Sustainably
Dependent: Bio-Architectural Living Spaces
[pdf]
Jennifer
Johung
What if a thin film of agar, agarose, or phytogel,
simultaneously pliable and solid, precarious and self-sufficient, and that
folds and curves into a semi-transparent spatial membrane, could provide an
architectural boundary between our bodies and our external environments? Not
unlike a cellular membrane, with its selectively permeable bilayer and complex
mechanisms for separating interior from exterior and for controlling what moves
across its barrier, these biological polymers are currently being developed by
the artist-architect-scientist Zbigniew Oksiuta on a micro to macro-scale.
Negotiating external pressures and internal tensions in order to create dynamic
spatial constructions out of liquid, jelly-like, and semi-rigid matter that, in
turn, may fabricate plant tissues by synthesizing solar energy from their
surroundings, Oksiuta’s ongoing research projects biologically generate living
and self-reproducing architectural forms that are no longer distinct from the
environment out of which they arise or from the entities housed within.
Zbigniew Oksiuta, Spatial Gelatum,
2007
But what happens to these living tissues and fragments if
they cannot be regenerated and reincorporated back into self-sustaining
infrastructures and living systems, but rather fall away as by-products of
various like-minded experiments? Oron Catt’s and Ionat Zurr’s 2007 NoArk is a Tissue Culture and Art
research project that examines the taxonomical crisis induced by life forms and
structures created through biotechnology and left without either categorization
or a home. NoArk is a structural
vessel designed to maintain and grow a conglomerate mass of living cells and
tissues that originated from different organisms. This vessel serves as a
surrogate body for a collection of living fragments, and is built out of
cellular stock taken from tissue banks, laboratories, museums and other
collections, which are then re-fit together into a newly living structure.
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, NoArk,
2007
As these two recent trans-disciplinary experiments
elucidate and problematize, the convergence of contemporary art and
architecture with biotechnology has wielded a range of experiments that seek to
catalyze, transform, challenge, reconfigure and/or reproduce living organisms
and systems.We can now generate actually living spaces out of organically alive
matter that are both internally self-organizing and dependent on their external
surroundings, and that activate living systems that can be maintained over
time. In light of these advances, how can we refigure our understanding of
sustainable living spaces? Indeed, sustainability is the word of the day in the
field of architecture, and accounts for developments in renewable energy and
responsible material sourcing while also overlapping in a range of related
areas such as landscaping, permaculture and farming. Across these practices,
sustainability is oftentimes determined in association with living systems, so
that as well as maintaining the life of the structure or site, sustainable
architecture also functions in a life-like or bio-mimetic way. But what kind of
alternative spatial structures, conditions, and programs are proposed when
cells and tissue cultures are reformed into sustainable spatial frameworks? As
biological matter becomes more visible, viable, and influential in the
maintenance of structured space on a microscopic level, how does this affect
our understanding and experience of the spatial structuring and organizing of
sustainability on a macro-level? What kind of living spaces are we trying to
sustain, how and why?
More broadly, a shift in the conceptualization and
materialization of built forms has been underway for at least the last decade
or two, so that architecture is no longer only conceived as an inanimate object
but rather is designed and constructed according to what it does, or how it
responds to its environmental situation while also anticipating its
inhabitants’ changing needs. Participation within and movement through the
subsequently enlivened built site has therefore impelled architectural theory
and practice towards performance-oriented vocabularies, design concepts and
methods of construction. Although contemporaneously termed, “performative
architecture” arguably has roots in much earlier conceptualizations of a
building’s responsive relationship to its users, dwellers, and landscape.
Architectural historian Vincent Scully, for example, has linked formal
attributes of Ancient Greek temples to the changing experiences of moving
through the whole architectonic complex, inclusive of both structure and site.1 By focusing attention on the mutually constitutive relationship between a
formal structure and its variable use, Scully activates the static building,
conceiving of it instead as an embodied, living form that depends on human
dwellers and users, and their desires, motivations, and demands. These
participants act as mediators who continually construct and re-construct the
links between the site and structure, while also revising their understanding
of their spatial situation within the larger world. While Scully’s particular
focus is on ritualized relationships between building and body, what remains at
stake for contemporary architecture, in approaching a performance framework for
design and use, is an understanding of building as both a spatial structure and
as a temporal process of ongoing situation.
Now, in step with advances in digital
modeling and fabrication technologies, architects and theorists must ask again,
to borrow David Leatherbarrow words: “In what ways does the building act?”2 As an actor, architecture is afforded temporality, motion, and even emotion, as
buildings become successively conceptualized, generated and maintained as if
they were bodies. But what makes an architectural body? In the 1990s, the
American architect Greg Lynn was the first to incorporate animation and motion
graphic software into the process of generating biomorphic structures, each
that transforms and deforms according to a time-based system that calculates
changing surface curvatures within a flexible set of parameters.3 With emphasis on keyframing, in which the mathematics of infinitely small
intervals can simulate motion, Lynn’s structures dynamically and
indeterminately evolve throughout the design process in ways that are not fully
predictable, and thus seem to have a life of their own. For the Dutch architect
Kas Oosterhuis, this kind of “building-body,” otherwise named as a “hyper-body,”
identifies a well-balanced and self-sustaining structural integrity, composed
of a continuous, semi-permeable, kinetic, interactive skin that makes no
categorical distinctions between floor, wall, ceiling, or door, that bends
exterior and interior spaces into and out of each other, and that reacts to
both the surrounding environment and to various inhabitants.4 These networked relations unfold in time, are variable and flexible, and are
programmed as such, but according to Oosterhuis, the uncertain conflations of
digital and phenomenological bodies and skins are also potentially emotive,
capable of accepting and exuding affective registers that may gesture towards
unforeseen exigencies outlaid from responsive digital technologies.
Greg
Lynn/FORM, Embryological
Houses, 2000
Kas
Oosterhuis/ONL, E-motive
House, 2002
As these new paradigms of architecture attend to structural forms as processes occurring in time, in relation to bodies and sites, and instilled with motion and affect, buildings become ever more life-like. While digital and interactive technologies can make structures do something, unmooring both material and conceptual fixity, when aligned with biological infrastructures and systems, another burgeoning field of biomimetic architecture is enlivened through either its imitation of, or its affiliation with, organic processes already occurring within living bodies and across the natural environment; such an “inherent human affinity” with the natural world has also been termed as “biophilic” by sustainable designer and social ecologist, Stephen Kellert.5 Among a wide range of recent biomimetic design explorations that can be incorporated into larger architectural structures, Thomas and Ana Moore and Devins Gust have studied a leaf’s ability to capture energy in order to make a molecular-sized solar cell. Jeffrey Brinker has mimicked the abalone's self-assembly process to create an extraordinarily tough optically-clear glass. J. Herbert Waite has examined the blue mussel that attaches itself to rocks, so as to develop an adhesive that can stick underwater. Peter Steinberg has created a compound that mimics red algae’s ability to keep bacteria from landing on surfaces by interrupting their communication signals with a compound called furanone.6 And on the examples go. With nature as the design model, to be mimicked in form, process, and eco-systemic relations, architecture can, as Janine Benyus argues, “begin to do what all well-adapted organisms have learned to do, which is to create conditions conducive to life.”7
But what if architecture didn’t only approximate, respond
to, imitate or support life, and instead was actually living, or semi-living?
We can only speak of life comparatively, according to phenomena that
distinguish living organisms and systems from non-living, inorganic matter.
Although there is no unequivocal definition of life, living entities share
common characteristics. They are self-sustaining and homeostatic. They grow,
move, metabolize, transform, reproduce, respond, communicate, have complex
organizational infrastructures that evolve over generations, adapting to
changing external environments and emerging with new functional abilities.
Scientists first began to explain life in the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of these material characteristics and physical laws. While
philosophical and scientific materialists believed that every entity and force
could be explained in physio-chemical terms, a strong contingent of vitalists
saw life as something incalculable, nature as indeterminate, and organic matter
as something that always escapes full prediction, qualification and control. By
the mid-20th century however, as biochemistry developed as a field
in its own right, with the subsequent discovery of self-replicating DNA, and in
line with efforts at gene sequencing and the mapping of the human genome, the
question of life was addressed again primarily in terms of cells, their
components and the interactions that maintain living entities through messages,
programs, codes, and instructions relayed and followed. Across the centuries
and into the new one, these ever-changing meanings are revisited particularly
when technological developments challenge us to retool our expectations of how,
and how long, we might continue to live.
In its efforts to reconstitute our qualifications of life,
biotechnology sits at the intersection of computer science and biology,
particularly if we follow Eugene Thacker’s articulation of a contemporary
“biomedia” that is most prominently activated in the relationships between
computer and genetic informatics. Designating the use of living organisms and
materials to fabricate or modify both living and non-living entities,
biotechnology now opens up the possibility of incorporating actually living
units, structures, and processes into both the concept and construction of
architecture, and indeed the field of sustainable architecture has been most
receptive to such intersections.8 For Zbigniew Oksiuta, the future of architecture is biological; he develops
living habitats out of biological polymers that act simultaneously as his
construction material and design process. Originating from animal or plant
tissues, his polymers consist of polynucleotides (DNA and RNA), polysaccharides
(cellulose, starch, pectin, chitin, glycogen and agarose), and polypeptides
(collagen and elastin)—all are chain macromolecules from naturally-occurring
sources.9 Beginning as soft matter, and neither classified as liquids nor solids, these
compounds can be easily formed as soft gelatins or may become hard and fragile
as agar gels, as they transition eventually into more stable solid states.
Oksiuta allows contingency and indeterminacy to take hold throughout the
process of formation, observing transformations and subsequent deformations
without interfering as the shapes begin to stabilize. In his series of Spatium Gelatum experiments, PVC
balloons rotate the biological polymers in a liquid state, which in turn
produce sphere-shaped forms. As the liquid continues to be mixed and cooled
inside the balloons, the polymers begin to congeal as a membrane. The resulting
architectures are biologically renewable and endlessly variable; soft and hard,
transparent and opaque, differently colored, flavored and smelling versions
have appeared in exhibitions at the International Furniture Fair in Cologne and
the BWA Galleries of Contemporary Art of Poland in 2003, at the Venice
Architectural Biennale in 2004, at Art Electronica, Linz in 2007, and at the
Sk-Interfaces exhibition in Luxembourg in 2010.
Above
and below: Zbigniew Oksiuta, Spatium Gelatum, 2004
Expanding his research into structural
forms conjured as and through biological polymers, Oksiuta also works under
water in an environment of relative weightlessness and neutral buoyancy, which
affords an even larger range of membranes. His Isopycnic Systems, explored first in a Neutral Buoyancy Facility at
the European Space Agency in Cologne in 2003, are liquid gelling polymers
generated and sustained within liquid landscapes. Gels of a certain density are
placed in water and amorphously float, pushed and pulled from all sides. Other
liquid polymers are then introduced inside the burgeoning form to change its
size and shape, creating various spaces and interiors. The entire floating
structure is maintained by introducing liquids that have a lower density than
the gel or the water inside the form.
Zbigniew
Oksiuta, Isopycnic
Systems, 2003
Both series of ongoing projects support Oksiuta’s most recent interest in creating three-dimensional living biological membranes that could act as architectural bioreactors capable of housing other living organisms on both a micro and macro-scale, and that internally reproduce the cells and tissues that make up the very structure. Breeding Spaces are polymer layers that are simultaneously spatial boundaries, shelters, and feeding grounds for the micro-organisms, plant tissues and cells that they hold. As Oksiuta describes: “The breeding process involves injecting plant cells into the interior of a form, in this way creating a kind of introverted biosphere. As the cells multiply on the walls and create stable tissue, the ‘bubble’ itself begins to self-degrade, thus facilitating the growth of autonomous plant objects.”10 The membrane therefore acts as scaffolding for the generation of matter that, in turn, maintains both the living membrane itself and the living entities within it. The exterior environment, interior spaces and the permeable boundary between are all inculcated into a biologically fabricated and fabricating system that uses the energy of the sun and the self-organizing tendencies of living matter to breed plant tissues and eventually plants, and to sustain their living conditions over time. The possibilities for Oksiuta are endless: “Since the biological membrane is an universal principle and forms the basis of each living system in the cosmos, it is conceivable in a great variety of consistencies and sizes, as a soft, gel-like or fluid object, the size of a cell, a pill, a fruit, a house or even biosphere. As a bioreactor, incubator or artificial placenta, it would become the new cradle of life and could in the future allow us to cultivate food, tools and shelters. It could even support us in settling the cosmos—it is a life form, thus, with a biological future.”11
While the associations between architectural and biological
sustainability have been influenced by technological advances in such areas as
tissue engineering and biochemical pathway identification, these crossovers are
also inspired by a broader understanding of biological organisms, events, and
evolution in terms of symbiosis and cooperation. Indeed, systems biology
focuses on processes unfolding between seemingly distinct entities, rather than
on their specific identification and labeling, therefore addressing wider
mutual interactions and dependencies between organisms, their cellular
components, and their environment. Relation and interaction are therefore key,
and implicate a wider network within which living cells and organisms are
generated and maintained.
For Eugene Thacker, systems biology and network theory
share common genealogies, overlapping conceptually as well as technically, as
both are mobilized by computational and networked technologies. In fact, as
Thacker reminds us, beginning the late 1950s Ludwig con Bertalanffy sought to
articulate common patterns of organization across disparate systems and to
frame these patterns in terms of a “general systems theory”; Bertalanffy chose
biological processes, such as cellular metabolism, membrane permeability, and
morphogenesis as his case studies. All are self-organizing and self-regulating
open systems that operate by constantly interacting with their surroundings and
consistently exchanging matter and energy over time, as opposed to closed
systems that remain distinct from their environment.12 By returning to Bertalanffy, Thacker pinpoints an underlying tension implicit
in systems theory between processes of identification and processes of
relational interaction. “A first step in any system-based approach,” writes
Thacker, “is to articulate the system, that is, to demarcate a boundary. The
second step is to complexify the first step by articulating the components and
relationships that constitute that boundary. The tension that systems biology
brings to the fore is whether this second step may in some sense fold back on
the first, making the first step of identification biologically irrelevant.”13 What drives a general system is therefore recursive; in demarcating
identifiable things via boundaries, we articulate relationships, which in turn
remark the boundaries that identify things. However, in recognition of open
biological systems, we might want to revise the direction and emphases of these
demarcations, by determining temporary relationships in order to then propose
boundaries that in turn constitute and reconstitute relationality.
From systems biology, we learn to pay
closest attention to the interactions that catalyze living processes and that
alternately vary and maintain the definition, function, and purpose of all
manner of living entities. Biologist Lynn Margulis is credited with
demonstrating that large evolutionary events in the history of life can occur
as two or more seemingly differentiated things merge and cooperate, across
small and large scales, and towards specific purposes. In the late 1960s, she
began to formulate her theory of “endosymbiosis,” which emphasizes the
interdependent and cooperative existence of multiple organisms. Margulis
believes that the organs within a cell, or organelles, were once free-living
single-cell organisms that were engulfed by a host cell. The fusion of these
two cell bodies also marks a fused purpose; Margulis proposes that the
endosymbiont, living within the body of its host, evolved into an organelle
over time, performing specialized functions that contribute to total cell
function and survival. The process by which such symbiosis occurs therefore
complicates a clear determination of boundary relations, and challenges us to
decipher the uneven mechanisms of collaboration while questioning individually
autonomous agency, as self-sustaining entities merge in favor of the
sustainability of a cooperative purpose. Although at first met by skepticism by
the mainstream scientific community, her endosymbiotic theory is now widely
accepted and has even catalyzed current understandings of human genome
composition. Rather than focusing on independent mutation and evolutionary
selection, Margulis has consistently over the course of her career forwarded
symbiotic relationships between all levels of organisms, from different phyla
to different kingdoms, as the force that drives, varies, and sustains life.14 Symbiotic relations generate boundaries to be dissipated and regenerated over
time, so that the determination of discretely contained entities, and the
borders between, are increasingly obscured.
Yet as architectural conventions will
tell us perhaps most convincingly, identifiable boundaries between autonomous
beings and things are still both conceptually and materially relevant, if less
so biologically. But what are we trying to sustain: the boundaries, the beings
and things they hold, or the relations between them and us? While questions
like these persist, there are other concerns that arise when those boundaries,
things, and relations alike are not only living, but are sustaining each other
as living. As cells and tissue cultures become regenerating systems and spatial
structures on a minute scale, ongoing art-architecture-science projects like
Oksiuta’s urge us to consider more expansively what it means to live within something
that is itself living—in other words, to understand the sustained life of
architecture in terms of the life, as well as the death, of body and matter. In
doing so, we must move from considering the kinds of living and habitable
spaces we are trying to sustain, to contemplating how we might want to be
structurally sustained by those spaces. If our living bodies are housed within living
spaces, then who or what is sustaining whom? How are these acts occurring, and
for how long?
To augment our recalibrated distinctions
between living bodies and living structural matter, The Tissue Culture and Art
(TC&A) project, NoArk, addresses
the pressing phenomenon of biotechnologically extended and extendable living
forms. Co-founded by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, TC&A has been exploring the
use of tissues and tissue technologies as artistic media since 1996, and as of
2000 the project has become the primary component of SymbioticA, an Art and
Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the University of Western
Australia. In 2007, Catts and Zurr developed their self-described “vessel for
neo/sub life” in order to respond to the growing mass of disassociated and
fragmented living tissues and cells, or sub-life, already existing in the
thousands of tons across pharmacological and biological research centers. As these institutions continue to
modify living organisms or recombine cell-lines and tissues, a large amount of
undistinguishable, unclassifiable “sub” living forms are excised and rendered
useless; NoArk attempts both to
reconstitute these fragments into new forms of “neo life” and to provide the
conditions for those transformations to continue to occur, thus also acting as
a bioreactor. Catts and Zurr have described the various biomasses that grow
inside NoArk as “semi living”
organisms, since they originate from tissue samples, and yet they have no
living parentage or indeed kinship, no lineage of relationality or site of
belonging. Within the bioreactor, however, the “sub-life neo-organisms” become
re-incorporated into newly self-organizing and sustaining systems. In its
exhibited form, NoArk consists of
separate transparent containers housing collections of dead and preserved
animal and plant tissues and specimens, as well as the support systems and
technologies necessary to both sustain and to re-synthesize life.
Above and below: Oron
Catts and Ionat Zurr, NoArk,
2007
In Catts and Zurr’s words: “We created
the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) in 1996 mainly as a way to
define this category of life and, at the same time, as an attempt to
destabilize some of the rooted perceptions of the classification of living
beings. We see TC&A, and our other attempts to grow aspects of the extended
body, as an amalgamation of the extended human phenotype—a disembodied body
that is unified in living fragments, and an ontological device for re-examining
current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life.”15 NoArk provides shelter and life
support for the parts and units, as well as systems and interactions, that
precariously and tenuously expand not only the definition but also
significantly the experience of life. But not everything remains alive; not
everything survives, even within this biological incubator. And we might not
want it to. Alongside processes explored for sustaining life then, we must also
allow for death, or the finitude that is implicit, although not actualized, in
the generation and fabrication of life-like entities and boundaries, relations
and architectures. Countering the impulse to keep things and beings alive
indeterminately, the death of tissues, bodies and structures are integral to
the activities of sustainability. In fact, programmed cell death, or apoptosis,
is advantageous and necessary for the sustainability of multi-cellular
organisms; for without such signals for death, uncontrolled cell proliferation
results, as is the case with cancer. Sustainability of the system, therefore,
incorporates the death of its components. Within the precarious co-mingling of
structural and biological infrastructures, as we examine the living entities,
spaces and systems we want to sustain, and as we acknowledge those that we
already guard against death, we also must consider the boundaries, spaces, and
relations that we let, or that we should let, die.
So far, my own effort has been to
sustain the practice of questioning life and to expand the sites and stakes of
asking. Yet if we look another way at the determinations of life, one that has
already been historically prefigured as antithetical to mechanistic paradigms
across both science and philosophy, then perhaps we can turn with new emphases
towards the expectations of sustainability across all kind of living
architectures, at the risk of rendering many of these questions and
expectations irrelevant. Arising in contrast to the chemical identifications,
physical definitions and properties of living matter explored from the 18th century to the present, the concept of vitalism attributes an inexplicable,
non-material force to the activities of life. Unlike those who ascribed a
spiritual soul to life’s incalculability, twentieth-century critical modern
vitalists sought to honor scientific developments while also acknowledging the
indeterminate nature of living things.
Henri Bergson named this enigmatic life force that escapes full control and definition: élan vital. In Creative Evolution, published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1910, Bergson envisions life and matter as not perfectly distinct, but rather as tendencies that exist in relation to each other, and that lean towards activity and passivity, respectively. Matter is never inert or stable, while life is always in the process of becoming, as it “appeals to some inner directing principle”; this is élan vital, “the tremendous internal push…the impulse which thrusts life into the world.”16 This generative force or productive impetus is multi-directional, diverse, uncontained and unpredictable; it manifolds and flourishes disassociatively between and amongst beings and things and injects indeterminism as foundational element of any kind of material formation. Bergson’s élan vital does not exist prior to, nor is it planned before, its enactment through, within, and in transition with living forms and living activities that are always already in process. Taken up again by Gilles Deleuze at the end of the 20th century, élan vital is direction without a goal, ignition towards but without an end. For Deleuze, this creative force with which, from which, and through which life emerges does not belong to nor can it be defined alongside organic or inorganic matter; it renders these distinctions between beginning and end, among form, process, direction and action undecidable, indiscernible, and irrelevant.17
A lesser-known contemporary of Bergson’s, the embryologist
Hans Driesch made similar attempts to decipher and name life’s vital force.
Initially put forth in his 1907-08 lecture series The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, Driesch’s notion of
entelechy has recently been
contextualized alongside Bergson’s concept élan
vital by political theorist Jane Bennett. Borrowing the term from Aristotle
for its articulation of a self-propelling impulse, Driesch’s entelechy
formulates and arranges emergent possibilities before they become actualized
within or as an organism; it is, in his words, “an agent sui generis, non-material and non-spatial, but acting into space,
so to speak; an agent, however, that belongs to nature.”18 As such, it is inexplicably responsible for rendering the potentiality of life.
According to Bennett: “Neither élan vital nor entelechy is reducible to the
material and energetic forces that each inhabits and must enlist; both are agents in the sense of engaging in
actions that are more than reflexes, instincts, or prefigured responses to
stimuli; both have the generative power to produce, organize and enliven
matter, though Driesch emphasizes the arranging and directing powers of the
vital agent and Bergson accents its sparking and innovating capacities.”19 In opposition to mechanistic examinations of life, élan vital and entelechy are attempts to think the vitality of life
as always escaping definition and quantification, and by extension both are at
work inside and outside of all kinds of material realities: embodied to inert,
organic to inorganic, alive to dead.
Now as the natural sciences move away from determining
stable underlying laws that might explain life and instead address an open
field of dynamic interactions between biological structures and living systems,
now as theoretical physics focuses on unpredictable and random waves, forces,
energies and intensities, now as the mathematics of chaos and complexity
considers ever-changing and interconnected material processes, a revised
concept of vital materialism is reemerging, one that critically challenges the
forceful culture-of-life movement. This new materialism, implicit but never
fully claimed by critical modern vitalists, forwards an even bolder proposal:
that matter is not only active, but that as an indeterminate and unstable
force, impetus, relation or direction, matter also has agency, which has
conventionally been ascribed exclusively to living humans. In their
introduction to the recently edited volume on New Materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue: “the human
species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces
themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of
unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened. Matter is no
longer imagined here as a massive, opaque plenitude but is constantly forming
and reforming in unexpected ways.”20 In affirming matter’s own vital force whose activity and efficacy exceeds human
action and purpose, materialism meets vitalism in order, to follow the call of
Jane Bennett’s thinking, “to paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter…to
dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal,
will/determination, and inorganic/organic…to sketch a style of political
analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants.”21 By superceding fixed and discrete distinctions between the life and matter
around and within us, we begin to reconsider not only the qualifications of
life, but the status and impact of living objects, structures, and bodies
within the material world, which architecture in its deepest conceptual
iteration must continuously face and from which it is called upon protect us
humans.
While biotechnology has most
compellingly affected our re-attunement to life across cellular, human and
eco-systemic scales, its partnership with architecture challenges us to
re-determine how we are sustaining what kind of life, and more specifically how
we are sustaining the spaces and structures that house and care for that life.
Volleyed between vitalism and materialism, these reconsiderations lead us to
find ways to sustain the indeterminate, consistently recalibrating dynamic of
and amongst material formations. Sustainability can therefore be understood as
a transitional process of life and death in which any sort of thing and being
may emerge and re-emerge. But what does it take to sustain sustainability
itself? What would it entail materially, as well as socially, ecologically, and
politically to sustain the variable alignments and uneven partnerships through
which all manner of living forms, biological to architectural, endure? This is
something we cannot do through human intention, want or will alone. Instead, in
order to sustain sustainability in its process of becoming we must trace,
touch, and accept the actions, accidents, and motivations of nonhuman matter,
the structuring of which has been the purview of architecture both before and
after the incorporation of digital and biological technologies.
Projected into the future while also
facing inevitable material transformations, living bodies and living structures
sustain each other through ongoing acts of heterogeneous cooperation,
interrelation, care, and symbiosis. Architecture, for its part, must act to
continuously readjust the delicate ways in which material systems are
generated, kept alive and are allowed to die through their inculcation and
implication within other material systems, across organic and inorganic,
animate and inanimate, forceful and passive reverberations of life. By
acknowledging the contingent ways in which these acts propel forth and
unpredictably perform, we can approach a certain vitality of sustainability in
terms of the incalculable dependencies through which living architectural
spaces and boundaries both intend and tend to the living matter within,
between, and outside of them. If we acknowledge that biologically living
entities, inorganic substances, and inanimate structures cannot be held so far
apart from each other, cannot be completely bound or contained, that all are
tendencies and intensities that socially, politically, ecologically and
affectively move and transform themselves and each other, then we might require
a different purpose from architecture. We might also recognize that
architectural formations operate not so very differently from the permeable
borders sustained within our own bodies, and that these nonetheless defining
walls are sustaining us as we are sustaining them. Indeed, in a significant
ontological sense, we have always been living inside of living, actant, and
agentic assemblages and systems of beings and things, and they inside of us.22 Architecture is yet another a living and dying membrane, providing an
additional permeable and complex system of separation, relation, protection and
care within which our bodies live and die, for us to uphold and in order for us
to be held, for however long.
Jennifer Johung is Assistant Professor
in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and
Director of the Art History Gallery. Her book, Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to
Digital Network in Contemporary Art, is
forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2011.
Notes
Special thanks to Tessa Johung for
talking through the science with me, for helping me organize these thoughts,
and whose like-mindedness is inspiring.
1
Vincent Scully, The Earth, The Temple, The Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
2 David Leatherbarrow, “Architecture’s
Unscripted Performance,” Performative
Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality, ed. Branko Kolarevic and Ali M. Malkawi
(New York: Spon Press, 2005), 7.
3 Greg Lynn, Animate Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
4 Kas Oosterhuis, Hyperbodies, Towards an E-motive Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser,
2003).
5 Stephen R. Kellert, “Dimensions,
Elements, and Attributes of Biophilic Design,” Biophilic Design, ed. Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen, and
Martin L. Mador (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 3.
6 For more examples:
www.biomimicryinstitute.org
7 Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Harper
Collins, 1997).
8 Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 2.
9 Zbigniew Oksiuta, “Biological Habitat:
Developing Living Spaces,” Sk-Interfaces, ed. Jens Hauser (Liverpool, UK:
Liverpool University Press and FACT, 2008), 135.
10 Oksiuta 137.
11 Oksiuta 140.
12 Thacker, Biomedia, 149.
13 Thacker, Biomedia, 161.
14 Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books,
1998).
15 Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “Bitesize
Lecture with SymbioticA,” http://fo.am/bsl_symbiotica
16 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998),
76, 132.
17 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1991).
18 Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism, trans. C.K. Ogden (London:
Macmillan, 1914), 204.
19 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 80.
20 Diana Coole and Samatha Frost,
“Introducing the New Materialism,” New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
21 Bennett x.
22 Drawing on semiotics, Bruno Latour uses
the term “actant” to articulate a source or force of action, whether human or
material. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: On Actor-Network
Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I borrow “assemblage,” as Bennett does as
well, from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a heterogeneous collections of things,
directions, and effects. As they write, in A
Thousand Plateaus: “there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata
and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization
and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce
phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of
acceleration and rupture. All this,
lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage.” Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-4.