HTC Experiments

Yesterday, I presented some notes and images from my forthcoming book Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments at the CCA/Stanford conference “Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics.” Here are my notes, collected together:

1. Architecture does not have an environment but environments. [i]

2. These environments are found within the theories of architecture stretching from early modernity to the present. [ii]

3. The environment of architecture is not just the environment of the environmentalist. [iii]

4. Lurking in architecture’s environments is a form of nature/environment that threatens architecture, its forms and practices — a “subnatural” environment. [iv]

5. If the natural environment is that realm from which architecture may draw its resources and many of its social concepts, the subnatural environment is that realm that threatens the concepts and forms of architecture, and often the natural environment. [v]

6. The subnatural environment is not composed of essentially subnatural things. [vi.]

7. Matter in the environment becomes subnatural relative to architecture through historically conditional concepts. [vii]

8. Although subnature often appears threatening to architecture, it can be brought within architecture.

9. Architecture can also produce subnature. [viii]

10. To bring subnature into architecture, or to use architecture to produce subnature, fundamentally transforms architectural concepts and practices in often radical ways.[ix]

11. The role of the architect is not only to understand the nature that constitutes environments but to produce the ideas and forms that constitute the nature in environments. [x]

________________________________________________

Notes
[image above is the Patio and Pavilion installation, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1956]

i. see eg. Canguilhem, George (2001 (1948)) “The Living and its Milieu” in Grey Room 3: 7-31; or this translation
ii. see Picon, Antoine (2000) “Anxious Landscape: from the Ruin to Rust,” Grey Room 1: 64-83.
iii. ibid.
iv. see eg. Gissen, David (2009) “Debris” AA (Architectural Association) Files 58.
v. see eg.  writings in French architectural theory on “nature” stretching from  Laugier to Francois Roche, which essentially arrive at this conclusion, from obviously, and significantly, different perspectives.
vi. see eg. Jacob, Sam, (2003) “Architecture: Dirty Filthy Things,” Contemporary, 73; or a more scholarly take in Campkin, Ben (2007) “Ornament from Grime: David Adjaye’s Dirty House, the Architectural Aesthetic of Recycling and the Gritty Brits”. Journal of Architecture, Volume 12 (4): 367-392.
vii. ibid.
viii. see Gissen, “Debris” (above)
ix. As the practices of Lebbeus Woods, Nox, Philippe Rahm, Francois Roche, Jorge Pailos, et al. demonstrate.
x. see Gissen, David (2009) “The Architectural Production of Nature” Grey Room 34: 58-79