Synthetic Ecologies
Architecture leaves a residue of waste and ruin. The entropic return of deteriorated past is a reminder of modern civilization’s failure to devise a more symbiotic existence. Robert Smithson ruminated on the possibility of such a relationship while walking through the Hotel Palenque: ‘You get this sensuous sense of something extending both in and out of time, something that doesn’t belong to the earth and something that is rooted very much in the earth.’
Smithson’s remarks now extend to the practice of architecture, where there has been a consideration of sustainable entropy by way of shared strategies between aesthetics and science. In the recent ‘Synthetic Ecologies’ symposium at the MAK Center, six panellists debated to what degree a programme of ‘genetic modifications’ could resolve the need for an environmentally sensitive culture. Coming into a ‘post-theory’ moment, architecture is drawing on other, sometimes unexpected practices in order to readdress our notion of habitat. To sociologist Benjamin Bratton the correlation between genetics and architecture is, in a word, natural; he noted that our bodies are the ‘first habitat’. This echoed architect Hernan Diaz Alonso’s speculations on a ‘species of architecture’. Speaking of biogenetic experiments in which researchers have grown mammal flesh, Diaz Alonso envisioned an epidermal architecture, proposing a built environment that could reject artificiality for the sake of a bio-compatible, cadaverous decay.
Bringing new meaning to the architectural uncanny, Diaz Alonso’s ‘monstrosity’ prompted the dilemma of the day. As moderator and architect Matias del Campo queried, was this ‘flesh or the idea of flesh’? Were such environments a means for architecture to produce new formal characteristics, or was it being renegotiated for the sake of ecological benefit? The possibilities of biodegradable living constructions, born in a petri dish, spurred thoughts of green algae-architecture, bogged down in our current ecological mire.
Yet talk of a literal return to nature denied the question of ‘creature comforts’, that nourishment born of Modernism’s rationalized domesticity. Certainly these shared strategies with biogenetics lean towards such formalism, as evident in the MAK Center’s concurrent ‘Gen[H]ome Project’ exhibition. Yet when UCLA architecture lecturer Marcelyn Gow mentioned a tendency towards the ‘immaterial’, we recognized this as a sign not of glasshouses but rather of non-destructive and ecologically consonant practices.
The panel was notably weighted towards West Coast professors. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that the discussion of post-theory engagements shifted, by day’s end, to a conversation on pedagogy. At the moment the future of architecture is not so much in crisis as in search of new terminology. As was evident in this discussion and in like-minded exhibitions (such as MOCA’s ‘Skin and Bones’, 2006–7), architecture is discovering a new language through a cross-discipline genetic engineering. If the outcome of this interbreeding leads to a more integrated relation with the cycles of nature, there is no denying its practicality. If the debate leads to establishing a biomorphic aesthetic, however, renegotiating beauty and establishing style, the critical contingency of these issues will have been lost. At a moment when amassing matter appears detrimental to the non-synthetic ecology we build on, less is more.
Chris Balaschak
