Christopher Hight

Christopher Hight, Theory and Design in the Anthropocene Age, 14 de marzo de 2019. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.

Architecture in the Anthropocene Age Christopher Hight

La transformación ambiental y las tecnologías climatológicas constituyen un problema cada vez más central para la arquitectura contemporánea, posiblemente análogo al rol que desempeñaron las metrópolis y la estructura industrial en la evolución de la arquitectura moderna. Antropoceno es un término dado a la época geológica actual, en la que la actividad humana se ha convertido en la mayor determinante del medio ambiente. Paradójicamente, al igual que la humanidad se vuelve central en la transformación de lo que solía llamarse naturaleza, en una especie de construcción arquitectónica accidental y precaria, el mundo que hemos construido se vuelve cada vez más extraño, proliferando objetos de conocimiento no humanos, inhumanos y posthumanos. Mientras la densidad del planeta aumenta antropocéntricamente, nuestra comprensión del mundo se vuelve cada vez menos antropomórfica. Dentro de tal entorno esquizofrénico, a medida que la teoría se vuelve una cartografía pragmática, el examen crítico de la historia del ambiente arquitectónico se vuelve importante para recalibrar los límites disciplinares, los objetos de conocimiento y sus prácticas.

Assemblage

I approach historical-theoretical problems like an architect. I always try to assemble things instead of breaking things down. I also teach design and do not try to instrumentalize history and theory. They are different, but they have feedback loops. It is important to have design and history relate to each other. It is a way of testing ideas.

Inoculation

Reyner Banham’s 1960 text Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, conclude with the proposition that, while architecture had taken the shield of modernity, the clothing of modernity, it did not fully embrace modern technology, modern processes, and that, actually, International Style was an inoculation, like getting a shot of a live virus that prevents you from getting the full disease. It protected the traditional understanding of what architecture is.

From Technology to the Environment

Information Age architects had a choice: they could choose to run with technology like a wolf pack, abandoning everything that we traditionally recognize as architecture, or they could stick with the identity of architecture and risk becoming irrelevant. In many ways, environmental issues are poised in the same terms today: either they become something that should determine architecture, or they become the technical thing architects do without any disciplinary significance. We are renegotiating that same territory, but it has shifted from technology to the environment.

Vast Invisibility

Reyner Banham’s dream of this totally welltempered environment, completely airtight, implies a building designed around its systems to chill the banks of servers. Some of the largest buildings we are constructing in the world right now can be considered our highest technical pinnacle, high tech culture, and they are designed to be invisible. They are tucked away from the streets, in the middle of the forest, designed to be invisible because they are supposed to be seamless, friction free, instantaneous. These vast architectures involve an incredible investment, and are designed to be invisible.

Territories

A lot of us are working on territories that await us in the coming future. It is possible that an increasing amount of the built environment is not going to be built for human use, at least not directly. Architecture will increasingly be concerned with constructing environments for non-humans and for humans as secondary use. Most of what we must deal with today, sea level rise, climate change, environmental degradation, has to do with beginning to reconstruct territories that are lost through our own damage.

Asset

Another issue is the rise of architectural projects described as assets. These pencil towers in New York, in Houston, and in London, are sold out before they break ground. And then, no one lives in them. Architecture turns into a product for investment. The desire comes from acquiring prestige and adding value. Architecture becomes a speculative investment vehicle, not a place to live, and operates in a completely different kind of system. We have the environmental scale, the technological informational scale, with server farms, and now the global economic scale that rests on architecture. How to design these buildings, and what is the city that results of these kinds of structures?

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is the idea that we have entered an ecological age where human activity is the single largest determinant of the global climate and geological processes. We have always shaped the environment, but this process began accelerating in the nineteenth century with urbanization and industrialization. The exponential rise in carbon dioxide in the air turns it into a sort of apparatus. Peter Sloterdijk’s position is that the atmosphere has become a technology, a by-product. The Anthropocene creates a strange condition. On the one hand, we have never been more central to the destiny of the world. We are central for the first time. We are the single greatest cause, the single greatest factor. The world is more anthropocentric than it has ever been, exactly at the moment where it seems more alien and hostile to us. The reflection we see in the Anthropocene is a kind of Narcissus gaze, the reflection of the monster. The world is alien.

Alien made Benign

If Martians once stood for Russians in popular films, and that was our antagonist, now we have the planet Mars itself standing as an antagonistic form. It has terraform activity being reshaped and controlled through science. This is the repetition of a well-known modernist trope. We must turn this alien landscape into something benign. This is the story of Colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We must reclaim the world through the very processes that have become a threat to our life. And you do it with science.

Space Suit

There is an entirely visual language evolving, a spatial taxonomy around technological closed spaces. They evolve from the space suit, the technological invention where the term cyborg came from, the prosthetic that allows a human to survive in an otherwise hostile environment. It is an acceleration of architecture’s role as a second skin. You can add the idea that humans are inconclusive, and that architecture is one of these original prosthetics, a double body. These ideas come around, considering that we have turned the world into a strange apparatus. The world has become a space suit that we are now occupying. Here we are, in this strange condition.

Groundlessness

Nietzsche says that humans can probably be admired as a mighty architectural genius who succeed in building a cathedral on foundations that move like flowing water. He describes that as a spiderweb, a filigree. It has intricacy. If it is a cathedral, it is a Gothic cathedral. We build a cathedral into foun-

dations that move on flowing water, and we have forgotten it. We pretend it is solid ground. We build the structure so we do not have to remember there is no ground. There is no ground, no foundation. There are just metaphors, a structure of meaning with no reference. This is the problem.

Greenhouse

The greenhouse is an interesting type. The greenhouse is a colonial, imperial project where you go around the world collecting specimens from indigenous places. Plants that exist on opposite ends of the world can exist together, next to each other, in one space. There is this implied cosmopolitanism to the greenhouse model. The greenhouse is a projection, a construction. The construction of the greenhouse itself matters. According to Sloterdijk, the space where we exist has been taken for granted and now we understand and must make it explicit. We can no longer take things for granted.

Storm System

An important hinge in the early the early XX century is the work of Jakob Johann von Uexküll, and his proposition of Umwelt. He defines, and this is also influential in cybernetics and information theory, that an organism has two systems: an effector and a sensory system, which circle around each other. Every organism exists in the environment, and the environment is an epiphenomenon created through this cycle, through feedback loops, through difference in information and training of information, responding to it endlessly. The environment is endlessly produced and reproduced. It is a very elastic envelope, like a storm system.

Morphism Constructs

One of the ironies of modernity is that we keep isolating nature and culture, but, in fact, underneath it, there is a proliferation of what Bruno Latour calls hybrids: cyborgs, monsters, assemblages, things that are constructed continually. The modern, in the past one hundred and fifty years, has been proliferating these things, even though they have always existed. They are now on the screen of a phone. We are endlessly proliferating, generating, but hardly knowing. Latour argues that anthropomorphism underestimates the power of what we do. We should be talking about morphisms, about alliances and their exchanges. That is what creates the Anthropos, the inverse of the story: no longer anthropomorphism, but morphism constructs. We are no longer projecting ourselves onto forms: forms are constructing us, and we must understand that we are wavered morphisms and are woven by morphisms.

Extractos de la conferencia de Christopher Hight, con introducción de Julián Varas, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 14 de marzo de 2019.