible scenarios for the future, just so we have a better grasp of them.

“I like the idea of being able to step back and say that what we do is a little bit like science fiction. We encapsulate many trends and ideas that are a part of all these peripheral disciplines and we synthesize them in ways that none of them would or could ever do independently.”

Do you have a specific ‘storyline’ in your mind that you can see being achieved as a future scenario?

For example, in your latest episode with Adam Frank, “Alien Anthropocenes,” you discuss this idea about our anthropocene maturing past this state of flux into a ‘condition’ of adulthood. How do you envisage this state?

Adam Frank is an astrophysicist and he has just written a great book, about the Anthropocene, which he refers to as the “Alien Anthropocene,” meaning he has performed equations and tests

“That way you realize maybe as a civilization, we are going through a kind of uncomfortable adolescence in the Anthropocene. And we will come through the other side, but any child that would beat themselves up thinking that they were being naive and silly for having adolescence, would be ridiculous. It is just simply part of growth.” and mathematical modeling based on the likelihood that other civilizations have existed in the universe and that they have gone through Anthropocenes, meaning any global civilization that has existed and gotten to the scale of actually being simply a planet, or even being a multi-planetary civilization, has probably done something that has created an imbalance in their environment and caused it to go out of whack. And according to Frank’s equations, he says this has happened millions of times, so, of course, the question is, will we go over and cause a mass extinction that includes ourselves, or will we rebalance it?

I thought it was such a compelling book and conversation because it almost made me feel… Okay. We are not unique. And it puts me at ease when I realize I’m not unique. Some people get nervous when they feel like there are other things happening or that what they’re doing has been done a hundred times before. But to know that it has happened potentially millions of times already also means that we don’t have to beat ourselves up so much, as it’s almost an inevitability. Take adolescence: if you think about a child becoming an adult, they’re going to go through adolescence and they’re going to do dumb things. Hopefully, they come out the other side, having learned something and grows up and lives a full life. – maybe have a child that becomes dumb themselves (laughing). It is okay, it is a process. In this way, you realize maybe, as a civilization, we are going through a kind of uncomfortable adolescence within the Anthropocene, and we will come through the other side, but any child that beats themselves up thinking they have been naive or silly just for going through adolescence would be ridiculous. It is just simply part of growth. This doesn’t excuse the atrocities or the greed or the actions of corporations and individuals, but as a civilization, when we think of ourselves as a collective, we don’t have to go to bed having beaten ourselves up. We’re not unique. And I think there’s something to that narrative when you think on the large scale: large-scale solar systems, universes, small or multiple civilizations, or even lifespans of the human species. I think that narrative helps us see things in a sort of broader context.

Within your office and writings it is apparent that you see technology as a mechanism for propelling ourselves towards a better mode of co-inhabitation. Are there technologies being developed that you believe will be integral to this process?

I don’t necessarily look to technologies to fix anything or solve anything, but I will say, avoiding them would be silly. It is a necessity we can’t get around. And so we’re better off trying to guide them as opposed to avoiding or belittling them. I don’t have any great faith that technologies will solve a problem, like a climate crisis or a political or humanitarian crisis. There are many other tools in the tool bag for those things. When it comes to technologies, we need to acknowledge and maybe think about who is in control of them. Maybe that’s the question. The idea that it’s often a capitalistic corporation behind them that is not being honest with their true intentions – that’s what

we need to question and be aware of.

For example, look back at the skyscraper. It wasn’t just steel that gave us the skyscraper. It wasn’t just the architect’s vision that produced steel or that got us from iron to steel. It was also the elevator. It was that fact that it was a time of commerce. There were a lot of things going on and those combined forces resulted in the novel typology of the tower. And so when we think of the future going forward now, it’s important to think, what can the architect do that is unique, that is actually taking all these disparate forces and seeing them in a spatial manner, seeing how they help people interact with them as a community, as a group of people, as with an environment, as with programs and activities? That’s not something any of these corporations, technologies, research institutes are going to be doing, not if it causes any problems for their business model. So we should be doing that. And we should be thinking, how can we inform future discussions and future research? We should be helping guide that discourse, not simply responding to it. I get nervous when I see that architecture today is worried that we have no ’agency,’ while at the same time it is still embedded in self-referential forms in geometry, because in reality, there’s no better time to be an architect.

The way I would reframe this view would be to say

“It wasn’t just steel that gave us the skyscraper. It wasn’t just the architect’s vision that produced steel or that got us from iron to steel. It was also the elevator... There were a lot of things going on and those combined forces resulted in the novel typology of the tower. ” that is there’s so much happening now. There are so many pressures. But this is really a great time for architects to be involved and for the discipline to play a role. I think we have the tool sets, we have the modes of thinking, modes of operating. How we create space, design for human interaction using materials, along with how these interact together on a community scale, is something that is so unique to architecture that we need to be addressing these pressures. And quite frankly, to do so is to be messy. It’s about getting it wrong. It’s about making mistakes, a little bit like the science fiction equation. It’s not about getting it right all the time. It’s about simply having the questions in the discipline so that we can move forward.

And so this sort of odd duality of regret, of agency yet continuous self-referentialism of the discipline, it boggles my mind. And I think we’re in this sort of unique period of time where we have to just simply generate discourse and ideas and not think we’re necessarily getting it right, but that we’re simply having a conversation, messy conversations that we can have as we try to move forward. It’s not an easy step, but it’s a step that has to happen. I think we’re still going to be in this process for decades from now.

Is there a way and a necessity to pull people towards a deeper understanding of ecology that not only takes into account the amount of green space but refers also to relationships of coexistence?

When it comes to plants, obviously there’s a coexistence occurring, which has been occurring for a long time, with agriculture: what we select, what we grow, and how we grow it. And now with some of the engineering going on, what corn looks like now in the United States looks nothing like it did a hundred years ago there. And so there is a coevolution that has been occuring... I think Geoff Manaugh posted at some point a short little piece about “Electronic Plant

Life.” Linköping University in Sweden was working and growing various silicon fibers through the xylem of the plant, where it gets its nutrients, and these were conductive materials. By doing so, the photosynthesis of the plant was then actually creating energy. That was then running through the conductive materials that were now in the plant, essentially making it act as a battery. That means that things like forests and plants and gardens could actually end up being sources of energy. It also means that you could store data, much like you do in your hard drive, into plant life. So plant life could become storage devices where information could be held, where information could be moved. We’re talking about plants being places of storing data and information – your home garden, that would become something altogether different. In that example, it would not just be a place of color, color therapy, or scents, smells and views. It would actually potentially even be a source of your energy and where you could store your gigabytes and terabytes of information. I mean, in that case, a ginkgo biloba tree on the street would look the same today as it did 30 years ago, except now it would have a completely different function. Another question would be: would it be an issue that we are now asking it to do something that we hadn’t even thought of or dreamed of asking of

“I think there’s going to be a need for a lot of compromise. And that compromise means if that street plant can both clean the air now as a city street specimen, and at the same time provide energy and still maybe exist as a species of tree that isn’t going to go extinct, is that a good in-between? There will be no absolutes without lots of consequences.” it 20 years ago? What are the ramifications of such whimsical imagery? interview from February 16, 2022 conducted by Jade Bailey, Adriana Boeck, Simon Schoemann to be continued in the Public Space issue on page 56

It is somehow a very humancentric way of looking at ecology: to combine it with technology in another way to get something out of it that benefits us. In Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene she gives us the impression that we should be living with this trouble, we should be even enhancing it, living with the dark places, rather than trying to make all of these dark spaces work in our favor.

Yeah. I think her question is a good one in the sense that I think it touches on two parts: one is, as you stated it, the idea that maybe not all dark parts need to have light shined upon them or need to be corrected or cleaned, and that this is just an aspect of our existence. And then also the idea of “staying with the trouble,” which is just the sense that when things get difficult, we don’t shy away from them, or we don’t try to resolve them, and that these things are where growth occurs and where we exist.

I think there’s going to be a need for a lot of compromise. And that compromise means if that street plant can both clean the air now as a city street specimen, and at the same time provide energy and still maybe exist as a species of tree that isn’t going to go extinct, is that a good in-between? There will be no absolutes without lots of consequences. And I think maybe with that, in “staying with the trouble,” the idea is that we have to be aware of some forms of compromise that are not defeat, rather a form of growth, and not all compromise is welcome and not all compromise is good, but maybe can be less harmful than absolutes.