A non-vectored manifesto
For those that may be interested: Here’s a link to my latest attempt to think past “neo-materialism” , especially in its environmentalist form. This is part of Arcade’s special guest-edited journal on “Air” – curated by Kiel Moe. Additional articles by William Braham, Hillary Sample, Steven Moore, and Sean Lally flesh out the theme.
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History's Apparatus [Interview in Landscape Futures, Actar]
Monumental Environments [Tarp, Not Nature]
"Examining Architecture's Other Environments" [Interview in SA]
Thoughts on a Heap of Rubble [Kerb Jorunal, RMIT]
Infrastructure Preservation [Quaderns]
Architectural Reconstruction of Nature [Landform Building, Stan Allen, ed]
Architectural Reconstruction of Geography [Coupling]
Energy Histories [AD, Energies, Sean Lally, ed.]
The Architectural Production of Nature, Dendur/New York [Grey Room]
Architecture's Geographic Turns [Log]
Anxious Climate: Architecture at the Edge of Environment [MICA]
Thermopolis: Conceptualizing Environmental Technologies in the Urban Sphere [JAE]
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HTC Experiments 
March 9, 2010 at 6:33 am
David:
You might check out the system used to represent air in 3d fire modeling — it consists of 3d cells varying in size, with the smallest closest to the walls and other combustibles. It is still a narrow, technological focus, but for me it starts to speak of our own subjective experiences, of nearness to surfaces and boundaries, and the like.
April 5, 2010 at 5:32 am
David: Its amazing how you place air with a total different conception. If you write a book about it I would definitely recommend people to read it!
May 4, 2010 at 8:54 pm
This isnt much of an attempt to move beyond neo-materialism. You suggest nothing in its place here. Your argument against vectors seems to be ‘its been done before.’ Also, Deleuzian neo-materialism has an intensely social/subjective basis [he draws heavily on social theory/ anthropology in his work with Guattari for instance]. This is just a silly article, it mentions names and movements, but argues nothing of any substance. It sounds like the potential of an interesting argument.
I am loving the Territory Issue of AD, however. Excellent work there.
May 5, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Dear Dan:
I appreciate the criticism; but this is far from silly. And, yes, it’s a bit difficult to completely think past a movement in a 500 word article.
Like Subnature, the ARCADE piece is an argument for the historical and the stagnant versus the emergent and animate.
The Arcade piece simply argues that the animate and emergent have their representation in architecture/nature interactions in the vector – the quivering life world of an ever becoming present of difference. The historical and stagnant (which draws from Benjamin’s Theses on History) have not been as well visualized, if at all – maybe Rossi in the early 1970s? They cannot be incorporated into a total process of becoming, for example.
My views are not compatible with a strictly Nietzcshe-ian view of history, which means that this does not fit well into dominant realizations of D&G’s thought in architecture. But I would say that I am interested in how historical self-reflection can recode notions of the subject/society interaction in ways that draws from the latter’s work. I tried to play that out in Subnature.
Thanks for reading Territory. I am very happy with the intro and afterword.