Posthuman Architectures

Posthuman Architectures

A Catalogue of Archetypes Jacopo Leveratto

Contents 6

Preface

10

Spaces for new alliances

24

A nest Henry David Thoreau Concord, Massachusetts, US 42.442104, -71.342524 1844-1854

46

A forest Richard St. Barbe Baker Kikuyu, KE -1.245528, 36.660422 1920-1954

66

A garden Cedric Price, Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Frank Newby London, GB 51.536465, -0.157374 1960-1965

88

An ark John Carl Warnecke Manhattan, New York City, US 40.716557, -74.006009 1967-1974

110

A lab Richard Rogers and Tony Hunt Newport, GB 51.565890, -3.022337 1982-1987

132

A starship Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio Yverdon-les-Bains, CH 46.793682, 6.648848 1998-2002

152

A colony Matali Crasset Caudry, FR 50.129329, 3.399900 2003

172

A reserve William Harrison Jr., Nam Il, et al.

P’anmunj m, KR 37.966667, 126.55 1953-2011

194

A biotope Junya Ishigami Nasu, Tochigi, JP 37.059076, 139.978298 2013-2018

216

A catalogue of resonance chambers

222

Bibliography

234

Index

Preface

“Every era has had its own iconic architectural typology. The dream commission was once the church, Modernism had the factory and then the house; in the past decade we celebrated the decadent museum and the gallery. […] The most significant architectural spaces in the world are now […] empty of people.”

Liam Young, Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene (London: Wiley, 2019), 9; 8.

At first sight, the expression posthuman architecture can be read as an oxymoron, there is no doubt about it. A real contradiction in terms. Because for too long a time design has been seen as an exclusive human prerogative. Especially spatial one. As it always represented an action that could be performed by people and for people only, with no exceptions. No need to imagine a possible one. Recently, however, things seem to be gradually changing, as different researches have started to challenge this idea. Quite a large number of scholars, for instance, has already highlighted how some animals actually design and not only build their dwellings. Intentionally responding, so to say, to symbolic needs besides functional ones. Far fewer, by contrast, have focused their attention on how humans have conceived spaces and objects also for other kinds of subjects.

Even though relevant references in this regard are not entirely missing. Whether datacenters or natural reserves, third landscapes or biospheres, some of the most innovative and meaningful projects of our times in fact seem to fall into this category, since they all feature a subject that is not only human, either in terms of fruition or agency, and they all materialize diverse interpretations of a larger project of living that involves different and interconnected entities. Nevertheless, the ability of design to spatially mediate this relationship has often been overlooked, as they have mostly been considered simple infrastructures. And this probably explains why qualitative researches in this regard are still partially lacking.

This is why this book collects and discusses archetypal models of posthuman design, in its broader sense. To identify its features beyond the limit of a functional determinism, within which it seems to be relegated. Even when it is barely aware of its role. Not all archetypes presented here can in fact be considered entirely paradigmatic. Some of them, for instance, may appear inadequate in dealing with complex interspecies relationships only in figurative terms. Moreover, almost none of Preface

7

them represent a conscious and explicit attempt of realizing a true posthuman habitat, considering all the philosophical complexity that the term entails today. This however is not a real problem. Even pre-modern church builders were not aware of creating archetypal spaces for the earliest industrial buildings.

As well as Renaissance architects could not know that palaces would have been considered a model for the typological development of museums and universities. The purpose of this book is in fact not the development of a new architectural typology, but to offer some possible references for its ideation.

Spatial ones, of course, but mainly methodological. Since the specific focus of this catalogue is design, both as a product and as a process. And its objective is therefore showing how architectural, but also landscape, and industrial designers, whether professional practitioners or not, have redefined their tools and strategies in order to meet the needs of new and different kinds of subjects. Or rather to show how they have turned this redefinition into a source of poetic expression and created a novel understanding of conventional categories through their work.

More than a historical research, therefore, this book represents a collection of stories of posthuman architectures, structured in a way to cover the topic both from a vertical and a horizontal perspective. At first, through an in-depth analysis of how some specific projects have reacted to the presence of different and extended subjectivities, in terms both of design process and form of expression. And then, through a visual atlas of multiple references that traces their possible genealogy.

All this is comprised in ten chapters, one aimed at clarifying the features of the posthuman condition, and nine organized in a chronological order, conceived like single architectural tales. Each one is dedicated to a different archetype and its design, in order to trace the evolution of a certain idea of coexistence between humans and other subjects. And each one is complemented by technical drawings, to translate that idea into an operational set of instructions. As the book was meant not only as an iconographic repository of case studies, but also as 8

Posthuman Architectures

an operating manual for designing spaces like those illustrated.

From the cabin of Henry David Thoreau, for instance, to the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Considering projects like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and designers like Cedric Price, Diller and Scofidio, or Junya Ishigami. To show how a different way of looking at the world is not only desirable and imaginable, but also actually realizable.

Preface

9

Spaces for new alliances

“Designers are always understood as solving a problem. Artists, intellectuals, and writers are expected to ask questions, to make us hesitate, to see our world and ourselves differently for a moment, and therefore to think. Why not design as a way of asking question?

Why not design that produces thoughtprovoking hesitations in the routines of everyday life rather than simply servicing those routines? Why not design that encourages us think?

Design as an urgent call to reflect on what we and our companion species have become?”

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2016), 162-163.

Earth rising

A nest Henry David Thoreau Concord, Massachusetts, USA 42.442104, -71.342524 1844-1854

“Henry often reminded me of an animal in human form. He had the eye of a bird, the scent of a dog, the most acute, delicate intelligence – but no soul. No … Henry could not have had a human soul.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Rebecca Harding Davis, Bits of Gossip (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 44.

A forest Richard St. Barbe Baker Kikuyu, KE -1.245528, 36.660422 1920-1954

“For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the good fortune to be able to observe its performance over many years. If this performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity, if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and that, in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no mistake.”

Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1985), 5.

“I learned early to regard the forest as a society of living things, the greatest of which is the tree.”

sahara de

Richard St. Barbe Baker

bamako

ouagadougou

abidjan

atlantic ocean

0

54

6

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36m

Posthuman Architectures

esert

khartoum

arabian sea

semiarid isoline

maiduguri

addis abeba

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200

400

800

1200km

nairobi

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dar es salaam

Speculative reconstruction of St. Barbe's Green Front

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A forest

55