Yaneva, Albena - Zaera, Alejandro - What Is Cosmopolitical Design - Design, Nature and The Built Environment-Routledge (2017)

What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
Design, Nature and the Built Environment

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What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
Design, Nature and the Built
Environment
Edited by
Albena Yaneva
University of Manchester, UK
and
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
University of Princeton, USA
© Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

What is cosmopolitical design? : design, nature and the built environment / [edited] by
Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-5225-2 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-5226-9 (ebook) --
ISBN 978-1-4724-5227-6 (epub) 1. Architecture--Human factors. 2. Human ecology.
I. Yaneva, Albena, editor. II. Zaera, Alejandro, editor.
NA2542.4.W49 2015
720.1’03--dc23
2015028324
ISBN: 9781472452252 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781472452269 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472452276 (ebk – ePUB)
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

About the Editors xiii
About the Contributors xv
Introduction: What is Cosmopolitical Design? 1

Albena Yaneva
1 Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts

and Politics 21
Bruno Latour
2 Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics 33

Manuel DeLanda
3 Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” – From Cosmos to Urban Life 39

Dominique Boullier
4 An Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation 57
5 Low Resolution for a High (Tech) Cosmogram: How to Handle

the Large Hadron Collider 79
Sophie Houdart
6 An Interview with Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda,

AMID.cero9 93
7 River Landscaping in Third Modernity: Remaking Cosmopolitics

in the Anthropocene 113
Cordula Kropp
vi What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
8 An Interview with David Benjamin, The Living 131
9 Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design 143

Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Uriel Fogué
10 An Interview with Eva Castro, Plasma Studio and Groundlab 161
11 Façades: Material Assemblages and Literal Embodiments 175

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Ignacio F. Solla and Jeffrey Anderson
12 An Interview with Philippe Rahm, Philippe Rahm architectes 213
13 Why Cosmopolitical Design is Performed 223

Seth Harrison and Ariane Lourie Harrison
Index 239
List of Illustrations
1 Waiting for Gaia: Composing the 3.8 A controversial project: 42 “high

Common World through Arts and environmental quality” apartments. Image
Politics courtesy of Jean-Yves Barrier.
1.1 St Christopher, Master of Messkirch,
3.9 Reinventing the tradition of clay with
(1500–43). Image courtesy of Kunstmusem
large bricks. Image courtesy of Jean-Yves
Basel, Martin P. Bühler.
Barrier.
3 Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” – 3.10 The initial program of the Forccast
From Cosmosto Urban Life project (launched 2012). Diagram by the
3.1 The basic cosmopolitical compass. author.
Diagram by the author.
4 An Interview with Andrés Jaque,
3.2 The city cosmopolitical compass. Office for Political Innovation
Diagram by the author.
4.1 Detailed mapping of trees and bushes
3.3 The time cosmopolitical compass. present in the lot where “House in Never
Diagram by the author. Never Land” was to be constructed.
Made by the Office for Political Innovation,
3.4 The Llech canyon in the French based on site survey.
Pyrenees. Photo by the author.
4.2 Roof plan. “House in Never Never
3.5 Traffic jam in the canyon. A crowded Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2007–2009.
river is not a river anymore. Photo by the © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political
author. Innovation.
3.6 The modernist solution: a canyoning 4.3 Construction site. “House in Never
park. No more attachments, no more Never Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2008.
uncertainties. “Paradise aventure” © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political
(L. Locquet). Innovation.
3.7 Seining on the Illinois River, 4.4 Construction site. “House in Never
Beardstown, IL, July 1908. Never Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2008.
viii What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
© Andrés Jaque / Office for Political and the cosmos. Photo collage by the
Innovation. author.
4.5 “House in Never Never Land,” Cala 5.2 “Propagation of Monotony.” Image
Vadella, Ibiza, 2007–2009. © Andrés Jaque / courtesy of Antoine Dumont, F93.
Office for Political Innovation.
6 An Interview with Cristina Díaz
4.6 “House in Never Never Land,” Cala Moreno and Efrén García Grinda,
Vadella, Ibiza, 2007–2009. © Andrés Jaque / AMID.cero9
6.1 “Museum of Energy” section and plan.
4.7 “House in Never Never Land,” Cala © AMID.cero9.
Vadella, Ibiza, 2007–2009. © Andrés Jaque /
Office for Political Innovation. 6.2 “Museum of Energy” greenhouse
interior. © AMID.cero9.
4.8 Abel in Silver Lake. “Different Kinds of
Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool.” Roy 6.3 “Carboniferous Museum” forest plan
and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater (REDCAT), and section. © AMID.cero9.
Los Angeles, California, 2013. © Andrés
6.4 “Carboniferous Museum” forest model.
Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
© AMID.cero9.
4.9 Political Toys. “Plasencia Clergy House,”
6.5 “Magic Mountain” exterior. © AMID.
Plasencia, 2004. © Andrés Jaque / Office for
cero9.
Political Innovation.
6.6 “Magic Mountain” flower petals model.
4.10 Postcard. “Skin Gardens.” Collection
© AMID.cero9.
of political jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque /
6.7 “Black cloud” site plan. © AMID.cero9.
4.11 Contract. “Skin Gardens.” Collection 6.8 “Black cloud” programs, paths and
of political jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque / structures. © AMID.cero9.
6.9 “Black cloud” bunches. © AMID.cero9.
4.12 “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political
jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque / Office for 6.10 “Black cloud” plan detail. © AMID.
Political Innovation. cero9.
4.13 “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political 6.11 “Black cloud” cage and flocks.
jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque / Office for © AMID.cero9.
Political Innovation.
6.12 “Cherry Blossom Palace.” © AMID.
4.14 “Superpowers of Ten.” Close Closer, 3ª cero9.
Edição Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa (12
September–15 December 2013). © Andrés 6.13 “Cherry Blossom Palace” elevation.
Jaque / Office for Political Innovation. © AMID.cero9.
5 Low Resolution for a High (Tech) 7 River Landscaping in Third

Cosmogram: How to Handle the Large Modernity: Remaking Cosmopolitics in
Hadron Collider the Anthropocene
5.1 Non-linear perspective. Or how to 7.1 Bathing in the urban river has a strong
proliferate connections between particles local tradition. Photo by the author.
List of Illustrations ix
7.2 The Munich Isar as postmodern of the Bulgarian communist party. Image
playground. Image courtesy of dpa. courtesy of Thomas Jorion.
7.3 Educational work on behalf of public 9.3 Device indicating domestic energy

understanding of river design. Photo by the consumption and costs.
author.
9.4 Left, “Open Streets,” street unfolded
7.4 Public discussion about options in as yoga studio by Bradley P Johnson. Right,
river landscaping in 2012. Image courtesy “Parking Day,” street unfolded as park, Art
of Elena Orth, Institut für internationale Monaco Portland via, my.parkingday.org
Architektur-Dokumentation GmbH &
Co. KG. 9.5 “El Campo de la Cebada” and its
multiple unfoldings. Image courtesy of
Zuloark.
8 An Interview with David Benjamin,
The Living
9.6 Map of “Acampada Sol” during the
8.1 “Lifecycles”. © The Living. third and final week of its life. Image
courtesy of Miguel de Guzmán.
8.2 “Living Light”. © The Living.
9.7 Map of new associations and
movements emerging from the different
8.3 “Amphibious Architecture”. © The Living.
committees and working groups of
“Acampada Sol.”
8.4 “Hy-Fi” exterior. © The Living.
9.8 Left, installation of the “JF-Kit House,”
8.5 “Hy-Fi” brick. © The Living. Guangzhou, China. Right, exercise tables for
checking your email, talking over Skype, or
8.6 “Hy-Fi” interior. © The Living. cooking. © Uriel Fogué and elii.
8.7 “Mussel Choir” close up. © The Living.

10 An Interview with Eva Castro,
Plasma Studio and Groundlab
8.8 “Mussel Choir” system. © The Living.
10.1 CAD drawing/master plan; pedestrian
8.9 “Bio Computation” diagram. © The paths and vehicular roads woven and
Living. articulated by the various patches of flowers.
© Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
8.10 “Bio Computation” sequence. © The
Living. 10.2 Aerial view of the park. © Plasma
Studio and Groundlab.
9 Unfolding the Political Capacities of
Design 10.3 A close up into the detailed
materialization within certain parts of the
9.1 School chairs as enfolding park. © Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
mechanisms of disciplinary power.
Lithography of H. Lecomte, 1818. 10.4 Views of the greenhouse. © Plasma
Studio and Groundlab.
9.2 Left, clothes line in Le Corbusier’s
Chandigarh Capitol Complex. Photo taken 10.5 Views of the exhibition building,
c. 2010 by Vinayak Bharne © 2010 Artists articulating the flows and mediating
Rights Society (ARS), New York ⁄ ADAGP, between the solidity of the ground and the
Paris ⁄ F.L.C. Below, abandoned headquarters waterfront. © Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
x What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
10.6 Hotel Puerta America, Madrid, the 11.5 Kalzip: A surface curved from roof
lobby area. © Plasma Studio. to façade on Foster and Partners Scottish
Exhibition and Conference Centre, Glasgow,
10.7 Hotel Puerta America, Madrid, room Scotland, 1998. Image courtesy of Jean-
interior. © Plasma Studio. Pierre Dalbéra.
10.8 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, 11.6 Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain,

techniques for soil remediation according shows the full potential of the metal cladding
to the type of contamination. © Groundlab. of the monolithic watertight façade, 1997.
Image courtesy of Angelica Louis.
10.9 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, polluted
water and soil remediation strategies. 11.7 Top, the façade of the San Francisco
© Groundlab. Federal Building. Architect, Thom Mayne of
Morphosis, 2007. Bottom, the San Francisco
10.10 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, new Federal Building, a detail. Architect, Thom
topographic condition produced through Mayne of Morphosis, 2007. Images courtesy
the soil remediation; zoom of the CBD area. of John Zacherle.
© Groundlab.
11.8 Left, the Cooper Union building
10.11 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, bird in New York City under construction.
view of a CBD’s segment. © Groundlab. Morphosis, 2004. Image courtesy of John
Hill. Right, the Cooper Union building in
10.12 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, the New York City. Morphosis, 2004. Image
new ground morphology woven into the courtesy of Vincent Desjardins.
proposed massing. © Groundlab.
11.9 Top, Lustron house on Roselawn.
11 Façades: Material Assemblages and Image courtesy of Philip Pessar. Bottom,
Literal Embodiments the Lustron Houses from 1947, scanned
postcard. Photograph by Arnold Newman.
11.1 Twelve Species of Facade © 1984 Arnold Newman © Fotofolio.
Assemblages. Diagram by Alejandro Zaera-
Polo and Jeffrey Anderson. Diagram by 11.10 The Alcoa Building in Pittsburgh,
author. Harrison and Abramovitz, 1953. Image
courtesy of Meredith L. Clausen. Source:
11.2 The Equitable Savings and Loan Cities/Buildings Database. Available
Building in Portland, Oregon, Pietro at: http://content.lib.washington.edu/
Belluschi 1948. Image courtesy of Michelle buildingsweb
Gray.
11.11 Trombe wall. Courtesy of
11.3 A portable town for Australia erected EcoGeekDan.
at Hemming’s Patent Portable House
Manufactory in Bristol, England in 1853 to 11.12 The School of Architecture, Nantes.
be dismantled and shipped to the Bishop of Architects, Lacaton and Vassal. Image
Melbourne. courtesy of Jean-Pierre Dalbéra.
11.4 A landscape of Kalzip used on an 11.13 Left, Parkroyal on Pickering,

urban scale at the Southern Cross train Singapore, WOHA Image courtesy of
station in Melbourne, Australia, by Jackson Aussle Assault. Above, detail of Parkroyal
and Grimshaw, 2006. Image courtesy of on Pickering, Singapore, WOHA. Image
Orin Zebest. courtesy of Jonathan Choe.
List of Illustrations xi
12 An Interview with Philippe Rahm, 13.2 Performance of Anchises at

Philippe Rahm architectes Bournemouth Pavilion Dance, 2010.
12.1 “Hormonorium,” the Swiss Pavilion

13.3 Performance of Veal at The Invisible
at the Venice Biennale in 2002. © Philippe
Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, 2013. David
Rahm and Jean-Gilles Décosterd / Photo:
Watson and Loren Dempster performing
Jean-Michel Landecy.
with the “herd” of penned bagpipe
12.2 The Library in Nancy, plan. © Philippe creatures.
Rahm architectes.
13.4 Performance of Veal at The Invisible
12.3 The Library in Nancy, diagram of the Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, 2013. Silas Riener
temperature. © Philippe Rahm architectes. performing with the “herd” of penned
bagpipe creatures in the foreground, while
12.4 The Library in Nancy, diagram of the digitally-rendered animal feed makes
the air ventilation in the winter. © Philippe up the background.
Rahm architectes.
13.5 Performance of Pharmacophore at
12.5 The Library in Nancy, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New
amphitheater. © Philippe Rahm architectes. York City, 2011.
12.6 Jade Eco Park, Taichung, Taiwan, 13.6 Species Niches pavilion by Harrison
2012–2016. © Philippe Rahm architectes, Atelier at OMI International Art Center,
Mosbach paysagistes, Ricky Liu & Associates. Ghent, NY, 2014.
12.7 Jade Eco Park, Taichung, Taiwan,

13.7 Species Niches pavilion by Harrison
2012–2016. © Philippe Rahm architectes,
Atelier at OMI International Art Center,
Mosbach paysagistes, Ricky Liu & Associates.
Ghent, NY, 2014.
13 Why Cosmopolitical Design is

13.8 Species Niches pavilion roof plan, 2014.
Performed
13.1 Research for Anchises included work 13.9 Species Niches pavilion in use by
at motion capture lab at Bournemouth Dance OMI residency at OMI International
University, 2010. Art Center, Ghent, NY, 2014.
About the Editors
Albena Yaneva is Professor in Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester,

Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre. She holds a Masters
degree in Sociology from École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1997)
and a doctoral degree from École des Mines de Paris (2001). Albena’s research
draws on Actor-Network-Theory to explore creative practice and design
invention, architectural controversies and politics of design, based on fieldworks
in architecture, contemporary art, and museum studies. She is the author of
Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012), The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist
Approach to Architecture (2009), and Made by the Office for Metropolitan Design:
An Ethnography of Design (2009). Albena is the guest editor of Understanding
Architecture, Accounting Society (2008, special issue of Science Studies) and Traceable
Cities (2012, special issue of City, Culture & Society). She is the recipient of the RIBA
President’s Award for Outstanding University-located Research (2010).
Alejandro Zaera-Polo is Professor of Architecture, and principal of AZPAML

London/Barcelona. He graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura
de Madrid and Harvard GSD with Distinction and worked at OMA in Rotterdam
prior to establishing FOA in 1993 where he has developed a successful international
professional practice since. In parallel to his professional activities, Alejandro has
developed a substantial role within academia. He was the Dean of the Berlage
Institute in Rotterdam, held the Berlage Chair at the Technical University of Delft
and was the Dean of the Princeton School of Architecture. Alejandro was the first
recipient of the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship at Yale. He has published
extensively as a theorist in El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Volume, Log and many
other international magazines and is a member of the London School of Economics
Urban Age project.
About the Contributors
Jeffrey Anderson is an architectural designer and researcher, with an MARCH 2

from Princeton University. He has worked with Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jimenez Lai,
Jeffrey Kipnis, and Cesar Pelli in architectural, exhibition, and research projects
and his work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, SCI-Arc, and Ohio State
University.
David Benjamin is Principal at the architecture firm The Living, and Director of the
Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation. Before receiving a Master of Architecture degree from
Columbia, Benjamin graduated from Harvard with a BA in Social Studies. The Living
is a firm dedicated to creating architecture that is both interactive and responsive
to environment conditions. David’s work is at the crossroads of design and biology,
exploring the possibilities of both mimicking and literally harnessing life to create
dynamic, responsive structures. His innovative work includes “Living Light,” a
permanent, illuminated pavilion in Seoul that visually reports changes in air quality,
and “Amphibious Architecture,” a floating installation in New York’s East River that
enabled participants to communicate with fish and learn about water pollution.
Dominique Boullier is Professor in Sociology at Science Po, Paris and the director
of Medialab in Paris. His work crosses the boundaries of urban anthropology,
linguistics, and communication sciences. Dominique is the author of La ville-
événement: Foules et publics urbains (2010), Opinion Mining et Sentiment Analysis:
méthodes et outils (2012), among others. Dominique is also the editor in chief of the
journal Cosmopolitiques.
Eva Castro is the Director of Groundlab and Plasma Studio, Beijing–London.

She has been a guest professor at the AA since 2003, and at the School of
Landscape Architecture at Tsinghua University since 2011 where she directs a
Landscape Urbanism Unit. Eva is also the recipient of a honorary professorship
at Xian University of Technology. She studied architecture and urbanism at the
xvi What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
Universidad Central de Venezuela and subsequently completed the AA Graduate

Design program with Jeff Kipnis at the Architectural Association, London. Eva is
co-founder of Plasma Studio and Groundlab, with offices in Italy, UK and China. She
has lectured internationally on the topic of Landscape Urbanism. Eva is the winner
of the Next Generation Architects Award, the Young Architect of the Year Award,
the Design Vanguard – Architectural Record, USA and the ContractWorld Award,
among others. Her work is published and exhibited worldwide. Recent exhibitions
include the Solo Exhibition, Deutsches Architekturzentrum (DAZ) Berlin, Critical
Territories – Solo Exhibition, Architectural Association Gallery, London, Cartographic
Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, Harvard GSD, Cambridge USA and the
ArchiLab 2013, FRAC Centre Orleans. Plasma Studios and Groundlab were the lead
designers for the International 2011 International Horticultural Expo in Xi’an, China.
Manuel DeLanda is an artist and philosopher. He is on the faculty and a Professor

of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, GAUD, Pratt Institute. Manuel is the
author of seven philosophy books: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
(2002), A New Philosophy of Society (2006), Deleuze: History and Science (2010),
Philosophy and Simulation (2011), and Philosophical Chemistry (2015).
Uriel Fogué holds a PhD from ETSAM/UPM. Since 2004 he works in four main fields.
First, teaching. In several universities since 2001. Currently, Projects Design tutor
at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, UEM (since 2005). Second, investigation.
Co-director of the Crisis Cabinet of Political Fictions, and co-founder of the group
(Inter)section of Philosophy and Architecture. He is co-editor of the book Planos
de intersección: materiales para un diálogo entre filosofía y arquitectura (2011). Third,
communication. Co-editor of the publication UHF (since 1998). Fourth, practice.
Co-director of elii (architecture office). Currently developing several architecture
and urban works in different countries. Uriel has obtained recognition and awards
for outstanding performance, amongst which are the FAD Opinion Award (2005),
the awards received from the Official College of Architects of Madrid (2006, 2011,
2013), the JustMad Award to Emergent Creativity (2013) and the Arquia Proxima
Award (2014). Their work has been nominated to the prestigious EU Prize for
Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award (2014). elii was selected as
one of the “100 architects of the year 2012” by the KIA Korean Institute of Architects
and the UIA International Union of Architects in Seoul (2012).
Seth Harrison is an entrepreneur in biotechnology and culture, and co-founder

of Harrison Atelier. He conceived of the performance installation series on which
Harrison Atelier is now embarked and is responsible for writing and directing
the works. Seth’s role in shaping Harrison Atelier’s thought-into-action approach
to post-humanism derives from his work with new technologies. He founded
Apple Tree Partners in 1999, a firm that creates companies in the life sciences.
Seth received his MFA in writing (fiction concentration) at Columbia University’s
School of the Arts (2010) and has published on performance and post-humanism
in anthologies and architecture journals.
About the Contributors xvii
Ariane Lourie Harrison is an architect, educator, and co-founder of Harrison Atelier.

Ariane has taught at the Yale School of Architecture since 2006, in the graduate and
undergraduate studio and design sequences and in the graduate history/theory
sequence. She is the editor of Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman
Territory (2013). Ariane worked at Eisenman Architects (May, 2006 through August,
2008). She is the editor of Ten Canonical Buildings by Peter Eisenman (2008). Ariane
received her PhD in Architectural History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, her
M.Arch from GSAPP, Columbia University and an AB from Princeton University, NJ.
She is an architect licensed in New York State and a member of the AIA.
Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific

Research (CNRS), a member of the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative
Sociology. Trained in the field of Social Studies of Science, she has conducted most
of her studies on Japan, focusing on the various ways modernity is being built and
enacted as a cultural construct, with a particular focus on innovation and creativity.
Sophie is the author of La cour des miracles: Ethnologie d’un laboratoire japonais
(2008) and Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph (2009).
Andrés Jaque, architect by the ETSAM (1998) and Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s
Tessenow Stipendiat (2000–2001), is Professor of Advanced Architecture at the
Columbia University GSAPP and Visiting Professor at Princeton University SoA. He
is the founder principal of Office for Political Innovation. They are the authors of
a number of awarded projects that explore the participation of architecture in a
context of post-foundational politics, including “Plasencia Clergy House,” “House
in Never Never Land,” “Tupper Home,” “Escaravox,” “Sweet Urbanism” (MAK Vienna,
2013), “Superpowers of Ten” (Lisbon Architecture Triennial, 2013), “Different Kinds
of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool” (RED CAT CalArts Center for Contemporary
Arts, Los Angeles, 2013), “Hänsel & Gretel’s Arenas” (La Casa Encendida, Madrid,
2012), “Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society” (Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona,
2012), “Sweet Parliament Home” (Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2010), “Skin
Gardens” (BAC Barcelona, 2009), “Fray Home Home” (Biennale di Venezia, 2010).
Their project “IKEA Disobedients” is the first architectural performance included in
the MoMA Collection. In 2014 Andrés and the Office for Political Innovation have
been awarded with the Silver Lion to the Best Research Project at the 14th Venice
Biennale and have been awarded Design Vanguard 2014 by Architectural Record.
Cordula Kropp is a Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Applied

Sciences, Munich. She has an expertise in social innovation, climate adaptation
and mitigation strategies in urban and regional development, environmental
challenges and debates, and civic participation in processes of socio-ecological
transformation. Cordula studied Sociology, Psychology and Anthropology at LMU
Munich, where she also received her doctoral degree (2001), and where she was
a lecturer in environmental studies at the chair of Ulrich Beck (1996–2002). From
2002–2009 she was a Senior Scientist and member of the Board of Directors at a
non-profit research institute (MPS e.V.), where she conducted research and served
xviii What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
as a consultant in the fields of science and technology studies, risk studies and
sustainable development. Recent publications include Klima von unten: Regionale
Governance und gesellschaftlicher (2014), Futures of Modernity: Challenges for
Cosmopolitical Thought and Practice (2012).
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today. He is among the
top foundational figures in science and technology studies. He is also internationally
recognized for his contribution to the arts. He has written a number of influential
books: Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), Science in Action
(1987), The Pasteurization of France (1988), We Have Never Been Modern (1993),
Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1999), Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of
Science Studies (1999), and most recently, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction
to Actor–Network-Theory (2005) and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013).
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda are both architects and founders
of the Madrid-based office AMID.cero9 and the Diploma Unit Masters in the
Architectural Association in London. Recently they held a professorship in the
Institut für Kunst und Architektur in Vienna. While teaching together in Madrid
since 1998 (in parallel at ETSAM and ESAYA UEM) they have been visiting professors
and lecturers at many universities in Europe, Asia and the US. Cristina and Efrén’s
projects have been widely disseminated and they have won more than 40 prizes in
national and international competitions. Their projects and writings of the last 15
years were documented last winter in the exhibition and publication Third Natures,
a Micropedia. They have recently completed the construction of the headquarters
for the legendary Institución Libre de Enseñanza in Madrid.
Philippe Rahm is an architect and principal of Philippe Rahm architects, based

in Paris, France. His work extends the field of architecture from the physiological
to the meteorological and has received an international acclaim in the context
of sustainability. Philippe has participated in a number of exhibitions worldwide
and in 2007 he had a personal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
in Montreal. He was Headmaster at the AA School in London in 2005–2006 and
lectured widely, including at Yale, Cooper Union, UCLA, the ETH Zürich, the
Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in Switzerland, the School of Architecture of
the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, the AHO in Oslo. From 2010
to 2012 he held the Jean Labatut Professorship in Princeton University. Since 2014
he is teaching architecture design at the GSD, Harvard University. His recent work
includes the First Prize for the 70ha Taichung Gateway Park in Taiwan, currently
under construction, an office building of 13,000 m2 at La Défense in France for the
EPADESA, a convective condominium for the IBA in Hamburg, Germany, among
others. His books include Physiological Architecture (2002), Distortions (2005),
Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow (2006), Architecture météorologique
(2009) and Constructed Atmospheres (2014).
About the Contributors xix
Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the

University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in Sociology from the
University of Cambridge in 2008. Between 2010 and 2013 he was a Marie Curie
Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University and the Centre for Research on Socio-
Cultural Change at the Open University. Fernando’s research focuses on cultural
sociology, and more specifically on the study of the different practices, materials,
and infrastructures through which different forms of subjectivity and objectivity
are produced. He has written on the relationship between enhancement
technologies and political subjectivity, contemporary art, and on the politics of
urban infrastructures. Fernando’s work has appeared in international journals
such as Theory and Society, Cultural Sociology, International Journal of Research and
Planning and City and Society. He is the co-editor of The Politics of Knowledge (2012)
and is currently working on a book manuscript based on his recent ethnography of
the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Ignacio F. Solla is a Director of Arup in Spain, and the leader of the Facades Group.
He is an architect and has worked previously as a façade contractor, a supplier
and a building envelope consultant for a range of high profile companies. Ignacio
provides façade design and consultancy for multi-disciplinary teams on building
projects globally. His particular expertise is the design of high-performance
and energy-efficient glazed façades, balancing materials supply, design, and
construction according to local capabilities.
Introduction: What is Cosmopolitical Design?
Albena Yaneva
The Cosmopolitical Question
In recent years we have witnessed an interesting and highly debated renaissance

in the term cosmopolitanism across the humanities and the social sciences (Tassin
2003, Archibugi 2003). Cosmopolitan is a very old term, which historically denoted
the citizenry or the citizenship of those who belonged to the world, that is, to the
networks of the great cities. The idea that the individual is a citizen of the world and
that the world might become their polis (cosmopolis) would be equivalent today
to the term international or global. This key term and its definition comes to us
from the Stoics and Kant. It points to the possible unification of all people through
universal laws, and to the cosmopolitan project of an international civil society.
In this tradition of European philosophical internationalism, nature, the cosmos, is
simply there, salient and rational; all humans everywhere share basic characteristics,
they are all endowed with the same psychology and their representations of the
world differ by degree. Issues of war and peace involve only humans, who have
different views of and perspectives on the world.
The recent debates suggested a move from a nation-state definition of society
and politics to a cosmopolitan outlook (Beck and Sznaider 2006). As Ulrich Beck
argued in World Risk Society (Beck 1999), ecological, economic, and terrorist risks
have generated the “cosmopolitan outlook,” according to which people view
themselves simultaneously as part of a threatened world and as part of their
local situations and histories. This cosmopolitan turn in the humanities and
social sciences will require a re-conceptualization of the field. Social sciences will
become cosmopolitan as they develop conceptual and methodological resources
for understanding the world that is undergoing a cosmopolitan transformation
(Beck 2006). Questioning the ontologized premises and dualisms of nation state
sociology (such as national and international, us and the others, society and
nature), this type of social research aims at inventing a new sociological grammar
for the descriptive theory of social phenomena and their translation into practice.
2 What Is Cosmopolitical Design?
While ethnocentric social scientists have engaged in the intellectual undertaking

of redefining cosmopolitanism as trans-disciplinary, embracing geography,
anthropology, ethnology, international relations, international law, political
philosophy, political theory, and now sociology and social theory, the critics of
this tradition have invented a new term: cosmopolitics. As Bruno Latour noted, the
scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been
cosmopolitics, that is, politics of the cosmos, and that we have always dealt with
object-oriented politics (Latour 2005). Cosmopolitics has a different meaning to
cosmopolitanism; it denotes the politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything,
including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act.
Isabelle Stengers offers a sophisticated reading of the term cosmopolitics (Stengers
2010a, 2010b). She has reinvented the word by representing it as a composite of
the strongest meaning of cosmos and the strongest meaning of politics.
For her, the strength of one element checks any dulling in the strength of the
other. The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics
to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics
in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities
that must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature
closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos (Latour
2004b: 454).
Citizens of the world may be cosmopolitan, global, and tolerant to different

cultures, but this does not mean that they have even begun to grasp the difficulties
of a politics of the cosmos. In situations of conflict, not only cultures but the
entire cosmos are in jeopardy. To see and understand this we need to cultivate
anthropological sensitivity and to witness and experience the variations of nature.
As the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro has shown, we are dealing with multi-
naturalism, a term he invented to counter ethno-centrism (Viveiros de Castro 1998,
2004), as opposed to the cosmopolitan understanding of mono-naturalism. If we
look for instance at theories under which the Amerindians operate, we find that
by default all entities share the same fundamental organization, which is basically
that of humans; a palm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw, all these entities have souls,
languages, family lives, and their souls are all the same. They all have the same
culture, but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in the same nature, as
their bodies differ. Thus, whereas in cosmopolitan thinking there is one nature and
the cosmos is unified, in cosmopolitcs nature is multiplied; it appears in different
variations: a Multiverse. While cosmopolitan thinkers reflect on the characteristics
and the ‘subject’ of the cosmopolitan age at the beginning of the third millennium,
the preoccupation of cosmopolitical scholars is rather different: their intention is to
open up to the diversity of the world and to acknowledge the existence of all the
entities composing it.
The cosmopolitical proposal has nothing to do with the miracle of decisions that
“put everyone into agreement” (Stengers 2005: 1003). Take for instance the case of
genetics. To generate cosmopolitics it is not enough to combine natural sciences
and political sciences and to weigh them all up together. Nor is it sufficient to add
a political interpretation to genes. In other words, adding a layer of symbols and

social sciences over the layer of natural sciences will not help to obtain a cosmos.
Genes are matters of concern, not matters of fact (Latour 2004c), and in genetics
there is already a wide discussion among biologists of what defining a gene actually
means. The dispute is no longer between the natural sciences and the social
sciences; it is inside every single discipline. We therefore need to introduce political
interpretations into the definition of natural sciences, and things into politics, so
that politics becomes “something entirely different from what political scientists
believe: it is the building of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive
composition of the common world” (Latour 2004b). If we are to be “cosmopolitically
correct” (Latour 2007b), we need to invent terms that would portray the zone
between the natural and the social sciences. This complicated trading zone not
only brings together two disciplines, it reinvents them both. If we take the example
of the natural park in the Alps described by Isabelle Mauz and Julien Gravelle (2005),
we witness how a park is no longer a natural environment “out there” waiting to be
discovered by visitors; nor simply an assemblage that stands to reason. Instead,
it has been entirely redesigned right down to the behavior of the wolves and
the mountain goats, to the great surprise of the people who advocated for their
protection. When the goats started to be protected they immediately appeared
to be boring, as tourists had not gone there to see mountain goats peacefully
eating grass. Hunters therefore had to teach the goats to be afraid of humans again
and to flee, so that tourists’ interest in visiting the natural park would be revived.
This example illustrates that the natural park is not passive nature, but rather an
assembly that is to be redesigned by all those who have relevant knowledge about
it. “Dasein is design,” as Sloterdijk famously put it (2009), in reference to the activity
of those who can no longer count on any natural untouched entity and have to
redesign every single feature of our common existence including, in this case,
the ethology of mountain goats. This debate is not simply “about nature,” about
conflicting human interests, but about humans and wildlife and, more generally,
ecosystems and landscapes. As it unfolds an assembly is slowly being built around
this heterogeneous assemblage of cultures and natures, and the reintroduction of
the wolf into the park creates a complex political imbroglio.
Cosmopolitical thinkers like Isabelle Stengers (2010a), Bruno Latour (2004 and
2005) and Peter Sloterdijk (2003 and 2004) see nature as no longer being unified
enough to provide a stabilizing pattern for the experience of humans; it is not “out
there,” a simple backdrop for human activities. Instead, it is to be done, created,
instigated; it is to be “composed” (Latour 2010). These thinkers abandon the
modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience – a nature
that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside. They advocate a
different, an a-modernist attitude to nature that will require an active process of
manipulating and reworking it “from within” (Haraway 2003). While cosmopolitan
philosophers have either described the moment of global ecological crisis as the
“end of history” or else qualified it as “post-human,” Latour has gone so far as to call
it “post-natural.” In the post-natural epoch we are more connected to one another
by our worries, our matters of concern, the issues we care about, than by any
other set of values, opinions, or principles. People assemble around things, around
“pragma” (Latour 2005).
Ecology has become an alternative to modernization: a new way to handle all
the objects of human and non-human collective life. Ecologize has become the
plausible alternative of modernize (Latour 1998). The distinction between political
and cosmopolitical ecology consists in the politicization of “positive” knowledge-
related issues or the practices concerning “things.” Political ecology affirms that all
knowledge is objectively produced and verified by experts. In political ecology,
politics is commonly reduced to an empty game, leaving astray all the entities
that are producing or destroying our worlds: non-humans such as viruses, natural
disasters, climate, carbon dioxide, floods, rivers, and so on. However, when there is
“an issue that not only does not allow itself to be dissociated in fact-value terms,
but also needs to be given the power to activate thinking among those who
have relevant knowledge about it” (Stengers 2005: 1002), we are in the regime of
cosmopolitical ecology. A cosmopolitical perspective would acknowledge that
there is no “objective definition” of a virus or a flood that everyone will share. A
detached definition of those entities accepted by all would not produce a better
understanding of the world transformed by viruses or floods. Instead, we need to
account for the active participation of all those whose practice effectively engages
in multiple modes “with” the virus or “with” the river. That is what will give us access
to the ‘cosmos’ and to the unknown constituted by “multiple divergent worlds”
(Stengers 2005: 995). The “cosmic order” can protect us from an “entrepreneurial”
version of politics giving voice only to the clearly-defined interests that have the
means to mutually counterbalance one another. To the same extent, “politics
can protect us from a misanthropic cosmos, one that directly communicates
with an ‘honest’ or ‘sane’ reality, as opposed to artifices, hesitations, divergences,
excessiveness and conflicts, all associated with human disorders” (Stengers 2005:
1000). Cosmopolitical ecology will therefore cover all the objects of human and
non-human collective life bearing on complicated forms of association between
beings–regulations, equipment, consumers, institutions, habits, calves, cows,
pigs, and broods–that are completely superfluous in an in-human and a-historical
nature. “Ecologizing” means creating the procedures that make it possible to study
a network of quasi-objects whose relations of subordination remain uncertain, and
which thus require a new form of political activity adapted to their study.
The key cosmopolitical question is therefore twofold: how to design the political
scene in a way that actively protects it from the fiction that “humans of good will
decide in the name of the general interest;” how to turn the virus or the river into
a cause for thinking and to design it in such a way that collective thinking has to
proceed “in the presence of” those who would otherwise be likely to be disqualified
because they have nothing to propose? Thus, to engage in cosmopolitics means
to redesign simultaneously the cosmos and the political assemblies. Yet the
cosmopolitical proposal, as Stengers points out, is not designed primarily for
“generalists.” It has meaning only in concrete situations where practitioners operate.
In what follows we will discuss how cosmopolitics gains meaning and relevance in
the field of architecture.
Cosmopolitics in Architectural Design
The cosmological agenda has inspired work in the fields of geography and urban
studies (Whatmore 2002, Morton 2013, Heise 2008, Hinchliffe et al. 2005). Although
recent scholarship has focused on architecture at the time of the Anthropocene
(Tassin 2013, Harrison 2013), little has been done to rethink the role of architectural
design. There is a very strong connection between cosmos and design. Cosmos
does not denote nature but rather the ordering of nature, the pleasant, pleasing,
aesthetically and morally comfortable order of things. If we follow cosmopolitical
thinkers’ view that politics not attached to a cosmos is moot, and that a cosmos
detached from politics is irrelevant, how should we understand the role of design
practice in reordering the material and living world? Questioning the traditional
‘humanist’ understanding of the relationship between the nature and the culture
of design, we ask: What is the role of architectural design if the common world is
not unfolded in a unified silent nature?
Confronted with the challenges of a geological epoch in which the Earth
is transformed by human action, that is, the Anthropocene, architecture is
required more than ever to address the primordial question of what it means to
live together. That is, the question of co-existence of humans and non-humans,
of how they share space and find ways to live together in peace (Sloterdijk
2003). The different constitutions of the world, Sloterdijk argues, materialize in
architectures in such a way that we always find ourselves within a very local and
specific envelope. A building is always a piece of soap, for an “exterior takes the
shape of the interior” (Sloterdijk 2003: 32). From this perspective, buildings are
understood not as containers for humans, where program contents can be placed,
but as the processes of shaping the spheres and atmospheres that constitute the
specific liveable environments that we inhabit. As Sloterdijk argues in Sheres III, the
adventure of modern architecture has rendered the apparently immaterial sides
of being – namely dwelling in an atmospheric setting – explicit in technical and
aesthetic terms. Air has become “explicit” in technical and aesthetic terms, and is
no longer to be considered as the background matter of our activity. The shaping
of respiratory environments by the designed psycho-active air in the shopping
mall and other spaces extends the principle of interior architecture to a milieu of
imperceptible ordinary life (Sloterdijk 2003: 101). Following this understanding of
architecture, what are the specific instruments that will enable architects to capture
the co-existence and isolation of habitable spherical units and design breathable
envelopes where humans can survive, share space and live together in peace in the
age of climate wars?
Our proposal is: design is a cosmopolitical activity that relates to the search for, as
well as the domestication and accommodation of, new entities seeking to find their
place in the collective in addition to that of humans. Our intention here is to show
how architectural design contributes to re-shaping the co-existence of different
entities and disparate technical practices, and to re-architecturing the cosmos: Who
is, or will be, affected by the design and how? How is the agency of other species
and objects taken into account? How do designers make explicit the connection
of humans to a variety of entities with differing ontologies: rivers, species, air,
pollution, objects, materials and divinities? How do they redefine political order by
bringing together stars, prions, cows, heavens and people? By providing answers
to these questions, the volume also aims at producing an active proposition that
offers design practitioners the possibility of presenting themselves in a “here”
that resonates with the “elsewhere” of other practices. Historians, anthropologists,
science studies scholars, philosophers, political scientists, along with architects
and urban theorists will examine the cosmopolitical question. Only by generating
such a trans-disciplinary dialogue, will we be able to propose a different way of
rethinking the role of design at the time of the Anthropocene.
Structure of the book
In his chapter, Bruno Latour (Chapter 1) discusses the reasons for humans to feel
so powerless when confronted with the ecological crisis and particularly “the total
disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomena and the set
of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to handle
those” (Latour, this volume). He sets the questions:
What does it mean to be morally responsible in the time of the Anthropocene,

when the Earth is shaped by us, by our lack of morality … and that even the loop
connecting our collective action to its consequence is thrown into doubt?
Isolating the world of science and the world of politics would not provide a
solution; moreover such a scenario would be mind-boggling in the Anthropocene.
Innovative ways of “deciphering with a new metrology the relative weight of the
entangled cosmologies” need to be found, argues Latour, who provides here a few
examples from the fields of both research and pedagogy.
Rethinking the definition and role of nature Latour states:
Nature is no longer what is embraced from a faraway point of view where the
observer could ideally jump to see things ‘as a whole,’ but the assemblage of
contradictory entities that have to be composed together (Latour, this volume).
Therefore, a new concept is to be found. From his point of view, Gaia is a better
concept than Nature (Latour 2013). Gaia is explored as very local, she cares for us,
reacts to us, feels and might get rid of us; unlike Nature, she is not indifferent. Gaia
is also a scientific concept understood in the cosmopolitical sense as searching for
and domesticating new entities in the collective, in addition to the human entities.
She is not ontologically unified, nor is she a super-organism endowed with unified
agency, and that is why she is politically interesting.
Manuel DeLanda (Chapter 2) offers a reflection on nature, materials and agency,
and the capacity to be affected. Commenting on the cosmopolitical proposal of
Isabelle Stengers and the inspiration from her previous work with Ilya Prigogine,
DeLanda argues that the “re-enchantment of nature, returning to it the magic lost
by the assumptions of both essentialism and clockwork determinism, demands
that we, humans, re-think the ways in which we interact with it.” Any explanations
of nature should take into account not only its capacity to affect (and therefore
all natural entities’ capacity to affect) but also its capacity to be affected, and ‘to
respond’ to human agency.
If we are able to change the way in which we view nature’s capacities to affect us,
this could lead to an equally important change in our capacities to be affected by it.
DeLanda argues that “to be re-enchanted by nature, to be intrigued and fascinated
by its morphogenetic prowess, we must study it far enough from equilibrium”
when the differences in intensity driving it – the gradients of temperature, pressure,
speed, chemical concentration, that contain the energy fueling the process – have
not been exhausted.
Traditionally nature is thought of in a non-linear way, as concept, where time
is reversible and natural events are modeled as series for which order does not
matter. This effectively eliminates history from the model as it is based on linear
progression of time, and paints an impoverished picture of the world: nature
as clockwork, its inner workings utilizing a complex series of mechanisms. Yet,
DeLanda argues that if we stop considering nature as a single entity and move on
to thinking of populations of such entities, causality will become statistical. The
terms “linear” and “non-linear” will then acquire a different meaning and nature will
become a different assemblage that is difficult to predict.
The only way to get into cosmopolitics, argues Dominique Boullier (Chapter
3), is to become embedded in some situations either as an ordinary actor, or with
the light equipment of ethnography, or else “to become within” (Haraway 2003).
This compels one to have some degree of reflexivity, and to be embedded and
affected. Boullier provides four different examples of cosmopolitical design, which
unfold as four stories that exemplify what it means to “become within.” Particularly
enlightening is the example of the Llech canyon. This canyon became very popular
as hundreds of people hiking in the area started using it for canyoning–an outdoor
activity in which a variety of techniques, including walking, scrambling, climbing,
jumping and swimming, are used to move through a canyon.
Gradually, as the crowds got bigger, the river became a very fragile ecosystem.
To prevent its destruction, a number of adjustments were made. As anyone
who wanted to access the canyon had to cross the land owned by a certain Mr
Gauderique, this person introduced a regulation stating that anyone wishing to use
the river and therefore to cross his land would have to fill in a form mentioning the
number of people who would cross it and their identity. Another adjustment was
also made: canyoning would be prohibited two days a week in order to allow the
river to “recover.” Speaking on behalf of the river as he did, Gauderique argued that
its “leisure load rate” had been exhausted. Yet, instead of preventing all canyoning
activities, an attempt was made to regulate them by way of these local adjustments
of humans, river, and land. While the official political solutions were unable to solve
the problem, Gauderique creatively assembled a number of humans and non-
humans around the river and crafted a cosmopolitical solution. By introducing a
different rhythm of river use (five days out of seven), Gauderique as a cosmopolitical
designer was able to make the crowds aware of the impact of canyoning sports on
the river biotope, without resorting to political speeches. Because this solution was
not generated by Big politics it met little resistance and, in the attempt to devise
a more sustainable use of the river, an agreement was reached between citizens
and the river. This example illustrates that the relationship with so-called nature
cannot be reduced to controlling or domesticating a wild object. As we live within
nature and interact with it, we weave a web of connections that might hurt or
repair its balance, and in this way we craft new compositions. In this example of
cosmopolitical design, we witness that the remaking of the river takes into account
our attachment to the cosmos, that is, to all the beings, human and non-human,
that populate the river cosmos. Instead of acting “against” the river pollution in a
blatantly political militant way, Gauderique acted “from within,” raising awareness
and offering new compositions, new local adjustments that would craft the cosmos
more adequately.
Other eloquent examples of acting from within include: how Forbes’s
understanding of the world of fishermen from within helped him to conceptualize
ecology; how experiencing a building from within the design process, in which
Boullier himself was involved, allowed for better political decisions to be taken;
and how the world of a controversy was unpacked from within (Yaneva 2012).
Being within enables us to understand how we share a common world. Taking it
at the level of the urban, Boullier argues that a cosmopolitical city does not mean
delivering one solution that will solve all previous problems; instead, it requires the
designing of the relevant arena for each specific dispute or controversy on each
issue, as all entities related to this issue must be part of the assembly.
In her chapter Sophie Houdart (Chapter 5) provides an example of cosmopolitics
from the field of particle physics. Based on ethnography at the CERN, Houdart’s
account takes us into this world of particle acceleration and light speed, and
explores how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) works. As the world’s largest and
most powerful particle accelerator (made of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting
magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the
particles), it connects us to the mysteries of the cosmos and therefore can act as a
transcendental device.
Rather than embracing the apologetic discourses of the media or the official
scientific discourse, anthropologist Houdart accounts for the social organization of
the CERN between 2011–2012 by shadowing physicists, operators, technicians, and
engineers in their daily practices. All these practitioners are involved in quotidian
work of gaining knowledge, measuring, and maintaining nice and stable particle
beams. Instead of examining the collider in representational terms (as a symbol of
technological progress, a “cathedral of …”) Houdart treats it as a cosmogram, a term
borrowed from John Tresh (2007), meaning that it establishes the relation between
different domains or ontological levels, between nature and culture, meaning and
materiality, gods, and universe (Ohanian and Royoux 2005). She asks: What is the
routine work that is needed to connect the scale of particles, rounding into the
LHC at the speed of light, with the mysteries of life or the origin of the universe? In
what way does the collider happen to reveal the hidden structure of the universe
in concreto?
In this anthropological account the collider appears as a technical or natural

imbroglio, a composition of vast numbers of elements that are all assembled. In
Houdart’s analysis “the cosmos could only be the thing obtained at the very end
of a complex process” rather than a starting point that we all take for granted.
We learn from the physicist, geologists, meteorologists, engineers, and operators
studied by Houdart that, instead of jumping up from the collider to the cosmos, the
LHC is first connected to the very local world of the Pays de Gex: to the farmers, to
the field, to Geneva and its lake, and to the Jura mountains. Instead of generating
significant truths about the structure of the universe, they connect to the cosmos
in practical ways.
Thus, Houdart explores the collider world “from within,” just as Boullier suggests.
The collider appears here as a cosmological system aimed at organizing the world
by defining the set of relationships between people, particles, technology, lights,
speed, and the Jura. Unpacking the collider as a cosmopolitical assemblage,
Houdart engages in producing a “low resolution” device by creating an art
installation in collaboration with the artist Stéphane Sautour and the photographer
Grégoire Eloy.
Drawing on a careful study of the contested shaping of the Isar River in
Munich, Cordula Kropp (Chapter 7) argues that urban river design is the result of
intertwined social and natural processes. The chapter is based on a study of the
landscaping of the Isar River in two periods: in 1992, when the river was submitted
for scientific evaluation by various experts, and the failure of the modernist hope
of depoliticizing a conflict through the involvement of expertise was witnessed,
and in 2011, when the river was widely discussed in civil society participation fora
and its interpretation was open to a pluralist and more inclusive treatment. In these
two periods, the river landscaping triggered huge public controversies and series
of expert hearings accompanied the urban river restoration projects. Kropp follows
the acts of protest and meticulously maps the actions both of concerned urban
residents and of institutional actors such as nature conservation organizations,
among others. All these actors claimed to speak on behalf of the river and tried to
define its local meaning. If in the first phase the residents wanted to protect “nature,”
in the second phase, they wanted to design a natural setting for citizen activities.
Kropp illustrates how cosmopolitics changed Munich in these two phases of her
study, and how both the cosmos and the political assemblies were reshaped in the
two stages of river landscaping. These examples demonstrate typical processes in
the second modernity (industrial) and the third modernity (postmodern).
In Kropp’s account the river does not appear to be a modernist object, intact,
stable,“out there,”waiting to be submitted to technocratic site-specific management
and experts’ interventions. Instead, it emerges as an unpredictable and hybrid
object, a new heterogeneous composition of human and non-human elements: a
cosmopolitical assemblage par excellence. It is also an assemblage that never stays
the same: not only the composition of the water varies mile by mile and usage by
usage, but so do the citizens’ relations to water and the way they co-exist with it.
The Isar River opens up a “hybrid forum” here, a space of conflict and negotiation
between various urban actors (Callon et al. 2001). A forum, because it creates a space
in which various groups can meet and debate different issues of river landscaping
and protection, and the various technical choices and solutions of importance to
the community. Hybrid, because the people involved and their representatives
are heterogeneous: experts, politicians, hydro engineers, ecologies, fishermen,
architects and concerned lay people. Hybrid also because the questions tackled
are of a different nature: from political and ethical concerns through to mechanical
engineering and aesthetics, mixing plans for river restoration, energy production,
or local recreation with perspectives from city planning, river engineering, flood
control, nature conservation, city marketing, and citizen associations.
River landscaping in the age of the Anthropocene, concludes Cordula Kropp,
is a challenging and highly political undertaking. It is a promising way towards
cosmopolitics as it spawns better “urban assemblages.” Kropp argues:
To collectively experiment with cosmopolitical assemblages, building urban

imaginaries enabling us to monitor, mentor, and reflect the cosmopolitical
composition of these assemblages, seem to be one of the pressing challenges of
the next decades.
The democratic challenges consist in developing governance procedures that

would better reflect the emerging politics of these new cosmopolitical design
solutions.
To unravel how design matters politically, Fernando Dominguez and Uriel
Fogué (Chapter 9) distinguish between “enfolding” and “unfolding” properties of
design. The “enfolding capacities” of design are its ability to inscribe or solidify
different political programs and power relations in materials, spaces, and bodies.
The authors draw a number of classic examples from Foucault’s interpretation of
the micro-technologies of disciplinary institutions that enable design to operate
at a sub-political level as inscribing power relations in material arrangements,
artifacts, technologies, and buildings. Another example of enfolding properties are
the speed bumps example of Bruno Latour. Like Foucault’s school chairs, speed
bumps operate as sub-political mechanisms that make it possible silently to
enfold a specific version of “civility” and the “public good” into asphalt. Dominguez
and Fogué disagree both with those for whom the enfolding capacities offer an
opportunity to delegate and redistribute human agency, and with those for whom
enfolding implies the risk of creating a sub-political world engineered with expert
knowledge. They see design as neither a useful governance mechanism meant
to solve problems with material means, nor a dangerous tool meant to generate
tacit power.
Questioning how lightly both camps have taken for granted the performativity
of design, Fernandez and Fogué argue that recognizing the limits of performativity
in the field of urban design can provide a possibility for rethinking the political
agency of architecture. They suggest that an exploration of how design matters
politically will rely on “its capacity to propose and open up the possibility of new
forms of action and thought.” That is what the authors call “unfolding capacity.”
This is another way of talking about cosmopolitical design, as a type of design that
spawns new relations and enlarges the number of bodies, spaces, entities, and
materials constituting the cosmos of the political. It is cosmopolitical also because

it multiplies the world (instead of unifying it) and generates new ways of thinking
and new political problems (rather than solving them).
The authors illustrate different ways of practising design as a form of
cosmopolitics. The first is by “enlarging” what counts as political. This includes
examples of monitoring domestic technologies like smart energy meters. Such
technologies unfold the possibility of turning the home into a genuine site for the
articulation of different forms of political action and participation. The second way
is by “speculating” about other possible forms of doing politics. Here the authors
draw on examples of “tactical urbanism” illustrated by recent urban projects
which aimed at transforming abandoned under-defined spaces into political
spaces that could be unfolded in different ways, and which therefore gained
political valence. The examples of El Campo and Acampasa Sol are particularly
revealing. They illustrate how these projects create sites of political speculation
and become powerful urban machines where alternative ways of being in the city,
new repertoires of practices and new forms of association can be tested. These
are also sites where new cosmopolitical assemblages are being formed as new
material arrangements of entities with different ontologies, and as new relational
configurations where “being together” becomes possible and new forms of political
participation emerge. The third way of practising design as a form of cosmopolitics
is by “interrogating” the political. The example of the JF-Kit House is analyzed here
as a space where sustainability is turned into a source for thinking; it is staged, and
rendered visible and public. The house also offers new forms of co-habitation of
humans and natural entities (solar energy, waste, heat) and therefore introduces a
new cosmopolitical regime.
In their chapter Ariane and Seth Harrison (Chapter 13) remind us that the
present threat of ecological crisis stems from the insufficient recognition of the
relationships among all entities constituting the cosmos: this may include humans,
along with animals, chemicals, molecules, and other entities. “Design disciplines
can invent sites and conditions to demonstrate how interdependent networks of
relationships operate,” argue the authors of this chapter, which they illustrate with
examples from the work of Harrison Atelier over the past several years. Using a
number of installation, dance, music, and choreographic techniques, the Atelier
has succeeded in pushing to the fore the process of making relationships among
human and non-human entities a centralizing concern.
Drawing on their own work as thinkers inspired by post-humanist philosophy
and as designers, Ariane and Seth Harrison address the central question of this
volume, “What is cosmopolitical design?,” by setting another question: “Why is
cosmopolitical design performed?” Cosmopolitical design is performative, as
illustrated in the works of Harrison Atelier, in that it calls upon fictional frameworks
to account for the diversity of the cosmos. It challenges design to materialize
these alternative worlds and encourage the enactment of new relationships both
within and potentially outside the designed space. Highlighting the engaged
and enacted dimensions of ecological practice, the authors argue that the term
cosmos challenges the designer to assemble provisional collectives that “do not
transcend the situation in question” but instead fully deploy and make explicit a
more inclusive version of the cosmos.
In Anchises, a 2010 work on medicalized longevity, Harrison Atelier addresses
aging as a contingent mixture of genetic, economic, social and technological
factors: a space of controversy. Inviting aged dancers to participate and dance
within a hanging field of medical tubing, they re-enact the hybrid cosmos of
the aging human body and create a flexible environment. In the 2013 dance-
opera-installation Veal, Harrison Atelier explores the life cycle of industrial food
animals, while mapping the broader ecological implications of industrialized
meat production. Veal deploys a cosmos where food animals are connected to
human technologies, to slaughterhouses, to supermarkets. The installation artfully
slows down reasoning and makes us imagine the industrial logics of food-animal
production and the different regimes of animal treatment. In Pharmacophore:
Architectural Placebo, a 2011 work on the complex economy of psychotropic drugs,
Harrison Atelier designs an active interface between the controlled space of the
gallery and the unpredictable street life beyond. Luring casual spectators to gather
and become performers, the assemblage addresses the complex cosmology
connecting scientists, the pharmaceutical industry, caregivers, patients, and
psychotropic drugs.
Questioning the consensual ways of presenting phenomena such as ageing,
the industrial logic of food-animal production, or the economy of psychotropic
drugs, the work of Harrison Atelier performs cosmopolitics: first, by turning aging,
animals, drugs, and other entities into elements for thinking; and second, by
suggesting that collective thinking has to proceed in the presence of those who
would otherwise be likely to be disqualified for having nothing to propose, that
is, aged bodies, mute animals, chemical substances. Each of their performances
offers an “explication of the fundamental situation of the human beings in the
world” (Sloterdijk 2003: 237–443) by creating complex spaces generated by new
forms of co-existence of humans, animals, objects, narratives and their worlds. The
performative nature of Harrison Atelier’s work implies the provisional construction
of a cosmos, a world that emerges from the network of relations enhanced by the
audience’s active participation and the ontological effects thereof.
In his chapter Alejandro Zaera-Polo (Chapter 11) argues that architecture
has always followed a compositional logic, especially in the last decades when
ecological crisis more critically challenged crucial elements of architecture such
as façades. Thinking architecture cosmopolitically, reckons Zaera-Polo, differs
significantly from a representational interpretation. The façade performance
happens through literal material embodiment of the real rather than through
ornamental representation. Architectural design has never treated nature as
an abstract, silent, and unified entity, which stands astray from design and
technological experimentation. Zaera-Polo sees the history of façade assemblages
as providing convincing examples of complex technologies that did not require a
single way of dominating nature, but rather offered ways of creating new alliances
with the forces of nature (solar energy, vegetation, temperature, ventilation).
This resulted in new compositions, new assemblages, or “façade species.” All the
examples of façades discussed here are demonstrations that we never deal with
simple implementation of natural rules, but with compositions.
The concept of façade assemblage describes the incorporation of a variety
of materials to form a singular ensemble. Façade assemblages such as curtain
walls, double façades, or vegetated façades address environmental equilibrium
comprehensively, drawing multiple attachments into their processes of production
and modes of use. Just like natural species, façade assemblages undergo a process
of development, proliferation, and – sometimes – extinction. Zaera-Polo identifies
12 species of façade assemblages that emerged during the twentieth century,
only six of which are discussed here: Airtight, Watertight, Screens, Insulated,
Double Façade and Vegetated. For instance, the Screen as a multi-layered façade
was invented to improve the environmental performance of the envelope by
making it hollow or porous so as to allow ventilation, pressure equalization and
solar shading. All these elements enter into a new assemblage. Another example,
the Double Façade, exemplifies an assemblage designed around glass’ capacity to
serve as a trap for infrared radiation; a double set of glass panes with air in-between
produces a benign micro-atmosphere that insulates while simultaneously enabling
maximum daylight intake and transparency.
Materials such as glass, systems such as curtain walls, and assembly logics such
as rainscreens are not superficial representations of cultural or political concepts,
but are, in themselves, literal embodiments of larger ecologies, politics, and
cultures. Processes such as the repurposing of the military industry after World
War II towards the building industry, the tendency towards the use of opaque and
insulated façades after the 1973 oil crisis, and the widespread use of titanium face-
sealed envelopes after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 exemplify how the
technologies and materials of the façade can be connected to diverse socio-political
or cultural ecologies. The different types of facade acknowledge the diversity of the
worlds in their own way and lead architects, engineers, and materiologists to test
different ways of “assembling,” to try out new compositions and to experiment with
and refresh these compositions, in other words, to “harmonize” the world.
Assembling a façade requires cosmopolitical thinking because its design turns
a number of problems related to nature and ecology into a motive for thinking
(solar light, vegetation, air, climate). Its historical analysis also reveals that façades
are the outcome of collective thinking, including the voice of those who are
usually excluded (that is, non-human entities, experimenters, manufacturers,
and contractors, among others). Such a cosmopolitical approach to façades also
takes into consideration “materiology” as the variability of materials related to
agency (Simondon 1989, Souriau 1956, Dagognet 1989). Analyzing façades as
compositions of human and non-human entities illustrates the pertinence of
contemplating material variations, and the importance of accounting for them
as phenomenal ensembles. Cosmopolitical design, as seen through the façade
examples, is not just about assembling, composing, redefining, and modifying the
compositions of the envelopes. It is also about rethinking the co-existence of all
entities the façade is made of and the very specific technical practices that facilitate
its new cosmological arrangements.
Modes of Cosmopolitical Design
Rather than “liberating” architecture from the undue weight of political influence,
cosmopolitics accounts for the sort of politics that follows the path of design.
Questioning the practices of a number of architects through a series of interviews,
we examine how design practice can be read “from within:” first, as a dynamic way
of incorporating, as constituent dimensions, the criteria and modes of judgment
of a collective practice; and second, in the ecology of relationships among other
disciplines. Challenging the modernist view of nature, we analyze the constraints
of different types of creative relationship in design and the way they affect the
practitioners. The task is to follow the threads used by architects to build the
structures needed to bring the whole Earth on stage, along with the political body
that is able to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state.
Since in the age of the Anthropocene “everything that was symbolic is now to be
taken literally” (Latour, this volume), how do designers literality compose, arrange,
and architecture the world? The role of design is to contribute to this process of
composition. Designers ask: What world do we assemble? With whom do we align?
What entities do we propose to live with? Who do we integrate, and who do we
exclude? Andrés Jaque (Chapter 4), Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda
(Chapter 6), David Benjamin (Chapter 8), Eva Castro (Chapter 10) and Philippe
Rahm (Chapter 12) provide answers to these questions. They discuss examples that
illustrate how their design works turn nature into food for thought and mobilize a
variety of entities in new compositions.
An example of composition is the intervention created by Andrés Jaque and the
Office for Political Innovation of the Barcelona Pavilion in 2013, titled “Phantom. Mies
as Rendered Society.” Jaque takes all objects that bear witness to the social fabric of
the Pavilion from its basement and re-integrates them into new compositions in a
way that re-tells stories of the hidden ordinary life of the building. He thus produces
new visible assemblages in the pavilion exhibition spaces and, in so doing, happens
to question the existence of water lilies. To be able to artfully integrate these tiny
beings into the new cosmological compositions, Jaque engages in an inquiry on
the water composition of the lake and the sunlight required to speed up the lilies’
growth. The knowledge obtained helps the architect to integrate the water lilies as
an active participant in the new composition (Chapter 4). Other projects of Jaque
also demonstrate how painstaking the creation of a new composition of the built
and natural world can be. For instance, the “House in Never Never Land” in Ibiza
is based on a long and meticulous process of integrating an arboreal mass in the
house as a habitat of a great number of animal species.
In a series of projects, Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda from AMID.
cero9 Architects (Chapter 6) produce unexpected assemblages through new
compositions of natural and artificial elements. For instance, the “Magic Mountain”
deploys the gardener’s ancestral techniques of genetic selection to transform into
an open receptacle a power station situated at the Ames mountain, where the
largest species of North American butterflies is found. An enormous variety of bird
species can nest there, attracted by the water tanks and the abundant insect life in
a vertical rose garden. A new composition of elements that questions the ecology
of living and the co-existence of species has thus been created. In “The Black Cloud”
in Rome, AMID.cero9 Architects question the relations of humans with genetically
modified animals. Shaped as a gigantic open cage, it creates an artificial ecotope
inhabited by starlings and allows for relationships between humans and other
species to be redefined. Another work of AMID.cero9, “The Cherry Blossom Palace”
in the Jerte Valley, is also conceived as an assemblage of different entities that
become a medium to re-link single-species cherry orchards, oaks, stone terraces,
and fog: that is, a composition of materials of different origins and landscapes that
redefine locals’ and tourists’ relationships to the environment.
For David Benjamin (Chapter 8) nature is far from being a passive backdrop of
creative practices. Instead, “it is one of the most important ingredients of design,
but it is an especially rich ingredient because it is dynamic. Designing with
the living world – with dynamic, breathing, growing elements – is a fascinating
process,” argues Benjamin. His work offers hybrid compositions of natural materials,
synthetic materials and ideas, usually web searches; they facilitate the invention of
better models of interaction of humans with non-humans; for instance humans
would send text messages inquiring about the condition of the water in East River
in New York, fish would respond to these signals and activate lights (the project
“Amphibious Architecture”). David Benjamin’s work invites non-humans to be part
of the collective thinking about environment. The new design ensembles created
are at the same time digital and biological, familiar and completely new, high-tech
and low-tech, precise and hand-crafted, nature and culture. Hybrid. They propose
new cosmopolitical scenarios for the co-habitation of human and non-human
entities, which might lead to novel ways of re-designing the cosmos.
The International Horticultural Expo of Plasma studio and Groundlab presented
by Eva Castro (Chapter 10) is a natural park designed as a cosmopolitical composition
in which the boundaries of natural and artificial are blurred. In the project Ground
Ecologies, Groundlab transforms a post-industrial area with polluted land located in
the Shanghai suburb Jiading. Rather than producing an architectural intervention
on the site, designers launch an inquiry that results in soil remediation and water
treatment systems to deal with the existing polluted conditions. They then identify
and locate various types, sizes, and degrees of existing industries as sources of
pollution, and suggest engineering interventions. Eventually a new artificial
remedial topography is produced as a new ground assemblage of existing and
purpose-built entities that are also expected to generate new urban conditions.
Philippe Rahm’s work (Chapter 12) fundamentally questions the definition
of architecture understood as content and container. Taking inspiration from
Sloterdijk’s theory of architecture as designed atmospheres, Rahm offers an
innovative climatic treatment of architecture that overcomes the human/non-
human duality, both inside and outside. According to him, architecture creates
a subtle environment consisting of light and breathable air. Instead of taking air,
light, heat, and wind for granted, he examines their composition and the way these
natural phenomena are generated. Air and light are for Philippe Rahm not just
natural elements “out there;” they become constituent elements of his architecture
that challenge the traditional geometrical composition of symmetry, harmony,

inclusion, and addition of columns or rooms. This traditional language is replaced
with a meteorological composition that relies on elements such as humidity,
evaporation, conduction, air, heat, and pressure. The new composition brings
together warm and cold climates, and reconfigures the relationship between all
entities within it. In Rahm’s most recent project, “Taichung Park,” we witness an
example of how the climate creates the master plan composition of the park:
by identifying colder and warmer spots, more polluted and less polluted, dry or
humid spaces, a differentiated typology is created. Trees with specific qualities
(cooling trees, depolluting trees, drying trees), along with depolluting and cooling
devices blowing air and cooling or warming it, are all installed to mediate the
production of a specific climate in the park. Thus, design follows climate and leads
to new compositions.
While Heidegger considers every object or natural entity to be the assembly of
four elements: “gods and the mortals, heaven and earth,” Latour, sends the inquiry
in the same direction by arguing that “there are many more than four existing
deities, or dimensions, or factors brought simultaneously into play.” Any technical
or natural imbroglio forces us to count way beyond four (Latour 2007a: 140). All
of them come together and are to be assembled. Cosmopolitical design is about
assembling, composing, redefining, and modifying the composition every time a
new non-human is brought into connection with humans.
As seen in the series of interviews included in the volume, designers make
explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with differing ontologies:
rivers, animal species, particles, materials, people, water lilies and trees, orchards,
pollution, concrete, evaporation, heat. Architects participate in the work of
“diplomacy” as they provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence,
and identity are threatened by the political decision. David Benjamin’s work
for instance gives voice to a number of non-human entities (fish, mushrooms,
mussels, bricks, and so on), which once engaged in cycles of feedback, enter new
compositions where they get empowered to “talk.” Designers’ role differs from that
of the experts, defined by Stengers as those whose practice is not threatened by
the issue under discussion since what they know is accepted as relevant. Designers’
knowledge is not accepted as relevant. That is why they engage in consultations,
convoke invisible entities and consult them, and establish different ways in which
those entities participate in shaping humans. Thus, they create new conditions and
new spaces for the co-habitation of humans with those entities. In so doing, they
actively contribute to the formation of new compositions; they stage, perform,
and make them visible anew and afresh. All these compositions turn a number
of problems related to nature and ecology into a cause for thinking, and suggest
that non-human entities such as butterflies, water lilies, insects, oaks, air, heat, light,
cherry orchards, stone and fog, soil and pollution, as well as lay people are to be
part of the collective thinking. They are all shaped as “parliaments of things” (Latour
2005). Take Harrison Atelier’s example of drugs. We are not given a new definition
of drugs; instead, a drug here is what binds together those who refer to it, from
chemists and biologists in pharmaceutical labs to the doctor who prescribes it
and the obedient patient who purchases and consumes it. All these actors, from
technicians of drugs to representatives of patients’ organizations, in brief, all those
who have relevant knowledge about it, are to negotiate its meaning. These new
parliaments/compositions all emerge not in an attempt to dominate nature, but in
a process of integrating, adjusting, and skillfully adapting it to new conditions “from
within.” Far from undertaking a unilateral and sometimes aggressive domestication
of nature, the designers create compositions where a reciprocal transformation
of human and non-human entities can occur. Thus, architects help us become
affected by the various natural entities with which we engage.
Our inquiry on designers leads us to argue that cosmopolitical designers are
those who recognize the diversity of the world and see this pluralism as essential.
They also partake in testing different ways of assembling and harmonizing the
world rather than quickly suggesting a “compromise.” As many ecological issues
are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests, architects are
to become scientists and artists at the same time. They do not simply engage in
representations of nature. Instead, they engage in an active inquiry of gaining (not
discovering) knowledge about the phenomena under scrutiny (Jaque acquires
knowledge about water lilies and lakes, AMID.cero9 architects study pollution
sources, Rahm investigates wind movements and air composition, Benjamin
experiments with the feedback of fish and polluted air, and tests the material
performance of mushroom bricks, and so on). In other words, they introduce
a form of architecture-making that goes beyond an understanding of design as
“expressing” what was hitherto hidden. This inquiry is so active that “there is no such
a thing as designers and designed entities, but encounters of things in which all of
them design and all of them, somehow, are designed, as part of the same process”
(Andrés Jaque, this volume). Learning the experimental method from scientists
and nature, allowing them to organize the contest of their proposals, to challenge
them collectively and to revise their pre-set views of the world, cosmopolitical
designers “activate thinking.” “To think” in the Deleuzian sense means to resist
ready interpretations. As seen in the interviews, architectural design more than
ever invites us to challenge consensual ways of presenting phenomena related to
nature, ecology, and biodiversity. Designers’ work requires a process of “mediating
between different materials of different origins so as to redefine the links with
nature and climate, and to produce local and artificial modifications of the physical
environment” (Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda, this volume). Design
compositions make us hesitate, experiment, start again, and refresh the work of
composition. They introduce new ways of engaging, new “thinking regimes,” new
ways of impacting.
In a cosmopolitical situation, “we need to slow down, not to consider ourselves
experts, authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know” (Stengers
2005: 995). More than ever, architecture today contributes to “slowing down”
reasoning, confronting the consensual way a situation is presented, creating a
space for hesitation where one can express concerns and voice disagreement.
As Stengers notes, without slowing down there can be no creation. An example
of slowing down is offered by Jaque in his intervention in Mount Gaiás in Galicia.
Instead of building a fence to conceal the highly controversial building site of

Eisenman’s Cidade da Cultura, he devised “12 Actions to Make Peter Eisenman
Transparent.” The actions were meant to trigger small adjustments on the building
site, so that they would stimulate discussion with a broad and diverse public and
draw new actors to the site (the actions included providing buses to enable people
to access the site, identifying the amount of resources each building company
was mobilizing, presenting this in graphic terms, and so on). All these actions
were meant to “slow down” reasoning and activate thinking about the impact of
design. They resulted in fuelling further the controversies and eventually led to
transformations. In a similar way, Philippe Rahm “slows down” the quick narratives
of meaning and sustainability and invites us to rethink the microelements of an
architecture threaded by climatic issues. David Benjamin “slows down” reasoning
about pollution by inventing a mechanism for testing the air quality and the public
interest in issues of air pollution based on real-time data collection and interactive
feedback loops. The performances of Harrison Atelier are cosmopolitical also
because they propose ways of “slowing down” the construction of the common
world and creating spaces for hesitation. These are spaces where the audience
is invited to defy consensual ways of presenting phenomena like ageing,
industrial logic of food-animal production; spaces of hesitation and thinking. As
cosmopolitical art architecture creates works which invite participants to witness
the differences of all of those who share the world, and to become shareholders.
In the light of a cosmopolitical philosophy, design is the activity of those who
can no longer count on unified nature and have to redesign every single feature of
our common experience.
Architects are involved in this consideration, as for them being-in-the-world

means dwelling in a building. A house is a three-dimensional answer to the
question of how someone can be together with someone and something in
something. In their own way, architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatial
prepositions, namely the “in” (Sloterdijk 2009).
Yet cosmopolitical designers are also those who philosophize in and through
materials. Whenever we design a dwelling or erect a building for an institution we
also make a statement on the relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic,
“between the world as apartment and the world as agora.” A cosmopolitically
correct urban design will require rethinking design practice in the light of this
discrete theory of co-existence of people and things in connective spaces. It
will entail identifying the specific practices, devices, innovations, and modes of
enquiry that will make a city a better assemblage, that is, one that acknowledges
the agency of all entities and intergrades them into new breathable and air-
conditioned constitutions.
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1
Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through
Arts and Politics1
Bruno Latour
What are we supposed to do when faced with an ecological crisis that does not
resemble any of the crises of war and economies, the scale of which is formidable, to
be sure, but to which we are in a way habituated since it is of human, all too human,
origin? What to do when told, day after day, and in increasingly strident ways, that
our present civilization is doomed; that the Earth itself has been so tampered with
that there is no way it will ever come back to any of the various steady states of the
past? What do you do when reading, for instance, a book such as Clive Hamilton’s
Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change – and that the
species is not the dodo or the whale but us, that is, you and me? (Hamilton 2010)
Or Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century, a
book that is nicely divided into three parts: how to kill yesterday, how to kill today,
and how to kill tomorrow! (Welzer 2012) In every chapter, to tally the dead, you
have to add several orders of magnitude to your calculator!
The time of great narratives has past, I know, and it could seem ridiculous to
tackle a question so big from so small a point of entry. But that is just the reason
I wish to do so: what do we do when questions are too big for everybody, and
especially when they are much too grand for the writer, that is, for myself?
One of the reasons why we feel so powerless when asked to be concerned by
ecological crisis, the reason why I, to begin with, feel so powerless, is because of
the total disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomena and
the set of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to
handle those crises – not even to act in response to them, but simply to give them
more than a passing ear. So this chapter will largely be about this disconnect and
what to do about it.
Is there a way to bridge the distance between the scale of the phenomena we
hear about and the tiny Umwelt inside which we witness, as if we were a fish inside
its bowl, an ocean of catastrophes that are supposed to unfold? How are we to
behave sensibly when there is no ground control station anywhere to which we
could send the help message, “Houston, we have a problem”?
What is so strange about this abysmal distance between our little selfish human
worries and the great questions of ecology is that it is exactly what has been so
valorized for so long in so many poems, sermons, and edifying lectures about
the wonders of nature. If those displays were so wonderful, it was just because of
this disconnect: to feel powerless, overwhelmed, and totally dominated by the
spectacle of “nature” is a large part of what we have come to appreciate, since at
least the nineteenth century, as the sublime. Remember Shelley:
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
How we loved to feel small when encompassed by the magnificent forces of the
Niagara Falls or the stunning immensity of the Arctic glaciers or the desolate and
desiccated landscape of the Sahara. What a delicious thrill to set our size alongside
that of galaxies! Small compared to Nature but, as far as morality is concerned, so
much bigger than even Her grandest display of power! So many poems, so many
meditations about the lack of commensurability between the everlasting forces of
nature and the puny little humans claiming to know or to dominate Her.
So one could say, after all, that the disconnect has always been there and that it
is the inner spring of the feeling for the sublime.
The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark – now glittering – now, reflecting gloom –
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings.
But what has become of the sublime lately, now that we are invited to consider
another disconnect, this time between, on one side, our gigantic actions as humans,
I mean as collected humans, and, on the other side, our complete lack of a grasp on
what we have collectively done?
Let us ponder a minute what is meant by the notion of “anthropocene,” this
amazing lexical invention proposed by geologists to put a label on our present
period. We realize that the sublime has evaporated as soon as we are no longer
taken as those puny humans overpowered by “nature” but, on the contrary, as
a collective giant that, in terms of terawatts, has scaled up so much that it has
become the main geological force shaping the Earth.
What is so ironic with this anthropocene argument is that it comes just when
vanguard philosophers were speaking of our time as that of the “posthuman;” and
just at the time when other thinkers were proposing to call this same moment
the “end of history.” It seems that history as well as nature have more than one
trick in their bag, since we are now witnessing the speeding up and scaling up
of history not with a post-human but rather with what should be called a post-
natural twist! If it is true that the “anthropos” is able to shape the Earth literally
(and not only metaphorically through its symbols), what we are now witnessing is
anthropomorphism on steroids.
In his magnificent book Eating the Sun Oliver Morton provides us with an
interesting energy scale (Morton 2007). Our global civilization is powered by
Waiting for Gaia 23
around 13 terawatts (TW) while the flux of energy from the centre of the Earth is
around 40 TW. Yes, we now measure up with plate tectonics. Of course this energy
expenditure is nothing compared to the 170,000 TW we receive from the sun, but
it is already quite immense when compared with the primary production of the
biosphere (130 TW). And if all humans were to be powered at the level of North
Americans, we would operate at a hundred TW, that is, with twice the muscle of
plate tectonics. That is quite a feat. “Is it a plane? Is it nature? No, it’s Superman!” We
have become Superman without even noticing that inside the telephone booth we
have not only changed clothes but grown enormously! Can we be proud of it? Well,
not quite, and that is the problem.
The disconnect has shifted so completely that it no longer generates any feeling
of the sublime any more since we are now summoned to feel responsible for the
quick and irreversible changes of the Earth’s face occasioned in part as a result of
the tremendous power we are expending: we are asked to look again at the same
Niagara Falls but now with the nagging feeling that they might stop falling flowing
(too bad for Shelley’s waterfalls around it leap forever); we are asked to look again
at the same everlasting ice, except that we are led to the sinking feeling that they
might not last long after all; we are mobilized to look again at the same parched
desert, except that we come to feel that it expands inexorably because of our
disastrous use of the soil! Only galaxies and the Milky Way might still be available
for the old humbling game of wonder, because they are beyond the Earth (and
thus beyond our reach since they reside in the part of nature that the Ancients
called supralunar – more of this later).
How to feel the sublime when guilt is gnawing at your guts? And gnawing in a
new unexpected way because of course I am not responsible, and neither are you,
you, nor you. No one in isolation is responsible.
Everything happens as if the old balance between the contemplation of the
moral law in us and that of the innocent forces of nature outside of us has been
entirely subverted. It is as if all the feelings of wonder, together with morality, have
changed sides. The real wonder today is how I could be accused of being so guilty
without feeling any guilt, without having done anything bad? The human collective
actor who is said to have committed the deed is not a character that can be thought,
sized up, or measured. You never meet them. It is not even the human race taken
in toto, since the perpetrator is only a part of the human race, the rich and the
wealthy, a group that have no definite shape, nor limit and certainly no political
representation. How could it be “us” who did “all this” since there is no political, no
moral, no thinking, no feeling body able to say “we” – and no one to proudly say
“the buck stops here?” Remember the rather pitiful meetings in Copenhagen 2009
of all the heads of state negotiating in secret a non-binding treaty, calling names
and haggling like kids around a bag of marbles.
But the other reason why the sublime has disappeared, why we feel so guilty
about having committed crimes for which we feel no responsibility, is the added
complication brought about by the climate “sceptics” or rather, to avoid using this
positive and venerable term, the climate deniers.
Should we give those characters equal time to balance the position of the
climatologists – in which case we risk rejecting our responsibility and associating
ourselves with creationists fighting Darwin and the whole of biology? Or do we take
sides and refuse to offer to deniers a platform to pollute what is probably the best
certainty we will ever have as to how we wreaked havoc on our own ecosystem – in
which case we risk having been enlisted in an ideological crusade to once again
moralize our connections with nature and to replay the Galileo trial as though we
were ignoring the lone voice of reason fighting against the crowd of experts?
No wonder that, facing this new disconnect, so many of us move from admiration
in front of the innocent forces of nature to complete despondency – and even lend
an ear to the climate deniers.
As Clive Hamilton argued in Requiem for a Species, in a sense we are all climate
deniers, since we have no grasp of the collective character – the anthropos of the
anthropocene, the “human” of the “human made” catastrophe. It is through our
own built-in indifference that we come to deny the knowledge of our science.
Think of it: it would be so nice to return to the past when nature could be sublime
and us, the puny little humans, simply irrelevant, delighting in the inner feeling of
our moral superiority over the pure violence of nature. In a way, the disconnect is
the real source of the denial itself.
What does it mean to be morally responsible in the time of the Anthropocene,
when the Earth is shaped by us, by our lack of morality – except there is no
acceptably recognizable “we” to be burdened by the weight of such a responsibility
– and that even the loop connecting our collective action to its consequence is
thrown into doubt?
To sum up my first point, how could you still want to feel the sublime while
watching the “everlasting” waterfalls sung by Shelley when, one, you simultaneously
feel that they might disappear; when, two, you might be responsible for their
disappearance; while, three, you feel doubly guilty for not feeling responsible;
and given that you sense a fourth level of responsibility for not having dug deeply
enough into what is called the “climate controversy.” Not read enough, not thought
enough, not felt enough.
Apparently, there is no solution except to explore the disconnect and expect
that human consciousness will raise our sense of moral commitment to the level
required by this globe of all globes, the Earth. But if we judge by recent news, to bet
on consciousness-raising is a bit risky since the number of American and Chinese
and even British citizens denying the anthropic origin of climate change is actually
waxing instead of waning (even in “rationalistic” France, a former minister of
research, with a nice uplifting name, Professor Cheerful, has managed to convince
a large part of our most enlightened publics that there is so much controversy
about the climate that we don’t have to worry about it after all) (Zaccai, Gemenne
and Decroly 2012).
It seems that, as in Lars von Triers movie Melancholia, we might rather all be
quietly enjoying the solitary spectacle of the planet crashing into our Earth from
the derisory protection of a children’s hut made out of a few branches by Aunt
Steelbreaker. As if the West, just when the cultural activity of giving a shape to the
Earth is finally taking a literal and not a symbolic meaning, resorted to a totally
outmoded idea of magic as a way to forget the world entirely. In the amazing final
scene of a most amazing film the hyper-rational people fall back onto what old
Waiting for Gaia 25
primitive rituals are supposed to do – protecting childish minds against the impact
of reality. Von Triers might have grasped just what happens after the sublime has
disappeared. Did you think Doomsday would bring the dead to life? Not at all.
When the trumpets of judgment resonate in your ear, you fall into melancholia! No
new ritual will save you. Let us just sit in a magic hut, and keep denying, denying,
denying, until the bitter end.
So what do we do when we are tackling a question that is simply too big for
us? If not denial, then what? One of the solutions is to become attentive to the
techniques through which scale is obtained and to the instruments that make
commensurability possible. After all, the very notion of the Anthropocene implies
such a common measure. If it is true that “man is a measure of all things” it could
work also at this juncture.
It is a tenet of science studies and actor network theory that one should
never suppose that differences of scale already exist but instead always look
for how scale is produced. Fortunately, this tenet is ideally suited to ecological
crisis: there is nothing about the Earth as Earth that we don’t know through the
disciplines, instruments, mediations, and expansion of scientific networks: its size,
its composition, its long history, and so on. Even farmers depend on the special
knowledge of agronomists, soil scientists, and others. And this is even truer of the
global climate: the globe by definition is not global but is, quite literally, a scale
model that is connected through reliably safe networks to stations where data
points are collected and sent back to the modelers. This is not a relativist point
that could throw doubt on such science, but a relationist tenet that explains the
sturdiness of the disciplines that are to establish and multiply, and do the upkeep
of those connections.
I am sorry to insist on what looks like splitting hairs, but there is no way to
explore a way out of the disconnect if we don’t clarify the scaling instrument that
generates the global locally. My argument (actually science studies’ argument) is
that there is no zoom effect: things are not ordered by size as if they were boxes
inside boxes. Rather they are ordered by connectedness as if they were nodes
connected to other nodes.
Nobody has shown this better than Paul Edwards in his beautiful book on
climate science, A Vast Machine (Edwards 2010). If meteorologists and later climate
scientists have been able to obtain a “global” view, it is because they managed
to build more and more powerful models able to recalibrate data points elicited
from more and more stations or documents – satellites, tree rings, logbooks of
navigators dead long ago, ice cores, and so on.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly what leads the climate-deniers to their
denials: they find this knowledge too indirect, too mediated, too far from immediate
access (yes, those epistemological doubting Thomases apparently believe only in
unmediated knowledge). They are incensed to see that no data point in itself has
any sense, that those data all need to be recalculated and reformatted. Exactly as
the negationists do about the crimes of the past, climate deniers use, for future
crimes, a positivistic touchstone to poke holes into what is an extraordinary
puzzle of crisscrossing interpretations of data. Not a house of cards, but a tapestry,
probably one of the most beautiful, sturdy, and complex ever assembled. Of course
there are a lot of holes in it, having holes is what weaving knots and nodes is about.
But this tapestry is amazingly resilient because of the way it is woven-allowing
data to be recalibrated by models and vice versa. It appears that the history of the
Anthropocene (climate sciences are by definition a set of historical disciplines) is
the best documented event we have ever had. Paul Edwards even argues at the
end of his book that we will never know more about the present global warming
trend since our action modifies the baseline so much, year after year, that we will
no longer have any baseline to calculate the deviation from the mean … What a
perversity: to witness the human race erasing its deeds by deviating so much that
its further deviations can no longer be traced.
The reason it is so important to stress this slow, tapestry-weaving process of
calibration, modelling, and reinterpretation is because it shows that even for the
climate scientists there is no way to measure up directly with the Earth. Thanks to
the slow calibrating processes of many standardizing institutions, what they do
is to carefully watch a local model from the tiny locus of a laboratory. So there is
one disconnect we don’t have to share: we don’t have on one side the scientists
benefitting from a globally complete view of the globe and, on the other, the poor
ordinary citizen with a “limited local” view. There are only local views. However,
some of us look at connected scale models based on data that has been reformatted
by more and more powerful programs run through more and more respected
institutions.
For those who wish to bridge the gap and fathom the new disconnect, this
foregrounding of the instruments of measurement may offer a crucial resource
– this time for politics. It is useless for the ecologically motivated activist to try
shaming the ordinary citizen for not thinking globally enough, for not having
a feel for the Earth as such. No one sees the Earth globally and no one sees an
ecological system from Nowhere, the scientist no more than the citizen, the farmer
or the ecologist – or, lest we forget, the earthworm. Nature is no longer what is
embraced from a faraway point of view where the observer could ideally jump to
see things “as a whole,” but the assemblage of contradictory entities that have to
be composed together.
This work of assembly is especially necessary if we now are to imagine the
“we” that humans are supposed to feel part of in taking responsibility for the
anthropocene. Right now there is no path leading from my changing the light bulbs
in my home straight to the Earth’s destiny: such a stair has no step; such a ladder
has no rung. I would have to jump, and this would be quite a salto mortale! All
assemblages need intermediaries: satellites, sensors, mathematical formulae, and
climate models, to be sure, but also nation states, NGOs, consciousness, morality,
and responsibility (Latour 2005). Can this lesson of assembly be followed?
One tiny way toward such an assemblage is provided by the work done by
several scholars of my persuasion around what we call “the mapping of scientific
controversies.” Controversies are not what we should escape from but what should
be composed, actor after actor, exactly as those who model the climate ad, actor
after actor – the role of air turbulences, then the clouds, then the role of agriculture,
then the role of plankton, every time gaining a more and more realistic rendering
of this true theatre of the globe.
Waiting for Gaia 27
Such an attempt at mapping controversies is one example of the instruments

that bridge in part the disconnect between the size of the problems we face and
our limited grasp and attention span. Especially if we seize the opportunity offered
by digital information to bring together in the same optical space documents
coming from science and documents coming from public arenas (Venturini 2010,
Yaneva 2012).
At first, the confusion is horrible as if facts and opinions were mixed up. But that
is just the point: facts and opinions are already mixed up and they will be even more
mixed up in the future. What we need is not to try isolating once again the world of
science and the world of politics – how can we even imagine keeping such a program
in operation in the time of the anthropocene, that mix up of all mix ups? – but
deciphering with a new metrology the relative weight of the entangled cosmologies.
Since it is now the worlds that are in question, let us compare cosmologies with one
another. Instead of trying to distinguish what can no longer be distinguished, ask
these key questions: what world is it that you are assembling, with which people do
you align yourselves, with what entities are you proposing to live?
After all, this is just what has recently allowed scholars to follow how the
anthropic origin of “climate weirding,” a fact which was taken as well established
15 or 20 years ago, and that has been reduced in the eyes of millions of people to
the level of a mere opinion. Very quickly it became possible for scholars to follow
with the same instruments that allow us to trace the production of science (search
engines, scientometrics and bibliometric tools, maps of the blogospheres), the
people, lobbies, credentials, and money flows of those who insisted on making it a
controversy. I am thinking here of the work of Naomi Oreskes or of James Hoggan
(Oreskes and Conway 2009, Hoggan 2009). How interesting to see the connections
made between big oil, cigarette manufacturing, antiabortionists, creationists,
Republicans and a worldview made of very few humans and very few natural
entities. If it is cosmograms against cosmograms, then let us compare cosmograms
with one another. That is what politics has become. Let us pit the worlds against
one another since it is a war of worlds.
I tried to introduce in philosophy the word composition and “compositionism”
just for that reason (Latour 2010). Not only because it has a nice connection with
compost, but also because it describes exactly what sort of politics could follow
the path of climate science. The task might not be to “liberate climatology” from
the undue weight of political influence (this is what a certain Texas governor has
claimed: scientists are in it for grant money and the opportunity to advance a
socialist agenda that even Lenin failed to impose on the courageous Yankees!). On
the contrary, the task is to follow the threads with which climatologists have built
the models needed to bring the whole Earth on stage. With this lesson in hand we
begin to imagine how to do the same in our efforts to assemble a political body able
to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state.
After all, this mix up of science and politics is exactly what is embodied in
the very notion of Anthropocene: why would we go on trying to separate what
geologists, earnest people if any, have themselves intermingled? Actually, the spirit
of our tongue has said that all along, having already connected humus, humane,
and humanity. We the Earthlings are born from the soil and from the dust to which
we will return, and this is why what we used to call “the humanities” are also, from
now on, our sciences.
So far I have insisted on one side of the disconnect, the one that led us toward
the helpless human race unwillingly changing its clothes into those of Superman.
It is time now to turn our attention toward the other side, what used to be called
“nature.” The tricky notion of the Anthropocene modifies both sides of what has to
be bridged: the human side for sure, as we are deprived of the possibility of any
longer feeling the sublime, but also the side of the geological forces to which we
humans are now aligned and compared. At the same moment when humans have
been changing the shape of the Earth without being used to their new Gargantuan
clothes, the Earth has metamorphosed of late into something that James Lovelock
has proposed to name Gaia (Lovelock 1988). Gaia is the great Trickster of our
present history.
In the remainder of this chapter, I’d like to explore how different Gaia is from
Nature of olden days. When we put together the two mutations, the one on the
side of the Earthlings and the one of the side of the Earth, we might find ourselves
in a slightly better position to bridge the gap.
First, Gaia is not a synonym of Nature because it is highly and terribly local.
During the period studied by Peter Sloterdijk as the time of the Globe, that is, from
the seventeenth to the end of the twentieth century, there was some continuity
between all elements of what could be called the “universe” because it was indeed
unified – but unified too fast (Sloterdijk 2014). As Alexandre Koyré had said, we
were supposed to have moved once and for all from a restricted cosmos to an
infinite universe (Koyré 1957). Once we crossed the narrow boundary of the human
polity, everything else was made of same material stuff: the land, the air, the moon,
the planets, the Milky Way, and all the way to the Big Bang. Such has been the
revolution implied by the adjectives “Copernican” or “Galilean:” no longer any
difference between the sublunar and the supralunar world.
How surprising then to be told, quite suddenly, that there is after all a difference
between the sublunar and the supralunar world. Also to be told that only robots
and maybe a handful of cyborgian astronauts might go further and beyond but
that the rest of the race, nine billion of us, will remain stuck down here in what has
become once again, just as in the old cosmos, a “cesspool of corruption and decay,”
or at least, a crowded place of risk and unwanted consequences. No beyond. No
away. No escape. As I said earlier, we can still feel the sublime, but only for what is
left of nature beyond the Moon and only when we occupy the View from Nowhere.
Down below, no longer any sublime. Here is a rough periodization: after the
cosmos, the universe, but after the universe, the cosmos once again. We are not
postmodern but, yes, we are post-natural.
Second, Gaia is not like Nature, indifferent to our plight. Not exactly that She
“cares for us” like a Goddess or like Mother Nature of so much ecological New Age
pamphlets; not even like the Pachacama of Inca mythology recently resurrected
as a new object of Latin America politics. Although James Lovelock has often
flirted with metaphors of the divine, I find his exploration of Gaia’s indifference
much more troubling: because She is at once extraordinarily sensitive to our action
Waiting for Gaia 29
and at the same time She follows goals which do not aim for our well-being in the
least. If Gaia is a goddess, She is one that we can easily put out of whack while
She in turn may exact the strangest sort of “revenge” (to borrow from the title of
Lovelock’s most strident book) by getting rid of us, “shivering us” out of existence,
so to speak (Lovelock 2006). So in the end, She is too fragile to play the calming
role of old nature, too unconcerned by our destiny to be a Mother, too unable to be
propitiated by deals and sacrifices to be a Goddess.
Remember the energy spent in the past by so many scholars to weed out the
difference between “nature” and “nurture?” What happens now when we turn to
“nature” and realize that we are the ones that should be “nurturing” Her so as not to
be reduced to irrelevance by Her sudden change of steady state. She will last. Don’t
worry about Her. We are the ones who are in trouble. Or rather with this enigma of
the anthropocene there is some sort of Moebius strip at work here, as if we were
simultaneously what encompasses Her – since we are able to threaten Her – while
She is encompassing us – since we have nowhere else to go. Quite a trickster, this Gaia.
Although in this chapter I cannot go through all the features that make up the
originality of Gaia, I nonetheless need to conclude with two more.
The third trait and probably the most important is that Gaia is a scientific
concept. It would be of no interest if it were associated in your mind with some
vague mystical entity such as Aywa, the networky Gaia of the planet Pandora in
Cameron’s Avatar. Even though Lovelock has long been a heterodox scientist and
remains largely a maverick, the real interest of the concept he assembled from bits
and pieces, is that it is assembled from bits and pieces, most of them coming from
scientific disciplines – apart from the name suggested to him by William Golding
(Gribbin and Gribbin 2009). Developing a concept that was not made mainly of
scientific content would be a waste of time since the requirement of our period is
to pursue the Anthropocene along lines dictated by its hybrid character. What we
mean by spirituality has been too weakened by wrong ideas of science to offer any
alternative. The supernatural, in that sense, is much worse than the natural from
which it comes. So, in spite of the name, as far as we know from the comparative
study of religion, Gaia does not really play the older role of a goddess. As far as I can
figure, Gaia is just a set of contingent positive and negative cybernetic loops – as
demonstrated in the well-known “Daisy world” model. It just happens that those
loops have had the completely unexpected effect, one after the other, of furthering
the conditions for new positive and negative loops of ever more entangled
complexity. There is no teleology, no Providence, in such an argument.
Of course, we should be careful with the label: when I say that Gaia is a “scientific”
concept, I don’t use the adjective in the epistemological sense of what introduces
a radical and traceable difference between true and false, rational and irrational,
natural and political. I take it in the new, and in a way much older sense of “scientific,”
as a cosmological (or rather a cosmopolitical) term designating the search for, as
well as the domestication and accommodation of new entities that try to find their
place in the collective in addition to those of humans, most often by displacing the
latter. The great thing about Lovelock’s Gaia is that it reacts, feels, and might get rid
of us, without being ontologically unified. It is not a superorganism endowed with
any sort of unified agency.
It is actually this total lack of unity that makes Gaia politically interesting. She is
not a sovereign power lording it over us. Actually, in keeping with what I see as a
healthy Anthropocene philosophy, She is no more unified an agency than is the
human race that is supposed to occupy the other side of the bridge. The symmetry
is perfect since we don’t know more what She is made of than we know what we are
made of. This is why Gaia-in-us or us-in-Gaia, that is, this strange Moebius strip, is so
well suited to the task of composition. It has to be composed piece by piece, and so
do we. What has disappeared from the universe – at least the sublunar portion of
it – is continuity. Yes, She is the perfect trickster.
The fourth and last trick I want to review is of course quite depressing. The whole
disconnect I have reviewed here is built upon the very idea of an immense threat
to which we would be slow to react and unable to adjust. Such is the spring with
which the trap has been set. Of course, confronted with such a threatening trap, the
most reasonable of us react with the perfectly plausible argument that apocalyptic
pronouncements are just as ancient as humans. And it is true, for instance, that my
generation has lived through the nuclear holocaust threat, beautifully analyzed by
Gunther Anders in terms very similar to those used today by doomsday prophets –
and yet we are still here (Anders 2007). In the same way, historians of environment
could argue that the warning against the dying Earth is as old as the so-called
Industrial Revolution. Indeed, a further dose of healthy skepticism seems warranted
when reading, for instance, that Durer, the great Durer himself, was simultaneously
preparing his soul for the end of the world expected for the year 1500 while
investing a bundle of hard money on printing his beautiful and expensive prints of
the Apocalypse in the hope of a hefty profit. So with these comforting thoughts, we
could reassure ourselves about the folly of prophesying Doomsday.
Yes, yes, yes. Unless, that is, it is just the other way around and that we are now
witnessing another case of having cried wolf too long. What if we had shifted from
a symbolic and metaphoric definition of human action to a literal one? After all, this
is just what is meant by the Anthropocene concept: everything that was symbolic is
now to be taken literally. Cultures used to “shape the Earth” symbolically; now they
do it for good. Furthermore, the very notion of culture went away along with that
of nature. Post-natural, yes, but also post-cultural.
Referring to the famous study at the origin of the very notion of “cognitive
dissonance (Festinger 1956), Clive Hamilton argues that we should heed again the
study of Mrs. Keech and her prediction of the end of the world. Our disconnect
might not reside in expecting the end and then having to reorganize our belief
system to account for why it is not coming (as the early Christians had to do when
they realized that the End was not that of Christ crashing through the sky in a display
of Apocalyptic pyrotechnics but rather the slow earthly expansion of Constantine’s
empire). But for us today the disconnect could be in believing that Doomsday is
not coming once and for all. It would be a nice and terrifying case of When Prophecy
Succeeds! And denial, this time, would mean that we are rearranging our belief
system so as not to see the Great Coming.
It is for this reason that Clive Hamilton offers the strange and terrifying assertion
that it is hope that we should abandon if we wish to enter into any transaction with
Gaia. Hope, unremitting hope, is for him the source of our melancholia and the
cause of our cognitive dissonance.
Waiting for Gaia 31
I hope (ah, hope again!) to have shown why it might be important, even urgent,
to bring together all the possible resources to close the gap between the size
and scale of the problems we have to face and the set of emotional and cognitive
states that we associate with the tasks of answering the call to responsibility
without falling into melancholia or denial. It is largely for this reason that we have
resurrected this rather out of fashion term of “political arts” for the new program we
created in Sciences Po to train professional artists and scientists – social and natural
– to the triple task of scientific, political, and artistic representation.
The idea, at once daring and modest, is that we might convince Gaia that
since we now weigh so much upon Her shoulders – and Her on ours – we might
entertain some sort of a deal – or a ritual. Like the megabanks we too might have
become “too big to fail.” Our destinies are so connected that there might be an
1.1 St Christopher,
Master of Messkirch,
(1500–43). Image
courtesy of
Kunstmusem Basel,
Martin P. Bühler.
issue in the end, as illustrated on the previous page in the fascinating print by the
Master of Messkirch in Basel (Figure 1.1) where you see St Christopher holding the
young Christ himself embedded into a closed cosmos. St Christopher seems to me
a slightly more hopeful icon than that of the overburdened Atlas – only, that is, if
hope could still be a blessing.
Note
1 Originally delivered as a lecture at the French Institute, London, November, 2011, for
the launch of SPEAP (the Sciences Po experimental program in political arts). I would
like to thank Michael Flower for his many suggestions and for kindly correcting my
English.
References
Anders, G. 2007. Le temps de la fin. Paris: Editions de l’Herne.
Edwards, P. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Festinger, L.H. 1956. When Prophecy Fails. New York: Harper and Row.
Gribbin, J. and Gribbin, M. 2009. James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Hamilton, C. 2010. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.
London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
Hoggan, J. 2009. Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Vancouver:
Greystone Books.
Koyré, A. 1957. From the Closed-World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. 2010. Steps toward the writing of a Compositionist manifesto. New Literary History,
41, 471–90.
Lovelock, J. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Bentam Books.
Morton, O. 2007. Eating the Sun: The Everyday Miracle of How Plants Power the Planet.
London: Fourth Estate.
Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Sloterdijk, P. 2014. Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology (translated by Wieland Hoban).
Los Angeles, CA: Semiotextes.
Venturini. T. 2010. Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network
theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–73.
Welzer, H. 2012. Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century. London:
Polity Press.
Zaccai, E., Gemenne, F. and Decroly, J.-M. 2012. Controverses Climatiques, Sciences et
Politiques. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.
Yaneva, A. 2012. Mapping Controversies in Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
2
Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics
Manuel DeLanda
In her work with Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers argues that recent changes in
scientific practice will allow us to enter into “new dialogue with nature” (Prigogine
and Stengers 1984). The basic argument is that these changes have revealed
that matter is neither an inert receptacle for forms from the outside (as implied
by Aristotelian science) nor a mere mass that obediently follows the immutable
laws of nature (as implied by Newtonian science). On the contrary, matter, when
it enters into the right alliance with energy, is an active producer of form. It needs
neither eternal essences nor eternal laws to possess morphogenetic powers of its
own. This new conception of matter has led Stengers to speak of a re-enchantment
of nature, returning to it the magic lost by the assumptions of both essentialism
and clockwork determinism, and demanding that we, humans, re-think the ways in
which we interact with it. While Prigogine and Stengers ascribe the source of this
change to a new conception of time as irreversible and full of contingencies, several
other conceptual changes are also involved: the conceptual distinction between
linear and non-linear causality, and that between equilibrium and equilibrium
dynamics.
The formula for linear causal relations is “Same Cause, Same Effect, Always.”
Different forms of nonlinear causality can be derived by challenging the different
assumptions built into this formula. The word “same” can be challenged in two ways
because it may be interpreted as referring both to the intensity of the cause (“same
intensity of cause, same intensity of effect”) and to its very identity. Let’s begin
with the simplest departure from linear causality, the one challenging sameness
of intensity. As an example we can use Hooke’s Law capturing a regularity in the
way solid bodies respond to loads, like a metal spring onto which a given weight is
attached. In this case the event “changing the amount of weight supported by the
spring” is the cause, while the event “becoming deformed” – stretching if pulled or
shrinking if pushed – is the effect. Hooke’s law may be presented in graphic form
as a plot of load versus deformation, a plot that has the form of a straight line. This
linear pattern captures the fact that if we double the amount of weight supported
by the spring, its deformation will also double; or, more generally, the fact that a
material under a given load will stretch or contract by a given amount which is
always proportional to the load.
While some materials like mild steel and other industrially homogenized metals
do indeed exhibit this kind of proportional effect, many others do not. Organic
tissue, for example, displays a J-shaped curve when load is plotted against
deformation. “A gentle tug produces considerable extension whereas a stronger
tug results in relatively little additional extension,” as one materials scientists puts
it – a fact that can easily be verified by pulling on one’s own lip (Gordon 1988: 20).
In other words, a cause of low intensity produces a relatively high intensity effect,
up to a point after which increasing the intensity of the cause produces only a low
intensity effect. Other materials, like the rubber of a balloon, display an S-shaped
curve representing a more complex relation between intensities: at first increasing
the intensity of the cause produces almost no effect at all, as when one begins
to inflate a balloon and it refuses to bulge; as the intensity increases, however, a
point is reached at which the rubber balloon suddenly yields to the pressure of
the air, rapidly increasing in size, but only up to a second point at which it again
stops responding to the load. The fact that the J-shaped and S-shaped curves are
only two of several possible departures from strict proportionality implies that
the terms “linear” and “nonlinear” are not a dichotomy. Rather, the linear case is a
limiting case of a variety of nonlinear possibilities.
A stronger form of nonlinear causality is exemplified by cases that challenge the
very identity of causes and effects in the formula “Same Cause, Same Effect, Always.”
When an external stimulus acts on an organism, even a very simple bacterium, the
stimulus acts in many cases as a mere trigger for a response by the organism. A
biological creature is defined internally by many complex series of events, some
of which close in on themselves forming a causal loop (like a metabolic cycle)
exhibiting its own internal states of equilibrium as a whole. A switch from one stable
state to another, the effect, can in this case be triggered by a variety of stimuli.
Hence, in such a system different causes can lead to the same effect. For similar
reasons two different components of a biological entity, each with a different set of
internal states, may react completely differently to external stimulation. The same
cause can thus lead to different effects depending on the part of the organism it
acts upon. The philosopher Mario Bunge uses the example of auxin, a vegetable
hormone that, applied to the tips of a plant stimulates growth but applied to the
roots inhibits growth (Bunge 1979: 49). While organic materials (tissue, rubber)
and organic creatures serve as good illustrations of weak and strong nonlinear
causality, biology does not have a monopoly on nonlinearity. Even purely physical
processes can behave in ways that demand a departure from the old formula. As
Bunge writes:
The act of releasing the bow is usually regarded as the cause of the arrow’s
motion, or, better, of its acceleration; but the arrow will not start moving unless
a certain amount of (potential elastic) energy has been previously stored in the
bow by bending it; the cause (releasing the bow) triggers the process but does not
determine it entirely. In general, efficient causes are effective solely to the extent
to which they trigger, enhance, or dampen inner processes; in short, extrinsic
(efficient) causes act, so to say, by riding on inner processes (Bunge 1979: 195).
Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics 35
Another way of expressing this thought is to say that explanations must take into
account not only an entity’s capacity to affect but also its capacity to be affected.
And the latter is not just the passive side of the active capacity to affect; it is equally
active on its own, although this depends on activity at another level of organization,
that of the component parts. In the case of organic tissue or rubber, for example,
their nonlinear response curves are explained by facts about the microstructure
of the materials determining their capacity to be affected by a load. And when
we consider cases like a bacterium and its internal stable states, its capacity to be
affected overrides its response to external causes, the latter having been reduced to
mere triggers. The third and final departure from linearity, the one that challenges
the “always” part of the linear formula, also depends on this distinction. As soon as
we stop considering a single entity and move on to think of populations of such
entities, causality becomes statistical. Even if a population is composed of entities
of the same type, each of its members may be in slightly different internal states
and hence be capable of being affected differently by one and the same cause.
The explanation given by the proposition “Smoking cigarettes causes cancer,” for
example, is not that a cause (smoking) always produces the same effect (the onset
of cancer). Rather, given that smokers’ capacity to be affected depends in part on
their genetic predispositions, the claim is that a cause increases the probability of
the occurrence of the effect in a given population (Salmon 1984: 30–34).
The second conceptual distinction that must be clarified is that between
equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium dynamics. This involves another concept,
that of a singularity. The stable internal states mentioned above in relation to a
bacterium’s metabolism, which define its capacity to be affected, can be conceived
of as singular or special points in the space of possible states for the micro-
organism. But these special states to which the internal dynamics of bacteria are
spontaneously attracted are not limited to biology. Soap bubbles and crystals, for
example, acquire their stable shapes by the fact that the process producing them
has a tendency towards a steady state, the state that minimizes surface energy
or bonding energy respectively. Similarly, the periodic circulatory patterns that
characterize certain wind currents (like the trade winds or the monsoon) and the
underground lava flows that drive plate tectonics, are explained by the existence
of a tendency towards a stable periodic or cyclic state. The fact that the same
tendency appears in physical processes that are so different in detail shows that
the explanatory role of singularities is different from that of causes. In particular,
the causal mechanisms behind the morphogenesis of soap bubbles and crystals
are different in detail, and yet the steady state reached at the end is common to
both. The same applies to the circulatory patterns of air or lava and their common
periodic stable state. What this implies is that, in addition to causal mechanisms, we
must consider the quasi-causal role played by the attraction towards a singularity.
In other words, we must take into account the fact that such attracting singular
points or loops are themselves mechanism-independent, since they can be shared
by many causal processes that differ in detail.
The terms “linear” and “non-linear” acquire a different meaning when applied
to the singular structure of possibility spaces than when applied to causal
mechanisms. In particular, a linear space of possibilities is one that is structured

by a single-point singularity, while a nonlinear possibility space is one with many
singularities of different types (steady-state, periodic, chaotic). Given that the
tendency to approach a singularity is entirely deterministic, knowing the structure
of a linear possibility space is sufficient to deduce what the final state of a process
will be: a sphere for a soap bubble; a cube for a crystal of salt. But with multiple
singularities, each with its own sphere of influence (or “basin of attraction”) that
knowledge is not enough. There are several possible tendencies and outcomes, so
the one currently manifested is in large part a product of the history of the process
(Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 140–45). Moreover, whether or not the full complexity
of a nonlinear possibility space will in fact be expressed depends on how close or
far from the state of equilibrium the process is. A process is said to be at equilibrium
if the differences in intensity driving it – the gradients of temperature, pressure,
speed and chemical concentration containing the energy fueling the process –
have been exhausted. If these intensive differences are not cancelled out but are
very small, the system is said to be near equilibrium, whereas if the gradients are
kept large by the supply of an external flow of matter or energy, the system is said
to be far from equilibrium. A process with a nonlinear possibility space that takes
place near equilibrium, such as a pendulum that is forced to swing in very small
amplitudes, is effectively linearized. In other words, a nonlinear process driven by
low intensity gradients behaves just as if it was linear (Stewart 1989: 82–3).
It follows that to be re-enchanted by nature, to be intrigued and fascinated by
its morphogenetic prowess, we must study it far enough from equilibrium. This is
the state in which our planet constantly is, as the intensive differences animating
it are replenished by the sun. About 70 percent of solar energy is captured in the
coupled atmosphere-hydrosphere system and feeds its gradients – zones of high
and low pressure, warm and cold air fronts, slow and fast air masses – creating the
conditions for hurricanes and thunder storms, cloud formations and wind circuits.
Although only seven percent of that solar radiation goes into the biosphere,
captured by plants through photosynthesis, this smaller portion is routed through
much more complex circuits, such as an ecosystem’s food web or an organism’s
metabolism, that have evolved to take advantage of a chemical gradient’s capacities
to affect and be affected. Classical science, culminating in nineteenth-century
mechanics and thermodynamics, could not deal with this wealth of spontaneous
form creation. It used mathematical equations to study laboratory phenomena,
but the only equations that could be solved exactly were linear ones, so it used
them extensively at the expense of nonlinear ones. The ideal phenomena directly
modeled by these equations (and then approximated by artificially simplified
laboratory phenomena) had properties that obscured the creative role of time. In
particular, the ideal phenomena of classical science were time reversible, that is,
they were modeled as series of events in which the order (forwards or backwards)
did not matter. This effectively eliminated history from the model and, together
with the possibility space of linear equations and their single global optimum,
gave us an impoverished picture of the world: nature as clockwork. It is no wonder
that this picture failed to seduce those seeking to understand the genesis of form.
Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics 37
Today, thanks to the work of mathematicians who have found ways around the
limitations of linear equations, and thanks to the work of physicists and chemists
who have led thermodynamics away from equilibrium, we can finally eliminate
this picture of cogs and gears. This will change the way in which we view nature’s
capacities to affect us, and it could lead to an equally important change in our
capacities to be affected by it.
References
Bunge, M. 1979. Causality and Modern Science. New York: Dover.

Gordon, J. 1988. The Science of Structures and Materials. New York: Scientific American Books.
Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. 1984. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. New
York: Bantam Books.
Salmon, W. 1984. Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Stewart, I. 1989. Does God Play Dice: The Mathematics of Chaos. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
3
Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” – From Cosmos
to Urban Life
Dominique Boullier
To “become within” may look like a rather strange expression, except for those
familiar with the work of both Donna Haraway and Peter Sloterdijk. This is a hybrid
expression based on the very powerful concept of “becoming with” coined by Donna
Haraway (2003) in her account of how we experience a new status of companion
species. Haraway challenges the respectful attitude or peaceful co-habitation
between species, which is the traditional “humanist” view of species’ relationships,
full of goodwill, indeed, but refusing to question the “natural” boundaries. She
pushes human beings to let them become affected by their companion species
(her dog is her preferred example) and to admit that a reciprocal transformation
occurs far from the domestication unilateral view of these relationships. This is
a first step to consider the cosmos not as “out there” but as a constituent part of
our existence. To “become with,” I add the concept of “within” which encapsulates
quite well the major insights of Sloterdijk (1998–2004) in his series of books
called Spheres (bubbles, globes, foams). Sloterdijk (2011) produced philosophical
masterpieces in his threefold essay in which he explored the ways human beings
have represented themselves in the cosmos throughout history, and how they
have managed the climate – both political and meteorological – in which they are
embedded. The main idea is to get rid of the modernist view of nature, which is
supposed to be external and controllable by engineers and scientists from their
overhanging position. The trouble with the climate change issue is that we cannot
get out of the picture anymore, since we are for a large part the ones who created
the phenomena, introducing the whole Earth to a new era, the Anthropocene.
The only shift that can help recover some understanding of what is happening to
us would be to put ourselves in a position of “being within,” and not out of, the
cosmos, nor able to master nature, as modernists used to do. As Sloterdijk puts it:
“is modern the one who believes he never was within” (Spheres III, Foams).
This is why this hybrid expression (to become within) seems a rather appropriate
way to guide us in the midst of the complex assemblages that make up the
common fieldwork for cosmopolitics. The modernist view of the world and of
what politics is about is immediately challenged. Cosmopolitics must clearly be

positioned in the tradition of ANT and of the “composition work” required by Bruno
Latour (2010) to better understand what modernism did to us as well as to the
cosmos. Actor Network Theory, although very often interpreted in various ways,
is often reduced to some concern for “non-humans” in social science studies. This
was clearly derived from work in the sociology of science and technology, which
was the first field of investigation of Law, Callon, and Latour. But, beyond this
starting point, ANT led us to acknowledge that no existence and no society can be
maintained without these artifacts, and that the style of cosmos and relationships
with “nature” is more one of composition than of mastership. “Following actors” is
another methodological rule of ANT that makes us avoid any modeling attitude,
as a systemic understanding of ANT would do, especially frequent in the natural
social science field. An ANT approach must account for all the reasons that make
all kinds of actors act, and seek to understand “from within” their rationale and
the intertwined associations they are able to build to make society exist. In this
way, the method “from within” is congruent with ANT principles and explores the
various agencies of all stakeholders without discarding any of them a priori. This
is why an ANT cosmopolitical understanding of projects offers the opportunity
for a major shift. Urban life cannot be separated from these concerns of cosmos
and modernist politics since it was largely designed as a relation of detachment
from any kind of experience “from within.” The main resource for mastering the
complexity of urban life was traditionally the 2D map where an overhanging
view shaped the relationship with the world to be built, in a “projection” mode,
a term used by armed forces to be deployed overseas. It might not be a mere
coincidence that 3D vision software has allowed us, for almost 30 years now,
to adopt a vision from within. However, since we do not necessarily adopt the
philosophy adapted to our technology, we may keep using 3D software as control
devices to provide us with a more realistic display, while still managing to avoid
being affected by the cosmos as we explore it. This is exactly what the conflict
between the hero of Avatar and his commander-in-chief is about: understanding
the Avatar world from within is not just a question of holographic technology that
enables one to perceive from within, but rather an ability to “become with” the
Avatar people: “becoming within” at the same time as putting one’s own integrity
at risk by being affected (and sometimes in pleasant ways, indeed!) by the whole
planet Avatar as a cosmos. However, cosmopolitics is not so easily summed up in
this stereotyped opposition which may be very powerful storytelling but does
not exactly account for the complex composition process that makes up the
very critical work of cosmopolitics. Expertise in composition is neither a specific
scientist’s expertise, nor a super-scientist’s ability to encompass the cosmic scale
of issues! On the contrary, in order to understand what cosmopolitics is about,
we must learn from the layperson’s activity; we must acquire expertise in dealing
with complex issues not only from a local point of view but with a localization skill.
Cosmopolitics implies connecting all concerns and actors and making them focus
on one specific issue, as Noortje Marres (2007) puts it. This is why the only way
to get into cosmopolitics is to become embedded in some situations either as an
ordinary actor, or with the light equipment of ethnography. This compels us to
Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” 41
practice some reflexivity, provided that we agree to be embedded and affected.

The four stories I will tell are examples of this view that transforms the process of
research itself and avoids any positivist risk while inventing the tracing methods for
accounting for such expertise. These remarks should be considered as guidelines
for taming the escapism in abstract confrontations when using the cosmopolitical
approach. Of course, one must acknowledge the filiations with Isabelle Stengers’s
work as well as with Bruno Latour’s, as I will explain, but without neglecting their
pragmatist approach to which cosmopolitics should remain associated. The
political responsibility of cosmopolitics is not to add new lines and papers to the
literature, but to become a resource for framing the only serious chance of avoiding
the ecological catastrophes forecast. By doing so, it delivers methods for sharing
some know-how between world citizens who have managed to invent a specific
composition of their cosmos because they agreed to become within.
A Cosmopolitical Compass
In no way can a cosmopolitical view be expected to erase all other existing cultural
and political frames. It cannot repeat such a harmful principle as the “tabula rasa.”
On the contrary, it must be designed so as to be able to come to terms with the
pluralism of points of view, since politics is about trying to build some kind of
common world, even though it comprises conflicts and diverse attitudes. How we
account for these mainstreams of attitudes towards politics will shape or preclude
3.1 The basic
the possibility of a composition. cosmopolitical
The theoretical framework of the compass (Boullier 2003a) is derived from the compass. Diagram
work of Isabelle Stengers (Stengers 1996), which takes into account uncertainty by the author.
Uncertainty
Relativism Cosmopolitics
Detachment Attachments
Modernism Tradition
Certainties
as constitutive not only of scientific activity but also of all contemporary human
activities. It also originates in the work of Bruno Latour (Latour 2004) and shows how
our attachment to our cosmos, which is ordinary in traditional societies, has been
broken down by the modernist project. This project organized our detachment
from the world in favor of the overreaching activity of science. All combinations
are still possible, and political choices always offer many different degrees of
attachment and uncertainty. Some of these choices favor detachment rather than
attachments, as does the modernist project that has geared all its action towards
detachment from traditions, with the aid of all-powerful science and technology
(Latour 2004). Others favor uncertainty and agree to live with it as an opposition
to other policies that seek to maintain or to recover certainties (Stengers 1996).
Cosmopolitical is not cosmopolitan in the Kantian sense, but takes into account our
attachment to the cosmos, i.e. to all the beings, human and non-human, animate
or inanimate, populating the world. Cosmos here is an open question about the
status of the relationship between entities from within the world and is opposed to
Taxis, which is a clear-cut categorization of the world from an a priori position. This
traditional distinction in Greek philosophy accounts for the various ways in which
one can describe the world, in terms either of categories, taxonomies, and clear-
cut definitions that are a priori projected on the world and made self-coherent, or
of experience of relations generated by life as such. This opposition indicates that
the way we think always takes shapes that are very difficult to overcome since it
requires a meta-analysis of the very resources that make us think.
With the crossing of these axes, four elementary policies appear, which apply to
all “issues.” But this framework is of interest only if it is adapted on a case-by-case
basis to each individual problem, or each “issue.” It demands an identification of
all the positions, even those which are sometimes hardly expressed, in order to
bring to the fore possible choices that may have been overlooked or crushed by
the obviousness of others. It is therefore, first and foremost, a heuristic tool and not
a system for comprehensive classification and storage. Each of the policies merits
an in-depth exploration every time because internal oppositions of the same
type may be detected, according to a fractal scheme that is potentially infinite.
A cosmopolitical design would have to explore these positions, even the ones
encapsulated in each larger category, in order to address the various ways of being
concerned by an issue. It has to invent a way of composing solutions or proposals
that are not supposed to become the enlightened or revealed truth but, on the
contrary, that will help all stakeholders to become active participants to the design
of the solution. The stories we’ll tell are made of these inventions that recompose
each cosmos as a common world despite definite and unsolvable disputes. This
means that there are always alternatives (unlike in the TINA dogma), provided that
the cosmopolitical method and principles are adopted and that time is allocated
for testing, debating, experimenting, and deciding. Cosmopolitics is challenging
the major crisis of humankind and takes time to be explored, and obviously this
clashes with the real-time stressed way of doing politics in our opinion economy
(Orléan 1999).
The compass can be used in a historical mode, but that is not its only purpose.
It can be considered for political choices or epistemic investigation as well.
Uncertainty
City as flows of data

The cosmopolitical city:
and opinion movements
re-composing
(connectivity
the previous cities
networks topology)
Detachments Attachments
City as a market place Fortified and sacred city

(accessibility) (centrality)
Certainties
Understanding the city in history as well as in functional terms by using the 3.2 The city
compass can lead to the diagram above. cosmopolitical
compass. Diagram
Centrality is one of the founding features of cities in history and is still relevant.
by the author.
Traditional policies will emphasize the qualities of traditional cities that were
considered first and foremost as fortified and sacred. Those cities were also related
to the cosmos in a way where transcendent links were displayed and were critical
for political power of all kinds. This is still the case nowadays, although republican
or civil transcendences have become the main justification for representing
centrality.
Accessibility is the second feature of cities that help to design the cosmos of
cities, as it challenges the centrality. During the Middle Ages, cities became more
famous and attractive in Europe for their markets and their opportunities for
trade and business of any kind, than for the central display of power and of sacred
commitments of the community. This is one of the underpinnings of modernism,
which was very powerful in shaping modern cities. It was developed to such an
extent with the car era, during the last century, that every traditional organization
of cities was all but dismantled to allow traffic to flow smoothly. The conflict is
permanent although the two features – centrality and accessibility – represent the
two main qualities of a space labeled a city (Lefebvre 2001).
Connectivity appeared more recently as a third quality of cities. It has to do with
the digital networks which give the city a new kind of life made of opinions and
tastes. These are propagated not only by authorities (traditional communication)
or experts (modernist management) but also by the very people and multitudes
that are concerned by the city in one respect or another. Websites, blogs, and social
networks, though not made of concrete, may have a powerful influence on the
images of the city. They may translate into attractiveness. Marketing is becoming
a major actor in city design; it uses opinion as a primary resource and networks as
a way of disseminating it. Everything looks more fluid and adaptable on networks.
Thus, conflicts may arise with other traditionalist views of the city as well as with
modernist ones, since they favor a more or less relativist view of the decisions and
of the technical constraints. This is where cities must learn to accept uncertainty
and to tame their faith in progress through technological control.
These three conflicting and competing views of cities still exist and there is no
likelihood of seeing one of them disappear. As a result, political debates often seem
too stereotyped and offer no opportunity for moving the conflict lines. Proposing
a cosmopolitical city does not mean delivering the one and only scheme that will
solve all existing problems. On the contrary, it will require the relevant arena to be
designed for each specific dispute or controversy on each issue, because all entities
related to this issue must be part of the assembly. Technical solutions, traditional
resources, opinions, and stakes are as relevant as others, and proposals will have
to account for the positions of each set of entities aligned along with traditional,
3.3 The time
cosmopolitical modern or relativist points of view.
compass. Diagram These pluralist worldviews are so deeply rooted that they show in the way
by the author. urbanites consider time policies.
Uncertainty
Instant time Reversible time

Events Experiment
Detachments Attachments
Linear orientated time Cyclical time

Progress Tradition
Certainties
The contrast is quite clear between the policies that are competing in the
same cities and composing the local style of time policy. Rituals and ceremonies
coexist with emphasized timelines where the city progresses according to many
indicators. Events are not ceremonies anymore because they must challenge the
repetition and try to create attractiveness of a new kind (Boullier 2010). But the most
promising and difficult mode to implement is one of experimentation, which may
look strange, when labeled as reversible time. However, experimentation is the only
way to learn from our errors, to improve, and to create a positive circle for a second
modernization (Beck 1997), thereby enabling us to consider the consequences of
actions through a model and political choices. This is what cosmopolitics is about:
learning from one specific skill of scientists, the experimental method, allowing
us to organize the contest of their proposals, to challenge them collectively and
to revise their preset views of the world. This method is not doomed to remain
scientific; it should become the very learning process of policies, although designed
for different purposes. We’ll see that no cosmopolitical policy ever succeeded first
hand, or at the first try. The learning curve is precisely what differentiates policies
that can be revised and whose principles can be improved.
“Diving into the magma” of these issues is a pre-requisite in order “to become
within.” I will provide thick descriptions of various situations where cosmopolitical
design made use of very different resources: how to regulate an overcrowded 3.4 The Llech
canyon in the
canyon in the Pyrenees from a neighbors’ point of view without getting trapped French Pyrenees.
in the NIMBY syndrome? How to invent ecology as a science by experiencing Photo by the
from within the skills of the fishermen on the Illinois River? How to design a high author.
environmental quality residential building by
combining hi-tech and traditional material such
as clay? How to propose new methods for a
student experience in order to tackle complex
and uncertain controversies? The methods of
assemblage are not the same, the resources and
the issues are far from similar but, for each of
them, the art of cosmopolitical design relies on
becoming within.
The Leisure Load Rate of a Canyon or

How to Use Traditional Resources for
Inventing Cosmopolitical Solutions1
The Llech canyon can but seduce canyoneers as

well as tourists for both its technicity and its wild
beauty.
It became so famous in the Pyrenees region
that large buses started to download dozen of
groups of first-time canyoneers. Initially the
villagers saw this as a favorable change to their
isolation. No concern was raised about the
damage caused to the environment, although
almost no business was created as a result to this
renown. Most guides were hired in other places
by tourism companies. Some issues nevertheless
began to be raised: on some days there were
so many buses that the village experienced
3.5 Traffic jam huge traffic jams, something they could not have imagined in a village of 200
in the canyon. inhabitants. The companies were so successful in attracting tourists that at times
A crowded river
canyoneers had to wait for two hours before a jump or a toboggan was available.
is not a river
anymore. Photo by This threatened the quality of the traditional canyoneers’ and their local guides’
the author. experience.
Eventually one of the river’s neighbors, a man named Gauderique, considered
that the time had come to regain some control over the area and the activity. He
was mainly concerned by the rapid destruction of the river itself when hundreds of
people went hiking or swimming in its very fragile ecosystem. Focusing mainly on
the issue of the buses, he tried to convince local inhabitants, as well as the mayor,
of the risks. Yet he failed because no one wanted to be responsible for obstructing
progress and village activity. Gauderique, a tall slim man with a constant sense
of humor but also with very strong confidence in his ability to assert himself,
discovered fortuitously that he was the only owner of the area immediately next to
the river – a very steep and wild area with only trees and rocks, but also including
the only accesses to the river. This meant that every group wishing to access
the canyon had to cross his land: it was literally an obligatory passage point. He
decided to use this rather traditional lever, private property, for the sake of the river.
Some neighbors thought he would try to make money by charging the groups that
crossed his land, but that was not his intention. He decided to implement a local
regulation stating that any group wishing to use the river and therefore to cross
his land would have to write a request mentioning the number and identity of the
people involved. He furthermore added a clause specifically worded to protect the
river: two days a week, canyoning would be forbidden in order to allow the river to
recover from the intensive disturbance of the other days. When groups broke that
rule by not declaring their visit or by coming on closed days, he asked a bailiff to
officially record the transgression by taking pictures, names, and all information
required to prosecute the trespassers. He was so successful because he did not
forestall canyoning but simply regulated it for a more sustainable use of the river.
Using the legal status delivered by the courts, he was in a position to ask officials to
control the offenders and fine them. At the same time, he improved the scientific
justification of his action by coining a new term, the “leisure load rate” of the river,
in order to avoid being trapped in a local conflict. Such was his success that many
national environmental organizations soon adopted his concept and his set of
indicators, and he was eventually elected to a national council in charge of these
issues. All these very quiet but determined decisions had an immediate effect on
tourism companies that consequently decided to leave the area, concerned about
trouble and potential costs.
How Might We Consider This as a Cosmopolitical Way of Dealing with an Issue?
First of all, the solutions were not at hand because Gauderique, our hero, managed
to invent one of his own. If all issues were waiting for solutions from a stock of
traditional responses, no politics at all would be needed. Building a common world
where all stakeholders find their place requires some imagination and creativity,
something that is hardly taught in our education system. Inventing solutions means
being able to move from one field to another (cosmos) without any prepositioned
division (taxis). Legal aspects are combined with (quasi) scientific indicators and
mixed with very practical matters.
The second cosmopolitical feature concerns the relationship with what we
call nature, which is not reduced to a wild open space for leisure, nor to a sacred
untouchable world. We live within nature, our activities can hurt it, and we weave
a web of connections with nature, whatever we do. The main political attitude
consists in becoming aware of the responsibility we have and managing it. The
problem is that this attitude is not so easy to design when entering a new field
or area: no rules, no indicators, no representatives can tell us how best to control
ourselves. On this ground it is easy to adopt the most simplistic and coherent
attitudes: no trespassing at all or freedom in a wild playground. The trick invented
by our compositionist expert is a very diplomatic move: save two days for the
river to recover, which is much more complicated for those who want dogmas
or recipes. By doing so, it does not solve the issue; it does not make it disappear
from our consciousness, it simply raises everyone’s awareness of the impact of
canyoning, by virtue of the mere fact of having to check which days are off this
week or this month. This could be considered as the perfect opposite of the current
trend of “solutionism” as Evgeny Morozov (2013) labeled it, for which “anything
goes” provided that the solution works, without looking at “causes” nor entering
into endless controversies with stakeholders.
The third cosmopolitical feature is the fact that the compositionist attitude does
not lead to a vague consensus satisfying everybody. It shifts everyone’s behavior
from the start, without avoiding conflict or any form of legal constraint. We cannot
rely on an arrangement model where trade-offs enable stakeholders to behave
3.6 The modernist

solution: a
canyoning park.
No more
attachments, no
more uncertainties.
“Paradise aventure”
(L. Locquet).
as they wish, provided that the consequences are compensated for in one way or
another. The conflict was not violent but it was acknowledged and it did produce
interesting outcomes: a more peaceful place and improved relationships between
local citizens and the river.
One of these outcomes is worth mentioning: when expelled from their
playground (although not so much expelled as regulated), the companies that
used to benefit from this wild and free leisure park known as a river decided to
build a place of their own from scratch. They designed a canyoning park, a leisure
park with artificial rocks imitating the river, with guides at each point who were
able to handle massive flows of visitors, 24 hours a day!
This is the best demonstration that their understanding of “nature” rested upon
transformation and control of any risk so that it fitted into the project and business
constraints. Making nature obey business requirements is not so easy when
someone emerges as its spokesperson, or when the feedback and consequences
must be faced, which is often too late. By building this leisure park, tourism
companies were able to get rid of attachments as well as uncertainties while
securing a regular business, typical of the modernist view of nature. Extracting
the relevant features of nature from their cosmos allowed for the creation of a
simulacrum controlled from an overhanging position. This is not just a criticism of
this attitude. It also means admitting that the composition work might fail if not
favored by the companies that left the controversial area and preferred to build
their own park. All solutions are related and the success story should not deny the
benefits of dividing the stakeholders into two groups and letting them occupy
different and not competitive fields. A cosmopolitical analysis cannot dismiss some
“externalities,” as economics used to do.
A Cosmopolitical Design of Scientific Activity2
Our second story will be quite different and will rely on David W. Schneider’s
account of Forbes’s creation of ecology as a discipline, in a paper called “the lake as a
microcosm” which captures quite well the essence of Forbes’s work. The field study
triggering this new discipline, ecology, was conducted along the Illinois River and
its lakes where fishermen used to capture significant

amounts of fish. According to Schneider’s account,
it was not the story of a dazzling discovery or a long
battle to build sophisticated labs, as we used to read
in mythological stories of science. It was much more a
question of embedded science, embedded within the
everyday activity of fishermen. And this experience
seemed to be rather painful for Forbes, whose letters to
his wife told for instance about the constant immersion
in a smell of dead fish, disgusting even for the robust
scientist that Forbes was. The relationship with ecology and the understanding of 3.7 Seining on
the fish’s life cycle might seem quite loose, but we have come to understand how the Illinois River,
crucial it was because it gave Forbes the perspective of a community member able Beardstown, IL,
July 1908.
to capture the rationale of the fishermen’s fishing strategy. They built small traps
adapted to the flows of the river which was perpetually changing and invading
lakes from time to time. The fish they captured appeared to have a different diet
from the fish arriving from the river.
Forbes was afforded the opportunity to record this ordinary knowledge
from within only because he admitted that fishermen were the best experts in
understanding the “milieu,” since they lived within this cosmos, as the title indicated
(“microcosm”). Forbes grasped the very meaning of this expertise because he spent
years living within the fishermen’s community, ever closer to these dead fish that
were dropped beneath his room – fish that contained the clues for the discovery
of dietary changes. This immersion was not an a priori choice but the consequence
of his inquiry, in which he agreed to be trapped. At the same time he was able
to describe sophisticated biological phenomena and to design the concept of
“milieu:” by being immersed within it and not overhanging it or extracting “facts”
from experimental processes that would have missed the key point. His personal
involvement was crucial and did not stop at the anthropological attitude of
which ethnomethodologists would have approved. He became part of the social
movement of fishermen who were confronted with landowners’ claims to have
more hunting land by draining what they considered to be lakes with no value.
Forbes agreed to write reports for the courts, explaining the critical role of lakes for
the whole ecological system of the river, with a view to preventing its destruction.
Although he managed to delay some operations, his efforts were largely in vain.
This nevertheless cast an interesting light on the birth of ecology: it was not
designed as a systemic modeling science, as modernists would have done using
their powerful tools to build relationships among entities from their overriding
position. Instead, this understanding was much more the result of a personal
experience of being embedded within the milieu that Forbes was studying, and
the effect of a non-separation a priori between biology, climate, organization,
market, and so on. Nowhere do we find a purification process such as the one
we used to observe in the modern view of science that required a full separation
between science and politics. The story is not of a scientist who becomes aware of
political issues and adopts a militant attitude. It derives completely from Forbes’s
cosmopolitical position where knowledge cannot be disconnected from the public

concerned and from the various entities that populate the cosmos and may be in
conflict. There is nothing such as a distance or objective position, unless you take
enough time to consider the various points of view from within and agree not to
reduce them.
The cosmopolitical design of a new field of science refers not to interdisciplinary
discourses but to the composition of issues that would produce ad hoc delimitation,
in the case of the lake – the delimitation produced by the fishermen and by the fish
that connect the various areas of the river.
The Design of Envelopes: A Traditional Hi-tech Building
The design process of a scientific activity can be considered as the need to recognize
3.8 A controversial the status of “being within” as the key point for understanding a milieu. It means
project: 42 “high that without any action we, humans, are situated within a cosmos and would do
environmental
quality” apartments.
better admitting that when making political choices. However, some may argue
Image courtesy of that human beings are famous for transforming this so-called “nature” and for
Jean-Yves Barrier. using technical expertise to build interiors of their own. That is what architects are
experts at, and the political side of their activity is sometimes admitted but often
rejected for the sake of the purity of art, or technical performance. The following
story of a high environmental quality building will try to emphasize the very
complex composition work to be done in order to adopt a cosmopolitical design
in architecture.
In this story, I will adopt a position close to that of Forbes, as I was personally
involved in the project in my capacity as the deputy mayor who decided to
implement these models of design and who set up the whole consortium to
achieve it. Having experienced this process from within, I am able to account for
the many changes, compromises, and controversies that occurred.
Salvatierra is a five-floor building of 42 apartments in a northern suburb of
Rennes, the capital of Brittany in France (see Figure 3.8).
I launched the project in 1995 and it was delivered in 2001. It was the first
residential building of that size to adopt high environmental quality standards
in France, while many of the same kind already existed in Germany and Austria
for instance. The standards themselves did not exist as such and the choices
made were quite original. The building was made of clay, hemp, and wood. It
was rather challenging for the local decision makers, although the local tradition
of clay housing is centuries old and the energy performance of these materials
quite well documented. It obviously challenged the modernist model of building
where concrete, metal, and glass are the key resources despite their notoriously
poor environmental results. However, these choices were not made for the sake of
tradition or the promotion of local expertise. First, due to the complexity of using
clay for a building of that size, the small company that was an expert in clay had to
design a new process to produce large bricks adapted to the size of the building
(see Figure 3.9).
This was a cosmopolitical choice in the sense that tradition had to be considered
as valuable and at the same time reinvented in order to fit into the general design.
Second, tradition was used as a resource because of its performance, and this
had to be controlled and not just taken for granted or as a dogma. As a result, a 3.9 Reinventing
the tradition of
battery of sensors was installed to assess the quality and performance of the whole
clay with large
construction. One apartment was fully equipped and devoted to this calculation – bricks. Image
a very modern way of putting one’s belief to the test, that science is familiar with. courtesy of Jean-
Third, while traditional techniques and materials were used, the project managers Yves Barrier.
chose for their energetic performance the most recent
type of glass window comprised of three layers of glass
panes with special gases, including argon, between
them. These windows were produced in Germany and
were not particularly neutral in ecological terms, but
they were the only option enabling us to meet the
requirements of the project, in terms of energy saving.
This was a significant move towards cosmopolitics
because the compromise between traditional and high-
tech technical systems was the only solution to reach
high-level performance for ecological purposes.
This may look like a local project, very well rooted in local political stakes
and very difficult to transfer to any other location. Yet a project cannot be
labeled as local when the technology used comes from foreign countries, and
when funding has to be sought at European level. City decision makers (both
political and technical) were quite skeptical regarding the choice of materials
and even the relevance of this kind of ecological objective for new building
techniques. Due to that reluctance, the main members of the consortium (the
developer, the architect, and I) had to look for seed money at European level.
They managed to convince the European administration to subsidize the project
with 2 million francs, which at the time amounted to €350,000. As soon as the
project leaders could show the support of important technical and political
European authorities, local authorities were more willing to launch the project.
This is a very classical case of “detour” required for attaching stakeholders to
interesting parts of the network (Callon 1986). Cosmopolitical design is always
confronted with the need to aggregate resources of various kinds in order to
form alliances that become convincing. Our project could not be labeled as local
only because of the combination of levels it required. For instance, the sensors
were able to trace all climate indicators but they could not account for the noise
produced by the VMC, that is, the dual flow ventilation, which was required in
order to achieve the required energy savings. Only the inhabitants could report
on this phenomenon that seems a minor one but is in fact significant of the
problems of designing envelopes (Sloterdijk 2004). In a cosmopolitical design
it is important to experience the building from within and not only with the
technical resources of calculation. And it appears that good intentions are
not sufficient to track all the details from within. The quality of the envelope
depends on a very complex set of features and decisions; it should be tested
with real people and the original design revised as long as the outcomes
highlight problems. The political assembly required by cosmopolitical design is
more complex and time-consuming than the modernist one, made of experts’
advice and indicators. Even in the case of this project, rather clearly oriented
towards the exploration of new ways of building housing that would meet
sustainable development requirements, the assemblage work missed the point
of participation to some extent, despite the legal status of the inhabitants as
members of the cooperative from the moment they bought their apartment
and even before its construction. Choices like heat recovery ventilation were
not discussed and the consequences were neither assessed nor considered as
a potential problem for the experience of the envelope. This flaw in the process
should have made the cosmopolitical designers aware of the on-going process
in which they were getting involved. While they adopted a point of view “from
within,” they had no opportunity to escape in any way other than by betraying
the expectations of the public they had brought together. Revision is a part
of cosmopolitical design (Boullier 2003b) that should be anticipated, though
that is not easily done when confronted with irreversible decisions. However,
even these flaws and the constraints preventing revision should be part of the
association process.
How to Train Cosmopolitical Vision: Educational Design
Discourses and pressures of various kinds do not help elites and decision makers
to change their behavior and to be more willing to consider the cosmopolitical
perspective. The need for a specific educational method has led to the design
of a specific innovative program for the students of some institutions in various
schools and universities all over the world. Forccast3 (Formation par la cartographie
des controverses à l’analyse des sciences et des techniques) was designed on the
basis of Bruno Latour’s view of controversies as a key resource to train students
to explore the issues constituting science and techniques. Latour invented a
method that was directly inspired by his own work in the fields of science studies
and innovation research, where he and Michel Callon developed the “actor
network theory” that became so famous. Controversy mapping is not only a way
of directing students’ attention to science and technology, or of merely putting
them in a more active cognitive attitude. It means addressing the critical issues
of our time, which are complex and made of uncertainty, and helping students
learn how to find their way in this environment without the trust, the fears or
the skepticism that are the traditional attitudes towards “ready-made” science.
By exploring controversies they adopt a view of science and technologies “in
the making,” which means observing all points of view, debates, and fights from
within, but in a much more documented way. They are able to trace scientific
arguments, to follow actors through their statements in the media, to observe
the evolution of public opinions by mapping web conversations, and so on. This
method was successfully implemented for students in architecture at Manchester
University4 and well documented in Albena Yaneva’s book, the first one to explain
3.10 The initial

To learn in the program of the
Forccast project
twenty-first century (launched 2012).
Cognition-action Diagram by the
author.
Contribute Build Debate Explore
Collaborative Maps
Realistic
videos and Gaming and
negotiations
websites datascapes
Mapping
Spideopedia Serious game Simulation
controversies
the background and outcomes of the method (Yaneva 2012). Moreover, in the
Forccast project, students have to publish their documents and investigations on
websites or in videos that might help the public or their peers find their own way
in a specific controversy. This is why relationships with the media are changing
so fast: all media are used to publish photos, videos, comments or blogs, but
in traditional education systems this publication is not considered worthy of
inclusion in students’ academic activity. By contrast, a cosmopolitical educational
design must rely on the extension of capabilities (Sen 1999) by teaching students
video and web literacy, which means reading and writing at the same time.
The last aspect of the project is the idea that the products of these educational
assignments are not supposed to remain confined to the university world.
Controversies and all the publications associated with them must become
resources for public debates, whether real or simulated, and for theater plays,
so that students can immerse themselves more deeply in them. There is a risk of
being trained to get involved in controversies with a rather distant attitude leading
to the modern understanding of knowledge, made of rational arguments, using
only language skills and written documents as resources. In the Forccast program,
knowledge is always closely coupled with action and must be experienced as
embodied knowledge. For instance, during role-playing games on the e-book
industry, a course created by Pierre Mounier (Dacos and Mounier 2010), students
were asked not only to express themselves as one of the stakeholders in the field
(Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Fnac, authors, bookshops, editors, and so on)
but also to play the role of a specific person in these companies, whose names
and biography are well known. The director, Oscar Castro, from the Aleph Theater,
asked them how much they earned and how their love affair with their colleague
was going, and he organized a contest where students had to use every possible
argument to criticize and mock one another. By doing so, he introduced aggressive
behavior as a normal feature of the situation, and obliged the students to embody
their knowledge in order to make them tackle the situations. The choreographer,
Sylvie Miqueu, did the same for seduction attitudes. Students found a way to make
their knowledge livelier, which prepared them for situations where arguments
were made not only of rational discourses but also multiple aggressive or seductive
clues. Any politician or project manager would have acknowledged the realism of
this scheme, which contrasted with traditional educational programs consisting of
canned knowledge, secluded from the body and passions.
The continuity of the methods we designed is intended for a complete renewal
of students’ cognitive attitudes. It is supposed to help them address in a more
subtle way the complex and uncertain issues they will experience in their jobs.
Exploring, publishing, and debating are part of the cosmopolitical skills that are still
underestimated in the traditional education system. This method is clearly related
to the principles of cosmopolitical STS that are taught during the activity: they
have to deploy their own agency and get involved in the controversy in order to
experience how science and technologies are made of connected and conflicting
statements and bodies.
Conclusion
These four stories seem quite different and they may produce confusion in the mind
of the readers who believed that cosmopolitics was about “nature” or “diplomacy.”
There is no limitation to the fields of invention in cosmopolitics. Some key words
may help them find their way: composition, assembly, pluralism, invention, issues,
empowerment, public, association of humans/non-humans, revision, non-modern,
and so on. But we still lack a method for design in general terms. The compass is
a first step that may help to us to grasp all solutions and attitudes available on a
specific issue and to open a more pluralistic view of the stakeholders and solutions.
But it is only the beginning of a cosmopolitical design. The methodology to
explore the issue, to assemble the entities concerned, whatever they are, to extend
continuously the awareness of excluded communities, and so on is different in
every situation but still relies on the same basic principles. They can be summed up
by the term that I have used: “to become within.” To “become” because it is a process
and no one knows the solution, the outcome or the aftermath of a controversy or
a project. Agreeing to be affected and transformed is a prerequisite that applies in
all the stories told in this chapter. Becoming “with” is putting one’s own trajectory at
risk: it is not a matter of having a project and “becoming” from one’s specific point of
view. It means accepting that uncertainty is radically increased under the influence
of the other parties involved in the situation: humans and non-humans, visible and
invisible, official and unknown, and so on. Adding the term “within” reorients the
sense of the shared experiment that is at the core of any cosmopolitical design.
Each of the stories insists on the need to quit any external or overhanging position
and to start by recognizing how we share a common world – a cosmos – which is
not “out there,” because we are within it. And the major stake of a cosmopolitical
design consists in finding the right shape, size, and climate of the required envelope
for the common fate to be accomplished and experienced. Sloterdijk is the most
famous expert analyzing the various shapes and composition of envelopes and his
main concern is always to find out how human beings as inhabitants of a cosmos
are able to design livable environments that take care of every entity, by creating a
climate where life is flourishing. This is what cosmopolitics is about.
Notes
1 This story was recorded and told by Gauderique Delcasso to Christelle Gramaglia and
Audrey Richard and was published in French in Gramaglia and Boullier (2009).
2 This story is based on Daniel W. Schneider’s paper (2000), discussing the work of
Stephen Forbes (1887).
3 Training by mapping scientific and technological controversies. This project, funded by
the French government, is supposed to last until 2019. Bruno Latour and Dominique
Boullier are in charge of the project that can be followed at this address: http://
forccast.hypotheses.org/
4 See www.mappingcontroversies.co.uk
References
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4
An Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political
Innovation
Albena Yaneva: How should we understand design practice and its relation to
the material and the living world? What is the role of design if nature is no longer
passive and salient enough to provide a background for human activities?
Andrés Jaque: The first implication is that design, as a relevant intervention in daily
enactments, is not to be found in the initial formulations of design proposals, but
in the trajectories and evolutions they become part of. I do not think that Mies van
der Rohe’s intentions are the ones that are performed now by the society which
the pavilion is part of, or at least not to a great extent. This means that the effects
of design are not the direct result of the pre-defined programs on which designed
entities are founded, but rather of the way their programs interact with a great
number of other entities and are reconstructed within time as part of that process.
As a practicing architect, this is quite obvious to me, because I have very often seen
how designed assemblages always evolve into different compositions that gain a
broad independence in their performance. That makes them differ from the way
their evolution was predicted during the “design process.”
The way politics are embodied in design is not by forcing designed devices to
perform a certain external-to-design previously-defined project. Devices are not
neutral transmitters of politics, but instead they do contribute to the making of
politics. Their political effect is however neither fixed, as it evolves with time, nor
absolute, for they share and dispute it with a large number of heterogeneous
entities.
It is also important to consider that the distribution of roles during design
processes needs to be reconsidered. There is no such thing as designers and
designed entities, but encounters of things in which all of them design and all of
them, somehow, are designed, as part of the same process. But the way each of
them is designing and the way each of them is designed is not equivalent. It is
very clear how, when it comes to natural entities, there is a participation of those
entities in the evolution of the compositions they are part of; a participation that
needs to be accounted for as a designing contribution.
As a designer, it is of great concern to me to find ways to escape from an approach

to my work based on the idea that there is first a phase of design, followed by
one of realization, ending with one of occupation and use. This idea is accepted
uncritically by most designers. The way design practices are institutionalized in the
places where I have worked is pretty much based on this idea, which, strangely
enough, has nothing to do with the way things happen when we carefully look
at them. It has been very important for me trying to replace that by a successive-
attempts-based design process. The way in which material realities are constituted
and composed with/within/as living realities can distribute designers’ contributions
in a similar spatial and temporal pattern to that in which those compositions are
produced.
The participation of nature in material compositions makes it inevitable to think
of design as an activity where interscalarity is managed. Your work “Scaling Up and
Down. Extraction Trials in Architectural Design” (Yaneva 2005) has been of great
importance to clarify practices that, without us being quite aware of how they
operated, have been important in the projects we have developed at the Office for
Political Innovation. Any object participates and performs in/as a certain network
of relations, dependencies, disputes and so on that attaches it to other things and
other evolutions, actually many of them. But when we design compositions with
what, in daily life and in ordinary speech, are thoughts as “natural beings,” there
is only one way to even consider providing any sustainability in the way their
participation is imagined. It requires that we account for them as beings that
are enacted in a multiscalar construction contributing to demands imposed on
the design process. For instance, including water lilies in the Barcelona Pavilion’s
assemblage, as we saw in the “Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society” project (Jaque
2013), automatically meant that tiny beings, such as those that decomposed the
water of the lake, or huge ones, such as the number of sun hours on which the speed
of the water lilies’ growth depended, needed to be introduced as active participants
of the design. Again, this presents basic practical problems. To encode into a
disciplinary intelligence the presence of those heterogeneous beings has required
a great deal of disciplinary recomposition. The participation of different disciplines
in a design process is regulated, in most cases, by a certain understanding that
each of these disciplines takes care independently of the decisions directly related
to one scale of the design process. In practical terms this means that each scale of
design is intended by humans to be practiced by a segregated disciplinary sphere
(urbanism, architecture, interior design, industrial design). But of course, in practice
it is never like that, and when we carefully look into these design performances
there are many devices and practices to operate in the transience between different
scales. In the case of Barcelona’s water lilies it was not the architects who, in the
first place – when they started to work on designing the reconstruction of Mies’s
pavilion in the 1980s – accounted for the micro-organisms decomposing the water,
but the installation’s designers. They automatically decided to remove the actors
making the ponds’ water green, as outsiders to the social arrangement of the lakes.
By doing this, the impossibility for architects in the future to take the decision of
accommodating water lilies in the lake was rendered costly. But a few years later
An Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation 59
the architects developed glass boxes to produce a tentative accommodation of the

water lilies that somehow challenged the scalar disciplinary distribution.
Albena Yaneva: This is an excellent example that illustrates how your design work
turns nature into cause for thinking and mobilizes a variety of entities in new
compositions? Can you provide more examples?
Andrés Jaque: It has been a constant in my work to consider as political the long
series of endeavors and technologies that are deployed when it comes to bringing
together different realities. In the case of the “House in Never Never Land,” a
secondary house in Cala Vadella Valley in Ibiza (Jaque 2010) that my office has been
designing and building since 2007, the process was traversed by the demands of a
large arboreal mass, the habitat of many animal species (Figure 4.1). We wished to
reconcile the hedonistic life the owners wanted to develop within the house, with
the preservation of that natural milieu. This required the production of documents,
models, drawings and so on. The first thing that was required was to spend weeks
onsite and, with the help of some instruments produced ad hoc, to record in detail
the species, position, and form of each tree and bush. We mapped all that in CAD
files so that we could start to accommodate, in a common vectorial digital space,
the owners’ demands for the design, along with the presence of the trees and
bushes.
The design process was especially long. A great number of models and plans
had to be produced to make sure that the presence of trees was compatible
with the structure and the layout needed to ensure views on the valley and the
Mediterranean coast from all parts of the house, while maximizing the real state
value of the house and a diversity of marketable divisions of it (Figure 4.2). All this
required that we identify principles to help us to discuss those different presences
in the house: from words, to basic tactics. But we also had to produce models and
drawings that enabled those discussions to be continued over time and to be kept
at the center of a number of actions whereby design decisions were taken.
A number of additional decisions were taken to make these different realities
compatible. For instance:
1. Concentrating most equipment and services in a more or less isolated

concrete tank, to prevent any risk of a damaging accidental spill on the
ground that would jeopardize the survival of the trees, bushes, and animals.
It also helped other aspects of the design: for example it made it easy to
accommodate the swimming pool in it, and provided stability to the overall
structure. So that reinforced concrete tank in itself brought together many
presences.
2. Most of the construction was raised on steel columns, and the land
underneath was kept unpaved, so the permeability of the ground, on which
the trees’ existence depended, could be preserved.
3. The structure of the buildings was layered so no trees had to be cut down,
but still the house was placed where it was needed to cater to the owners’
4.1 Detailed mapping of trees and bushes present in the lot where “House in Never Never Land” was to be constructed.
Made by the Office for Political Innovation, based on site survey.
4.2 Roof plan. “House in Never Never Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2007–2009. © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
4.3 Construction site. “House in Never Never Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2008.
© Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
4.4 Construction site. “House in Never Never Land,” Cala Vadella, Ibiza, 2008.
demands (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). With the accumulation of many adjustments
it ended up being quite an irregular structure that again required numerous
specific models, drawings and meetings. And in all those meetings trees
were part of the talk.
Many other things were needed to accommodate a number of diverse entities on

common ground. At some point, during the construction process, new realities
emerged. Some of those new realities were not included in the models. The rush
that governs building sites made it impossible for us to react on time and to produce
the necessary documents, models, and designs. Without them, and with machines
and people operating on site, there was no way to have tactics to properly bring 4.5 “House in
an inclusive articulation into those parts of the process. For instance, at some point Never Never Land,”
Cala Vadella, Ibiza,
the intended vehicles’ access to the site was changed by the contractor without
2007–2009.
further notice. He decided to open a new route for heavy vehicles to approach the © Andrés Jaque /
construction, and to do so a number of trees were felled. Even though initially they Office for Political
would have been extremely easy to preserve, since they were not in the way of Innovation.
4.6 “House in any construction and there were alternative possibilities for access to the plot, we
Never Never Land,” thought it was not needed to dedicate efforts to include them in plans, documents,
design adjustments, or models. This lack of attachment to the design composition
2007–2009.
© Andrés Jaque / and to the material devices where that composition was being constructed (plans,
Office for Political documents, conversations, models, and so on) made them weaker and caused
Innovation. them to disappear.
It seems strange, now that the house has been inhabited for more than five
years already. The trees that remain in the house five years after its construction,
are those that we succeed to include in the models, drawings and conversations
(Figures 4.5, 4.6, 4.7). The persistence of trees was directly related to their presence 4.7 “House in
and participation in the devices through which the site was being composed. Never Never Land,”
Those preserved were included in the models, drawings and conversations in the
2007–2009.
first place, because someone thought they were likely to disappear as a result © Andrés Jaque /
of the construction process. Those trees and bushes that we considered initially Office for Political
unlikely to be damaged, and therefore they were not included in the discussions Innovation.
or in the documents and models by/in which the discussion happened, ended up
disappearing. The persistence of trees, bushes and the animals living in association
with them, was directly related to their presence in the diversity of material devices
by which/where the construction process happened. For me this is very interesting,
because the idea that nature is just what happens when architecture and social
assemblage are avoided does not work here.
Albena Yaneva: How does your work contribute to “slowing down” reasoning,
“slowing down” the construction of the common world, and creating a space for
hesitation?
Andrés Jaque: It is a significant part of my practice to find the way to slow down
processes that otherwise would be considered even automatic. In many of our
works I would say that it has been our main contribution to the process. But to slow
down a specific construction is not something that you can do alone. It requires the
enrolment of a large number of forces, and it definitively requires the development
of material devices.
In 2004 we were called to intervene at Mount Gaiás, 1 km from Santiago de
Compostela in Galicia. It had been a natural space, quite intensively inserted in
the life of the surrounding neighborhoods that were associated to that landscape
in many different ways. In 1999 the regional government of Galicia, under the
impetus of the so-called Bilbao effect, had decided to run an international
competition – that Peter Eisenman Architects won – to transform it into the current
Cidade da Cultura. At the time Mount Gaiás, as an ecosystem, was already totally
transformed. As a result of an intense earthmoving activity, its vegetation cover
had been totally removed and its topography and pluvial regime was no longer
the one the neighbors related to; it started to reproduce what had been decided
in the models and plans that the different architects and engineering teams had
produced. All that had triggered a certain level of social unrest, which prompted
the project managers to call us and ask us to design a nice wooden fence all
around the building site so that it would be rendered invisible to the neighbors.
According to the authors of our commission, they expected this to put an end
to the unrest. We proposed not to build a fence but to use the money instead to
carry out what we called “12 Actions to Make Peter Eisenman Transparent.” The 12
Actions were small adjustments on the building site, so that they could bring to
the site a discussion with a broad and diverse public. The actions included things
such as providing a line of buses to enable people to access the site; or color codes
to make transparent the amount of resources each construction company was
mobilizing; or meeting places where publics not directly related to the companies
or consultancies working on the construction of Cidade da Cultura could meet
and discuss. This is only one of a series of works (such as the Skin Gardens or the
1 L Oil Banquette) in which there was an intention to involve actors not directly
concerned in the discussions where decisions were taken.
It was interesting to see how things reached a point in Santiago in which the
controversies activated by the construction, partially fueled by the effect of the 12
Actions, started to call for a transformation of the initial plans. At that point the 12
Actions were canceled. We were told that there was a “need to speed up the end of
the construction” and that maintaining the 12 Actions “made the process slower.”
We proposed a number of ways to keep the 12 Actions running, and in the last
meeting we had, the Director of Fundación Cidade da Cultura explained it quite
clearly:
Why are we even talking about this, this is exactly what we do not need now that
we have to finish the works before the discontent becomes unbearable.
4.8 Abel in Silver Lake. “Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool.” Roy and Edna Disney /
CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Los Angeles, California, 2013. © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
In 2013 we developed a project for RED CAT/CalArts (Figure 4.8). The way we worked
was to study a very small number of particular ecosystemic constructions in Los
Angeles, and to find the way to extract from those compositions some knowledge
that we could use to re-enact them in a series of ecosystemic prototypes through
which the knowledge could travel and be re-associated with new publics and
contexts. One of the cases was the vegetable garden that a man, Abel, had built
at the back yard of his suburban house in Silver Lake. He had been brought up
in Colonia, Uruguay. In the 1960s his family sold their house to a company that
was consolidating farming land by demolishing and bringing together a large
number of small family properties. This transformation in the way people, land
and houses related to each other was perceived, by the people affected, as a very
fast and radical one. Our work consisted on reconstructing the broader network of
architectures and other things that participated in that process. The composition
in Colonia ended up re-accommodating Abel, first in Alaska and then in Silver Lake.
Something similar happened to his siblings and friends. Within a 30-year period
they had all built gardens in the places where they lived, from Venezuela to Italy,
where they grew vegetables like the ones they had had in Colonia when they were
all living there. They would discuss their gardens via Skype almost every day and
would post each other seeds of the exceptional crops they had every season. We
can see this new setting as a recomposed version of the society they were part of
in the Colonia of the 1950s. The use of Skype, associated to their gardens and the
circulation of seeds could be seen as a way to code a shared intelligence effective
on reenacting social constructions. It took Abel years to gain insight into how
potatoes reacted to weather in Alaska, but he finally included them in his backyard.
The same was needed in order to make seeds travel. All that could only be achieved
in a tentative trial-and-error dynamic. What was interesting for me was how that
whole enactment was a reaction and a response to the superfast transformation
of the assemblage that brought together people, plants, land, and property
distribution in a fragmented-but-connected network. It seems as if the accelerated
transformation effected by mass fruit traders in Colonia was radically successful.
Yet, when considered in detail, with a broader description of the evolution of Abel’s
enactment, it can be argued that the enactment was reconstructed to produce a
relational scheme where a slow restitution of an evolved version of the Colonia
composition of the 1950s could be approached by means of intense but slow
collective design work. This is quite important for me. The possibility to slow down
processes is often related to their collective dimension and to redistributing the
relational scheme by which they happen.
This was very important for the “Escaravox” project that we have been working
on for five years now, and in which our design work has never been considered
finished. The three-year period in which the devices have been used is part of a
never-ending tentative-based design process. For instance, we are now designing
and constructing new devices to add to the “Escaravox.”These devices are a material
reaction to some of the challenges and conflicts that happened during this three
past years.
In order to make the “Escaravox” something that maximizes its potential to
be associated to other entities, we made them inexpensive. We also divided
them into many independent but relatable pieces and over-equipped them with
technologies available to cater for a wide range of situations. The composition of
technologies and other things that are mobilized by them evolves with time. Only
a tiny part of the entities that now compose the “Escaravox” have been designed by
our studio, but those that we designed in the first place are still part of the multiple
enactments that the “Escaravox” triggers. That relational wealth was in part possible
because the constellation was equipped with an informal constitution that makes
it easy for people, groups, and technologies to associate to it.
Albena Yaneva: “To think” in the Deleuzian sense means to resist ready
interpretations. How does your work contribute to resisting consensual ways of
presenting phenomena related to nature? How do you “activate thinking” through
design?
Andrés Jaque: That has been something we have tried with many different tactics.
In the “Plasencia Clergy House” (Figure 4.9) we designed a catalogue of political
toys that operated in different ways, but mainly by making it necessary for users to
develop knowledge and to perform it, in order to take decisions required to make
the architecture usable. Only through that process could they relate to the toys.
The “Skin Garden” project was very important for us as an experiment that helped
us to test a way of thinking architectural practices. We designed, constructed, and
distributed a number of jewels that were actually models of the landscapes related
to the daily actions that many people usually perform on their skin. We catalogued
a number of them, from perfuming the skin with specific components, to applying
anti-aging collagen lotion on it. The jewels represent the image of those other
places: mines, laboratories. They are models of mines, petrol extraction towers, and
so on, and as such were intended to bring into daily conversations the interscalar
connections by which they were made possible. The people wearing them had to
sign a contract with us, undertaking to wear them only when those connections
were actual, on the days they had performed actions on their skin that contributed
to those connections being produced (Figures 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13). They also
undertook to inform us of the contents of those conversations by sending us
postcards with drawings and transcriptions.
The previous works I mentioned were not directly intended to affect architecture
as a discipline. Often we have found intense resistance from architects and
architectural institutions, among which there is a strong attachment to modern
paradigms, to understanding or accepting cosmopolitical notions of social
construction and their appeals to architecture. But in order to gain in criticality and
a capacity to act, we need to gain allies within our discipline and to connect with
those who could share our interests. Mainly to have an impact on our colleagues
and on the way we relate with them, we recently produced an opera, “Superpowers
of Ten,” that was presented in the last Lisbon Triennial (Figure 4.14). It consisted of
a performative analog version of the 1977 second version of the movie “Powers
of Ten” by Charles and Ray Eames. The original movie presents the architectural
change of scale as something unproblematic that can be delegated to technical
4.9 Political Toys. “Plasencia Clergy House,” Plasencia, 2004. © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
4.10 Postcard. “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political jewelry, 2007.
4.11 Contract. “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political jewelry, 2007.
4.12 “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
4.13 “Skin Gardens.” Collection of political jewelry, 2007. © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
4.14 “Superpowers of Ten.” Close Closer, 3ª Edição Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa

(12 September–15 December 2013). © Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation.
automatisms. We did a slowed down version of it in which many discussions,

knowledges, actors and controversies, unrepresented in the original version, were
included. The final scene presents all the actors (in this case most of them are not
human).
Albena Yaneva: How do you make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of
entities with differing ontologies? What are the specific techniques used to create
new conditions and new spaces for their co-habitation?
Andrés Jaque: A first basic need is to recognize that architecture is not only
the architecture produced by architects, and that even architectures officially
designed by architects are participated in and affect many other actors. Moreover,
architectural objects never happen alone, and part of their social inclusion depends
on the way they relate to other entities. This implies that design as an occupation
needs to include a great deal of detailed observation and scrutiny.
The main difficulty is always to find the tactics to provide a certain level of
symmetry in the participation of those ontologies. We are not happy when the
inclusion of other entities happens as an extension of our own ontologies, for
instance by trying to include those others in our drawings as passive decorative
presences. To avoid this we try to find the conflicts that make it problematic to
compose a diversity of entities together. Those problems require adaptations in
many directions, which end up mobilizing a more symmetrical distribution of
adjustments. In practical terms, it requires us to divide the action into a series of
actions. We need to get closer to a way of managing design in which, instead of
it being dealt with as something that progressively jumps from paper and digital
spaces to edification, and from less to more detail, it requires a timing in which
no step is ever completed and those apparently successive steps keep appearing,
as long as the co-habitation is current. It also requires an approach in which a
high level of revision can be included throughout the process. We can consider
that repeated revision will concentrate efforts on the problematic evolution of
articulations, and that “discussion” does not necessarily mean human deliberation
but, for instance, the putting in place of alternative versions of the compositions so
that they can gain a place in which to be experimented with.
In my case it has also required me to diversify my engagement in architectural
practices into a number of activities. These are organized to acquire a social
distribution symmetrical to that of the enactment in which architecture is being
produced. Teaching, publishing and being part of debates has been important to
gain a certain independence from something that, in my opinion, weakens the
possibility of architecture obtaining social relevance: the divorce between the
actual performance of architectural realities and the underlying modern ideological
paradigm that, to a certain extent, prevails in architects’ discourses. To contribute
to making available alternatives to that divorce requires strong engagement in
restaging what architecture can be, not only by means of design but also in the
daily performance of its discussion, its teaching, its researching, and its exhibition.
A third practical requirement is the need to find ways of working that

enable multidisciplinarity, something that can only be achieved with time, by
constructing long running networks of discussion and cooperation between
different perspectives and practices. I have engaged in that, by maintaining formal
and informal cooperation with a number of people and institutions external to
architecture, by being interested in how architecture is being discussed by people
who are not architects, and by contributing to the development of methodologies
and opportunities for the projects to involve practitioners from different fields.
And I have also done so by reinforcing architectural traditions that tend to be
disregarded, such as that of engaging in fieldwork, in dedicating time to scrutinize
the trajectories of designs, and to deliberating with others to collectively construct
the definition of problems or needs.
The last consideration, but probably the most important, is the acceptance
that there is no possibility for holistic visions of reality, and that the notion of
universality does not correspond to the fragmentation and specific particularity
of which any composition is made of. It implies that only pragmatism can make
design relevant, and that a huge effort needs to be made to install architecture in
the contexts where it intends to operate.
References
Jaque, A. and Office for Political Innovation. 2010. House in Never Never Land. Collective
Experiments. El Escorial. El Croquis (149).
Jaque, A. 2013. Phantom. Mies as Rendered Society. Barcelona: Mies Files vol. 3. Mies
Barcelona.
Yaneva, A. 2005. Scaling up and down: Trials in architectural design. Social Studies of Science,
35(6), 867–94.
5
Low Resolution for a High (Tech) Cosmogram: How to Handle
the Large Hadron Collider
Sophie Houdart
As the biggest experimental device in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
set up by the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), half in France and
half in Switzerland, is a machine that can be described with superlative: 100 meters
underground, particles are accelerated at 99.9999991 percent of the speed of
light, execute some 11,245 rotations around the loop and collide with one another
about 600 million times per second! The incredible complexity supporting these
performance records has been designed for an even more incredible purpose:
“a journey inside the deepest structure of matter,” to discover “the fundamental
laws that determine the behavior of nature,” to understand “the first principles
that govern the universe,” and to provide “insights into the origin of the universe.”
Respect. Admiration. Adoration even.
In order to explain the extraordinary implication [involvement] of physics and
physicists in our contemporary societies, American anthropologist Sharon Traweek,
in her study of high-energy physics communities conducted in the late 1970s,
proposed at least two types of reason. One was concerned with organization and
particularly the ability of physicists, in times of war and in the aftermath of war,
to “administer large interdisciplinary teams of researchers, manage huge budgets,
and speak the language of government agencies” (Traweek 1988: 2). Another
reason concerned what she called “the emotional power of cosmology:”
[Physicists] do see their own profession as the revelation and custody of

fundamental truth and to a surprising degree Western culture confirms them
in this privileged role. They bring news of another world: hidden but stable,
coherent, and incorruptible. … The extraordinary scale and costliness of much
physics research if anything reinforces [the] cultural value [of this gospel]. The
great accelerators, for example, are like medieval cathedrals: free from the
constraints of cost-benefit analysis (op.cit.: 2–3).
The image of the LHC as a cathedral of the modern world is recurrent. It has been
used more than once, not only by physicists, technicians, and operators but also
by journalists and sociologists. Like medieval cathedrals, the LHC is said to allow
one to connect with the immensity and the mysteries of the cosmos, to gain access
to something that exists outside and beyond us – something like a transcendence
that still concerns us and our becoming. The size of the experimental device,
the extremely high technological performance, the seemingly irreproachable,
immaculate social organization of the CERN: all tend to credit the LHC and physicists
around it with the ability to provide the means for this incredible journey – straight
from somewhere under the ground to our common destiny.
Like the small people inhabiting architectural drawings in order to scale a
building,1 the image of the cathedral appears as one of the easiest ways to convey
what the machine is about: all at once, it delineates the place the LHC takes on
the ground (its easement), emphasizes the ambition driving it (the LHC as one
of the Twelve Labors of Hercules), and speaks of the vastness of the universe and
the new spiritual impetus it confers on our modern and technicized worlds. For all
these reasons, the LHC seemed to be the perfect object for a social anthropologist
interested, as I was, in what gives some consistency to our modern representations
of the world. When I became involved, between June 2011 and February 2012, in a
collaborative project to depict what was going on at the LHC,2 it would have been
quite easy to take for granted the narrative proposed by the physicists and the
media. There was more than enough in it to consider the big collider as a high-tech
cosmological system that shared common points with some other cosmological
systems anthropologists were familiar with, and that aimed at organizing the
world by defining the set of relationships between people, gods, animals, and
objects. The idea, however, was to consider collective celebrations and general
representations, and to look for ways to depict the kind of concreteness needed in
order to get a unified vision of the universe. I was convinced that, as the historian of
science John Tresch points out in his studies of Western cosmologies (Tresch 2005,
2007, 2012), there was much to gain from scrutinizing the materiality of devices,
objects, or series of actions – in other words, cosmograms – that foreground such
cosmologies, rather than analyzing them in terms of representations.
It’s the materiality of the cosmogram that makes it a particularly useful

object [because] it puts [a] totality in a concrete form as the basis for new
interpretations and action: social relations, relations with other cultures, with
natural entities, with animals, plants – but it also establishes the relation between
different domains or ontological levels – the mundane world, the world of spirits,
God and the ancestors, places where they intersect. It’s much more concrete
than a cosmology. A cosmology can’t be seen; a “worldview” is locked up inside
people’s head. It also allows for a lighter grip: people can relate to it in different
ways, it’s not some monolithic mental pattern that determines their thoughts and
action (Tresch 2005: 69).
The question for me, then, became the following: How is an artifact – something that
has been designed and built – able to obtain such credit for revealing the hidden
structure of the universe. And what is more, revealing it with such consensus?
Grégoire Eloy, a photographer, StéphaneSautour, an artist, and I went there,
to the Pays de Gex, on the border between France and Switzerland. First we met
Low Resolution for a High (Tech) Cosmogram 81
physicists, then operators, engineers. After our first visit Stéphane, the artist,
decided to remain in Paris because, as he said, he was happy to have seen what
was there but did not really need to be at the place to get his material. Grégoire the
photographer and I went back to the CERN and the Pays de Gex several times, over
a period of several weeks. We definitely did need to be there to get our material.
Grégoire was carefully taking photos here and there on the circle drawn by the
collider’s ring, while I was doing fieldwork, interviewing people, following them –
shadowing them – in their routine. For me nothing could emerge there apart from
this peculiar relationship developed with the people who take care of the machine
day and night. It was not long before the three of us discovered that approaching
such a technical object as the LHC was challenging in many ways. First, over the
last 15 years it had been the focus of many historical and sociological studies,3
and of artistic inquiries. In that respect, as the material was abundant (thousands
of images circulating on the Web, for instance, and hundreds of papers and
books), the feeling persisted that nothing new could really be added. Somehow
the scenario was set: this scenario unambiguously showed the LHC as a unique
and extraordinary machine capable of situating us, as Humans, in a cosmological
history. The second difficulty concerned the properties of the apparatus itself
(among other things, the radioactivity it generates while working), which prevent
immediate access and confront the researcher with a large degree of invisibility.
In other words, we were supposed to come back with a depiction of what was
happening at the LHC but without ever having had a chance to see it – although we
quickly came to understand that seeing in this context had a special meaning. Third,
the scale of the machine (27 kilometers of circumference and a symbolic potential
comparable to a cathedral or Egyptian pyramid) makes it particularly difficult to
grasp at a glance. These are some of the parameters that gave an orientation to the
depiction with which we ended.
During our first visit I was struck by the fact that, as a physicist explained to me,
almost 90 percent of the people at the CERN were concerned only with maintaining
and stabilizing the machine. In other words, for the LHC to produce reliable data
that physicists would analyze, a wide variety of competencies are needed that seem
eventually to disappear from the final scenario. It reminded me of the physicist Max
Planck, quoted by Isabelle Stengers, who was sure of being able to speak about the
world independently of knowledge relationships created by humans. For something
like “the conservation of energy” principle to exist and remain possible, explains
Stengers, physicists such as Planck had to suppose that even inhabitants from Mars
rely on it and could formulate or could have formulated the same rules (Stengers
1996: 17–19). But according to her, this is going too fast as it supposes a common
ground (Nature) on which everybody would rely without any consideration other
than the reputation of the scientist and how much credibility they have to speak
faithfully in the name of something else. It was partly to object such allegiance
to Nature that Stengers developed her concept of cosmopolitics as a way to slow
down the process of agreement and to open scientific and technological objects
to questions, doubts, proposals of some alternatives, resistances even – anything
that could shake and disturb authoritarian evidences. I thus take Stengers’ proposal
as an invitation to reopen a situation that looks closed or an argument that is

linear. What if we make room, in our depiction, for the nonlinear, for bugs, bumps
and relief? It may seem odd that my research at the CERN echoed in my mind
my previous experience in an architecture studio. I felt I might miss the point if I
credited the LHC with supporting a kind of transcendence (whether it was called
Truth or Universe or The Whole, or whatever) without accounting for the 90 percent
of people working daily to stabilize it – just as I might have missed the point had I
depicted architecture without accounting for the daily routine, the tedious nitty-
gritty work of assistants, model makers, or graphic designers. The methodology
that consists in going into the details of actions to understand how new things
– new worlds – emerge from the capricious accumulation of matter has proved
particularly efficient for the study of architecture. It could also fit the study of such
an incommensurable object as the LHC, designed to unravel the mysteries of
nature. Where can we stand to observe what is concretely needed to connect the
scale of particles, circulating into the LHC at the speed of light, with the mysteries
of life or the origin of the universe?
Because Grégoire, Stéphane and I were not physicists, we decided we needed
to go and see for ourselves if and how what scientists do at CERN, with the LHC,
does concern us. Supposedly, we – like anyone else – would have to go through
the LHC to get a chance to know more about ourselves, about our origins and our
destiny. Following Stengers’s proposals, we decided to try to slow down the process
through which the infinitely small and the infinitely big get connected; to pause
for a while on what is needed, required, to get this kind of transcendence and to
stabilize it. Each of us tried to look at the LHC from a place where the cosmos and
the particles are not a given anymore; a place from which humans, especially, still
have work to do, and more than that, choices to make. From our perspective the
cosmos could only be the thing obtained at the very end of a complex process, not
the more or less stable point connected to particles in a direct and linear manner.
Between particles and the cosmos, our position – strictly speaking – was at first
sight very simple: “Where are we, exactly?” From where we are (in the fields, above
the tunnel, in the Pays de Gex, close to farmers, close to Geneva and its lake, close
to the Jura mountains), what do we see? What does this cosmos, the cosmos we are
supposed to belong to and come from, require to exist and to last in time? What
kinds of connections does it require? What kind of relationships does it involve?
Taking the machine as a high-tech cosmogram devoted to commensurate the
cosmos and particles, the infinitely big and the infinitely small, we collaborated in
the field to propose a low-resolution device to render the hesitations, ambiguities,
uncertainties, fuzzy zones and resistances of any sort that punctuate scientific
and technical practices. We created another narrative aimed at exploring, or re-
exploring, the various ways to connect oneself to the cosmos through the LHC.
Grégoire, the photographer, spent hours striding across lands and fields in the
Pays de Gex above the LHC, tracking ambiguous traces of the presence of the
LHC. Stéphane, from his studio in Paris, lost himself in visuals on the Web, put silly
requests to the CERN’s search engine, chose three of them, printed them in low
resolution and then started to reproduce, to reenact visual entities. I went to the
CERN to spend days with technicians from the Environment Department, covering 5.1 Non-linear
the area marked out by the LHC to measure everything that would come out perspective. Or
how to proliferate
of the device in the air, water and soil. I followed engineers from the Metrology
connections
Department, eventually going down into the tunnel to check the alignment of the between particles
magnets which ensures that scientists get “good and nice beams.” I shared the daily and the cosmos.
and nightly routines with operators at the Central Control Centre. Photo collage by
From the geologists I learned that the LHC is connected, wittingly or not, to wild the author.
boars in the forest that keep transforming the soil and little by little threatening
all sorts of cables feeding the LHC. From Julien, in the Environment Department,
I learned that environmental monitoring has forced the LHC to become a very
good check-point from which to observe the effects of distant events – such as
the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011. From Dominique, in the
Metrology Department, I learned that special devices and precise calculations were
required because the LHC, extended as it is throughout the territory, is affected by
the spherical shape of the Earth and even by tides. I also learned that a basic fishing
line is still considered the best method to realign the magnets. These operations
are not routine and are all but stabilized. In one way or another, they affect,
complicate, make denser and less linear the connection between the particles and
the cosmos. Among the widely diverse scenes I collected, I would like to introduce
in this chapter three episodes that offer a glimpse of the means that physicists,
operators, and engineers have to understand the LHC. Eventually, in the design of
5.2 “Propagation our own cosmogram, these narratives composed the sound track of the installation
of Monotony.” that weaves together my experience at the CERN, Grégoire’s photos and Stéphane’s
Image courtesy of
huge drawings. They offered equivocal views of what matters if we are to grasp
Antoine Dumont,
F93. the cosmos we inhabit. They aimed at disclosing the imagination by rendering the
heterogeneous work of composition required to obtain a unified version of the
cosmos.
Higgs in the Honey Field
Alexander is a physicist. He welcomes me to the Control Centre for the CMS

(Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment, one of the four great experiments in
progress at the LHC. As we talk, we keep an eye on one of the many screens in this
rather special control tower. “We know how the protons are going, where they are
in their life cycle. At the moment we are in ramp down,” explains Alexander. “During
the day, they fine tune, because there are so many experts there. Our idea is to
reach 250 million beams a second.” “They” are the people who work in the CCC, the
Central Control Centre: beam physicists, as they are called here.
We exploit the collisions. We have tables identifying the particles, a very

precise table, but what we try to do is to understand the interactions between
the particles, the structure of the universe. We already have a few identified
interactions: electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong forces. We know
all that, even if the last two are already harder to put on paper. We want to
understand how certain particles are sensitive to certain forces and other
particles to other forces. In fact, we know only 4 percent of the structure of
the universe! And there is also the problem of the origin of matter: we don’t
understand that at all. We have modeled a Higgs field, the Higgs effect is
everywhere in the universe, it is one of the components of the mass of the
universe. It can be imagined like a field of honey that you are trying to walk
through and which puts up a certain resistance; the further you go the heavier
you get. We are looking for the origin of the quark mass, except that the quark is
unstable and disintegrates into other particles. The materialization of the Higgs
field is so rare that we have not yet seen it. We have proved it exists by default, in
a way.
The Beams and their Navigators
The Central Control Room is a quarter-circle of computers with one or two screens
in each of the four corners of the huge room. Above each bank, measurements are
displayed on large screens. There is a bank for the injectors, one for SPS, one for
water, electricity and cryo-engineering, and the last one for the LHC. Two people
are on the shift for each bank. It is 11 pm and I am getting ready to go on night shift
with George-Henry and Laurette, trained operators at the Central Control Centre.
A bit later that same night, Laurette explains that a beam contains 1,380
bunches. We also count in trains, there are 144-bunch trains and 72-bunch trains.
They produce different dynamic effects and will have a different granularity.
“My objective,” says Laurette, “is to keep the parameters stable over the whole
beam. Now that the machine has been going for a while, we have some feedback.
We work with this feedback to try to keep the parameters as constant as possible.
But we keep asking the question “Is today a good day or not?” It is the same for
racing car drivers, they are always on the same circuit, with the same cars, but
there is one who wins.
Producing a good beam and keeping it stable is a technical matter, but it also
depends on multiple parameters which cannot always be controlled. As if the
beams had a life of their own and the lives are all different.
All that will depend on the past, what magnetic cycle was done before, for
example. It is not the same thing to inject after two hours or after five. We look at
what has happened over the last 24 hours: “Ah, that happened, so I can expect to
have such and such a problem.” The vacuum, for example, is trial and error.
One of the things that can make a difference is whether or not the beam physicists
took part in the start-up period. “Those who went through the start-up tend to
fill step by step to produce collisions. Whereas those who have just arrived are
less sensitive to that, they have not been through the entire test period and all
the instabilities,” explains Laurette. Coming from the experimental side, being a
physicist or an engineer can also make a difference. Laurette says she is on the
machine side.
After that there are the imponderables. Such as Friday, a fortnight ago, when
an electrical cable burnt and the injector crashed. A month ago, when work was
being done on the network, a technician hit a cable with a pick. He was okay, he
was very lucky, the pick went between the soil and the cable. But the machine did
not like it.
While time ticks slowly by and none of these events that could happen at any time
actually happen, Laurette and George-Henry keep talking about the nights that are
not like this one: busy, chaotic nights, “nights when we had to do three injections,”
for example. “We can have vacuum spikes,” completely random phenomena when
there is nothing to be done and we lose the beam without understanding why. We
try things, reduce the intensity, but “sometimes it does not work.” George-Henry
and Laurette note that it often happens in waves.
When the equipment starts to fail, we will have a whole series. We had a series of
faults in supply, now a series of problems with the life of the beam. We also had
a series with the kickers, the fast magnets which direct the beam, and which did
not kick any more, but funnily enough we didn’t hear any more about that. There
was also a series of UFOs, for “Unidentified Falling Objects” or “Unidentified Fast
Objects.” We had something like little bubbles falling on the beams which caused
very rapid losses and the beams disappeared. Nobody ever understood what it
was. There were lots of attempts to explain it and operations to try to reproduce
them. It may have been dust, we never found out. “When we push the machine, it
pushes some of the equipment to the limit.”
While nothing seems to want to upset the homogeneity of the system and
destabilize the stable beams, Laurette tells me: “My thing, my obsession, is having
homogeneity in the bunches. It is not very scientific, but I prefer to take the time
to inject homogeneous bunches. That comes from experience.” And when there
is nothing much to do, Laurette “likes watching,” observing the optimization time
between two levelings, correlating, checking loss levels.
That helps to understand if there is a dump afterwards. It is my way of learning,

observing the beam. It is like your work as an anthropologist. Except that for me
the idea is to observe the others to try to homogenize them. I want to see how the
beam reacts to a given situation. How it happens that today we have one beam
that loses more than the other. To see what we can do to improve the beam.
What can be tried. But in any case, the beam always has the last word. On paper
it says that the beam must do this or that, but if the machine does not want to …
that is my technical side.
The night drags on. It is now 5:40 am. Several of us go out of the room – the first
time of the night for me – to take the dishes to the kitchen and clean the table.
When I come back “It has crashed, we have lost the com!” On the screens, Beam 1
and Beam 2 display “zero” where a few minutes before there was a constant 1,380.
Indicators are going red all over the screens. Panic! The “initial event” is diagnosed
in RBA78. It is a maindipole. “That is hardware, it’s a mechanical failure. The expert
is trying to see what happened.” Waiting to hear from an expert, Laurette does
a post-mortem on her computer: on the three screens in front of her she has an
image up to a thousand turns before the event, which corresponds to only a few
thousandths of a second. “I am checking the cause and making sure that the dump
went well.” She cannot do much about the causes, except guess, so she tries to
gauge the consequences for the machine. “I feel we have an access, George-Henry
…,” Laurette says to her team mate. She calls someone from another department,
waking him up. She explains what is happening, what is displayed in orange
(instead of green) on one of the screens:
See if you can do a reset or if we will have to do an access. The last time I saw an
orange controller there, it wasn’t a good sign. I have another magnet, the B32R7,
where I have no QPS. Often that is not good … Do you think we will have to go
down? Will you confirm that?
The Bubble, the Trout and the Cosmos
I have an appointment with the geodesic metrology department at 8:30 am. A few
weeks earlier, the beams were turned off for the winter break. Here and there on
the CERN sites the screens displayed:
***End of 2011 Run***

Thank you all for this brilliant and exciting year. We look forward to another
unforgettable year in 2012.
*** Start of Xmas Technical Stop***
Today I am going down into the tunnel with Elizabeth and Alex. Before going
down into “the bowels of the earth,” we prepare the equipment: the 1-metre long
deviation measurement tool in its wooden box, the bubble levels and of course
batteries, helmets, and “Biocells,” the belts to which are attached the masks we will
need if there is a helium leak. Before we go we have to adjust the bubble levels.
On the ground floor in one of the department’s workshops, Elizabeth duly “adjusts
the bubbles” – the spherical bubble level and another more precise and more
sensitive one on the thick marble bench that is used as a reference plane. She
uses a screwdriver to make sure the bubble is exactly in the centre of the space.
They need adjusting because they are knocked out of kilter when carried about in
bags for example. “There are mechanical and physical limits to the precision of our
measurements!” exclaims Elizabeth.
Once the pillars have been installed and the wire stretched between them,
Elizabeth and Alex set up the deviation measurement tool, fixed at one of its ends
on the fiducial mark on the magnet. By moving a small screen with an eyepiece
on the ruler, Alex places the mobile part so that the wire is under the eyepiece. To
look into the eyepiece, Alex has to stand on a wooden crate. After making a few
adjustments, He lets me look into it. In the center of the eyepiece there is a circle.
The wire makes a line underneath it. Alex moves the eyepiece so that the circle sits
on the line: this is called “finding the tangent.” The deviation measurement tool is
used to position ourselves in relation to the bore points, outside the curve drawn
by the magnets. That should avoid the problems we had yesterday, when the tool
was too short and struck the iron racks above the magnets. “At 60 centimeters it
touched a hood, we adjusted it to 100 centimeters.” Elizabeth put one level after
another on the first bore point, which will be used as a reference. If need be, she will
adjust the plane of the bore point with a slight turn of the screw. “Okay, not bad. It is
a very sensitive level and here we are not in microns, so there is no need to nitpick.
That one is really sensitive, I know it well, I can make it go where I want just by
touching it.” Alex, 100 meters further off, is making adjustments on the pillar itself.
He turns the handles on the pillar one way and the other to stabilize it. To check he
looks at the little level on the pillar. It is just as delicate an operation to balance and
stabilize the pillar as it is to find the tangent in the eyepiece.
At each station, the height of the wire also has to be adjusted, directly on the
pillar, so that it slides under the eyepiece. At the end of a station, when the data
are recorded on the little monitor, Alex and Elizabeth look at all the measurements
taken, as well as the offset calculated by the machine on the basis of the parameters
already entered.
There we have an offset of 1.8, which is a bit much. The tolerance for the
dipoles of the LHC is 0.2. That is the offset tolerated in relation to the theoretical
measurement made when the magnets were installed. Right, in any case that is
why we take measurements. Afterwards, they will be smoothed over. Okay, now
we close.
Elizabeth tells me that:
last year, one Friday evening we left the equipment in the car. We were tired. On
Monday morning it was cold. We saw that the instruments were cold, but what
of it? We took measurements for three hours, for an operation which usually
takes us four. We had almost finished and we realized that our measurements
were wrong! Out by two tenths. At this degree of precision, the atmosphere really
counts!
We finish a new station and then stop for lunch. Then we set up the instrument again
for the third segment, going further along the injection tunnel. Even more than in
the previous station, the wire in the middle goes well above the eyepiece. We have
to slacken the wire. With the draughts, even when they are hardly perceptible, it
rises, moves, wobbles. Impossible to catch it in the eyepiece or to stabilize it.
• You will have to drop it a bit, give it more slack and I’ll take the measurement
quickly. [Talking to the wire] Gently, gently, keep still … I can’t measure you
like that … [Louder, to Elizabeth] I can’t do it, Elizabeth, it is wobbling too
much!
• How did they do it last year?
• Perhaps they put a weight on the wire …
• I’ll ask Patrick. [On the phone to Patrick] You know, we are just at the place
where there is a slope, before it goes up again. And the problem is that the
wire is dead straight, so when we get to the center … Yes, yes, the pillars are
already secured … No, it is already right at the bottom …
Alex and I keep watching the wire slowly rising … “It has moved two or three
centimeters, that is why they put sheaths in the LHC.” Elizabeth talks into the phone:
“Alex suggested putting a weight on it … Okay, I’ll tighten it and put something
on the wire.” After scrabbling around in her bag, Elizabeth finally hangs her bunch
of keys on the wire. They manage to adjust the height of the wire by moving the
weight along it.
• Ah … it’s wobbling …
• You have to let the wire settle down.
• What if we tighten it a little? And then we’ll move the keys.
• We can just take several measurements and average them.
Elizabeth steadies the keys with her finger and Alex manages finally to take a
measurement. Then he moves the deviation measurement tool to the next point.
“Bring the keys a bit closer. Back a bit … there!” What with one thing and another,
they manage this next station. We have spent a lot of time in this hollow and
nobody feels like doing the next one. They undo the wire, put the pillars away in a
small side tunnel and we go back up to the surface.
Conclusions
Obtaining and maintaining nice and stable particle beams aimed at delivering
significant truths about the structure of the universe require constant attention.
Along the process, people, whether physicists, operators, or engineers, acquire
knowledge on various unexpected things. These are all needed to finally connect
ourselves to something beyond us. As much as the LHC can be described as a
cathedral or as a “chain of production,” it can be depicted as a “symbiotic complex”
(Beech op.cit. viii) that has all the properties of an “almost-living” entity (Grimaud
and Paré 2011): people willingly recognize that the machine “moves” and has its
own beats, some say it breathes, dilates or retracts, goes up and down. Knowing
how it behaves in its environment is what people work on daily. To comprehend
such dimensions, there is a lot to gain by doing away with “the rude alternative,”
as Stengers puts it, “between knowing and believing” (op.cit. 44). Particles are “not
indifferent to what they are submitted to,” to the know-how of operators who have
learnt to be sensitive to how particles like to be injected in the machine and run
side by side; or to the land surveyors who have to coordinate and homogenize 27
kilometers of circuit at some hundredths of a centimeter.
There is often more in the rough depiction of operations or in the spontaneous
appreciation of situations than in the accommodating analysis that comes
afterwards. To use narratives to depict what is going on at the LHC allows me to
explore or re-explore the various ways to connect oneself to the cosmos. It allows
me to re-open the investigation by asking different questions, or by putting the

same questions differently to scientists and people taking care of the machine.
Notes
1 The comparison is not fortuitous: previous to this enquiry, I was doing research on
architectural practices, and was particularly interested in the technical devices used by
architects to build new worlds (Houdart 2008, 2009, 2013). See also Yaneva 2009.
2 This project has been undertaken by F93, a cultural center aimed at bridging science
and the public. I would like to thank Marc Boissonnade, director of the Center, for the
opportunity he offered me to carry out this fieldwork.
3 Among many others, see for instance: Beech 2010, Galison 1987, Galison and Hevly
1992, Giudice 2010, Pestre et al. 1987, 1990, Roy 2011, Schopper 2009.
References
Beech, M. 2010. The Large Hadron Collider: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe. Springer,
Heidelberg: Springer Science + Business Media.
Galison, P. 1987. Ainsi s’achèvent les expériences. La place des expériences dans la physique du
XXe siècle. Paris: La Découverte.
Galison, P. and Hevly, B. (eds) 1992. Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Grimaud, E. and Paré, Z. 2011. Quand les robots mangeront des pommes. Paris: Pétra.
Guidice, G.F. 2010. A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC. New York:
Houdart, S. 2008. Copying, cutting and pasting social spheres: computer designers’
participation in architectural projects. Science Studies, 21(1) (Special Issue:
“Understanding Architecture, Accounting Society”): 47–63.
Houdart, S. 2009. Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph. Paris: Editions Donner Lieu.
Houdart, S. 2013. Welcome to the “small people-texture industry”! Human figures in
architectural perspective drawings, in D.A.A Transdisciplinary Handbook of Design
Anthropology, edited by Y. Milev. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1006–13.
Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA:
Pestre, D., Hermann, A., Krige, J. and Mersits, U. 1987. History of CERN, Vol.1: Launching the
European Organization for Nuclear Research. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Pestre, D., Hermann, A., Krige, J. and Mersits, U. 1990. History of CERN, Vol.2: Building and
Running the Laboratory. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Roy, A. 2011. Dualism and non-dualism: Elementary Forms of Physics at CERN. PhD
Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Schopper, H. 2009. LEP. The Lord of the Collider Rings at CERN 1980–2000: The Making,
Operation and Legacy of the World’s Largest Scientific Instrument. Berlin: Spinger-Verlag.
Stengers, I. 1996. Cosmopolitiques I. La guerre des sciences, Paris: La Découverte/Les

Empêcheurs de penserenrond.
Traweek, S. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, London.
Tresch, J., 2005. Cosmogram, in Cosmograms, edited by M. Ohanian and J.-C. Royoux. New
York: Lukas & Sternberg, 67–76.
Tresch, J. 2007. Technological world-pictures: Cosmic things and cosmograms. Isis, 98:
84–99.
Tresch, J. 2012. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Yaneva, A. 2009. The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Oxford:
Peter Lang AG.
6
An Interview with Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García
Grinda, AMID.cero9
Albena Yaneva: As Isabelle Stengers notes, without slowing down there can be no
creation. How does your work contribute to “slowing down” reasoning, “slowing
down” the construction of the common world, and creating a space for hesitation?
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda: Let us answer this question first,
because it relates to the necessity of creating a space for hesitation, which both
raises concerns and highlights the need to rethink what nature is today in relation
to the continuous transformation of our environments. One of our ways to deal
with all this is to invent or retrieve new and incomprehensible words, to form
glossaries composed by new meanings yet to be unveiled. We are interested in the
disruptive effect of those who, belonging to a given culture, invent a new language
by introducing new words, some of them as assemblies of existing words, other
previously known words introduced again in different contexts, some of them
clearly out of date and which, in light of a new problem, acquire new meanings and
relevance. All those neologisms require thinking about conventional assumptions,
about given cultural constructs that do not exactly slow down our actions, but that
do project our imagination towards a collective desire, one that society has not yet
attempted to actualize, and for which it therefore has not been able to coin a term.
This is about departing from the reasoning that demands that the emergence
of new realities be followed by the invention of the terms that denote them. In
reversing this logic by inventing new terms to express new, yet-to-come realities,
we are somehow forcing their emergence. Remembering what Rorty pointed out:
What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination rather than reason
is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking
differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change
… The latter “method” of philosophy is the same as the “method” of utopian
politics or revolutionary science (as opposed to parliamentary politics, or normal
science). The method is to re-describe lots and lots of things in new ways, until
you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising
generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms
of non-linguistic behavior (Rorty 1989: 7).
An example is the term Third Nature, which was not coined by us but that we
usually apply to refer to both our projects and other alien realities. The term terza
natura (third nature) was coined in the early sixteenth century by Jacopo Bonfadio
to refer to a new reality halfway between existing categories; a new species
combining nature and culture. It was used specifically in relation to the new
Renaissance gardens, which established culturally constructed relationships with
nature, technology, and history, and defined spaces with a radically new materiality
incorporating historical references and mythology. The first documented use of
the word occurs in a letter Bonfadio wrote to a fellow humanist, Plinio Tomacello,
in which he described his pleasant perception of the landscape around Lake
Garda:
For in the gardens … the industry of the local people has been such that nature
incorporated with art is made an artificer and naturally equal with art, and from
them both together it made a third nature, which I would not know how to name
(Hunt 2000: 33).
These gardens are more sophisticated, more deliberate and more complex in
their mix of culture and nature than is agricultural land, which accounts for a large
part of what Cicero called a “second nature.” For us, the concept of third nature
is synonymous with space, the phenomenon of mediating between material of
different origins so as to redefine the links with nature and climate, and to produce
local and artificial modifications of the physical environment – what we used to
call buildings.
Understanding buildings as Third Natures means turning them into arenas of
interaction between actors of different origins that do not necessarily have the
same umwelt, although they may share the same space. Those spaces of interaction
are intended firstly to compose them, to put them together so that there is an
active process of sharing space. Second, imagine those buildings as places where
the umwelt of the various actors involved are not necessarily identified, but are
interspersed through the process of being put together. We progressively become
aware of the fact that the modes of relationship between us, with our environment
and therefore with that which we regard as nature, are cultural constructs and are
therefore subject to change and constant redefinition.
Perhaps one of the projects that has lately more time demanding and that
redefines the usual categories in which our discipline is generated, transmitted,
and discussed, is a book, our own monograph published last year in the AA and
titled Third Natures. The book takes the form of a micropaedia, that is, the younger
sister of the classical encyclopedia. It updates the current state of knowledge
about the world and tries to describe it through a specific group of neologisms and
familiar words intended to reflect our approach to the project. Both the words and
our projects are understood as neologisms, pieces that seek to turn the attention
elsewhere and make us understand that the modification of our environment
should be first and foremost a critical task, and not based solely on criteria of
production, economy and efficiency.
Interview with Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda, AMID.cero9 95
Albena Yaneva: How should we understand design practice and its relation to the
material and the living worlds?
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda: For us there is in fact a world out
there or rather many worlds out there. Even though there is a universe formed by
a plurality of different worlds interconnected in terms of access to information,
and even if anything can indeed be considered as an isolated object with no
interconnections, things and ourselves are still part of the physical and virtual
proximity of productive, economic, and social environments that, despite their high
level of interrelations, tend to be simultaneously opaque, refractory, and hardly
permeable. These environments of affiliation and proximity, whether elective or
given, are still present in our practices, tending to isolate – but above all to present
as supposedly independent – everything around us. While our actions constantly
affect other worlds and we are in constant interaction with our environment
through our presence and our acts, a big effort is needed to be aware of that
invisible world of connections that link us, our acts, and everything surrounding
us, with those worlds out there.
In our everyday practices we still tend to perceive things and actions as isolated
entities and, by education, in many cases we have the tendency to identify, isolate,
and treat them as independent. This effort to present the existing connections
between things, and to amplify and foster weak or even non-existent relationships
as something intelligible, has been one of the main targets of our work since we
started.
In our particular jargon, “assembling” means “interconnecting.” Among the
possible interconnections that can be set between different entities, the simpler and
more evident are based on similarity and on physical proximity. When independent
things have common properties, we can infer a degree of interconnection because
they have or have had a common origin, or they respond or have responded to
similar external sets of circumstances. Likewise, one of the simplest forms of
interaction is sharing physical space, that is, being physically located in the same
environment. When two entities are located in the same physical space, this
precise environment, and by extension, the things that construct and occupy it, are
affected by their own presence.
In our case, how do we assemble, or how do we put together and induce
interaction among apparently different things? Usually we simply move them from
their own origins to the virtual space that is the design. Incorporating them into
the concrete and specific world of the design, we introduce them into the category
of things that are relevant to it and become part of a reduced-scale version of a
cosmology, with the intention that – like words – they resonate with one another
in our brain and almost involuntarily they start producing interconnections.
This small-scale cosmology expands the usual restrictions of the architectural
project, generally limited by the immediate physical context, the kinds of actions
– productive or not – that will be developed inside, the user as an anonymous
actor devoid of character, the climatic imperatives or even the culture – most of it
illegible for the layperson – of architecture as a discipline.
Initially these expanded links tend to be simpler than those previously

mentioned, and afterwards – on a second reading – start gaining complexity
as we understand the shared territories of all the material that we add to the
project. Ideally, these connections between significant materials will help us and,
by extension, those who experience them, to build links between the object and
the world around it through different levels of reading and complexity, which
are revealed and intelligible according to each perceiver’s vital and cultural
backgrounds.
That material (biotic and non-biotic, cultural and technical) is incorporated into
the physical space with differing degrees of abstraction, from the more direct, to
the most elaborate and mediated, which correspond to relatively weaker – and
therefore more difficult to rebuild – connections. We cannot speak automatically
about interconnections since they are produced in our brain and their basic material
consists of experienced space and our conscious or unconscious memories of all
kinds of lived experiences.
We actually reproduce common habits in our culture, which overlap and
interfering with the usual methodologies of our discipline. The assimilation of
material from diverse origins that coincide in space and time is something that
belongs to our everyday life. Constant access to information (and knowledge)
through various sources and channels, all interspersed and overlapping despite
their origins, is now part of our existence. We voraciously and instantly consume
material of any kind, from different periods in history, irrespective of the origin.
This is something that we try naturally to incorporate into our work, in our case by
looking for material that problematizes our mediated relationship with our umwelt
and our shared surroundings.
Albena Yaneva: What is the role of design if nature is no longer passive and salient
enough to provide a background for human activities?
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda: The question concerns two conflicting
terms for us: design – because we understand that it is an obsolete category – and
the living world or nature, to the extent that it can be considered as something
external; whereas we understand that, in our environment, it is necessarily and
unquestionably the object of our work. Virtually all of our projects take it, directly
or indirectly, as their main subject to address.
First of all the term “design” is something that we do not consider applicable
to our work. We try to avoid things projected into the future that serve or are
illustrations of ideas or conceptions of a former, predetermined and specific world.
Moreover, we do think that today it is not relevant to apply the word design to
project environments. The term comes from the Italian disegno, the drawing that
serves as a tool to transmit what is intended to be actualized in reality, anticipating
a final result, and that should be replicated at full-scale as faithfully as possible. This
means that it is a possibility designed beforehand and that, once projected into the
future, becomes a certainty imposed on others, finished as such and considered
complete when it is actualized in the space of reality.
Therefore the word “design,” according to its etymology, is a fixed, predetermined

and complete process, offering no possibility of change or evolution over time.
In this sense it is an object, a differentiable and isolated entity, something that is
considered to be finished when the correspondence with the disegno is verified.
Neither its future interaction with other entities and environments is carefully
thought through nor its cultural or functional decline is contemplated. The usual
connotations of the term design still prevail over the finitude and preponderance of
the object as something brimming with distinctive conditions. But if we replace the
term “design” by the definition of space – or environment – based on the constant
interaction of different agents (biotic and non-biotic) that inevitably evolves over
time, all these connotations tend to disappear, or at least can be problematized.
This set of interactions between different agents is visible in projects like the
“Museum of Energy” (Figures 6.1 and 6.2) or the “Carboniferous Museum” (Figures
6.3 and 6.4), both in the north of Spain, which deal with how we manage energy
and extinct species.
But maybe it was also in the “Magic Mountain,” in Ames (Iowa), when we started
to deal with these subjects, quite a while ago, in 2002. Right in the heart of the
city there is an enormous power station that runs at full throttle. Our proposal
transformed it into a piece of landscape inside the city: a living mountain (Figure 6.5).
Rather than resorting to cosmetic treatment, our project challenged established
instruments and concepts of gardening, species breeding, architecture, and the
ecology of living. We proposed to totally cover the fragmented volumes of the
power station with a membrane of roses, lights, and honeysuckle (Figure 6.6). This
skin wraps around and adapts to the units at different heights, unifying them with
a silhouette and common material. The membrane creeps above the highest parts
of the power station and transforms the building into a vertical garden. The species
chosen for this vegetal crust are a combination of rosebush creepers against a
green background of honeysuckle, making use of the immense genetic material
developed by Griffith J. Buck (an Ames native), who grew many species of roses
adapted to Iowa’s harsh continental climate. We proposed to deploy the gardener’s
ancestral techniques of genetic selection to evoke a modern image in the power
station’s uncomfortable presence. Ames lies on the southern migratory route and,
like a real mountain, the membrane provides a resting place for the largest species
of North American butterflies. At the same time, the power station has been
turned into an open receptacle where an enormous variety of bird species can
nest, attracted by the water tanks and the abundant insect life in the vertical rose
garden. In recent years many of the area’s forests and wetlands have disappeared.
The power station provides an alternative habitat and a living laboratory where the
university can test new varieties of species adapted to this climate. The assembly of
the existing power station and its new image produce an ecosystem that is subject
to human interaction. Architecture and energy infrastructure are converted into
living systems using bioengineering techniques, thus creating a natural monument
generated artificially.
Even our own name, AMID, refers to this space of interaction between various
agents. It is an English preposition, which denotes the space in between things,
6.1 “Museum of Energy” section and plan. © AMID.cero9.
6.2 “Museum of Energy” greenhouse interior. © AMID.cero9.
6.3 “Carboniferous objects, people, or natural species, and is also used to express something that
Museum” forest happens at one temporal point in the course of a process, something that is not
plan and section.
already fixed or closed, but in the same process of being defined. In our own
© AMID.cero9.
vocabulary AMID refers to the space of interaction between us, our collaborators,
and our students, the mediated and to-be-conquered space constructed by our
interaction with the rest of the world. Being a preposition, and neither a noun nor
an adjective, the term speaks about and implies projection and transformation (as
a proactive condition). For us, AMID is synonymous with space.
Albena Yaneva: Can you provide examples that illustrate how your design works turn
nature into cause for thinking and mobilize a variety of entities in new compositions?
6.4 “Carboniferous Museum” forest model. © AMID.cero9.
6.5 “Magic
Mountain” exterior.
© AMID.cero9.
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda: An example of how we turn nature
into cause for thinking is the project for Rome: “Black Cloud” (Figure 6.7). The project
discusses humans’ relations with animals, and in particular with a peculiar kind of
animal, those that have been genetically modified through their interaction with
humans. The relationship between humans and animals is based on power, and
almost always animals have been the relatively powerless and marginalized “other.”
The voicelessness of the individual animal enables those in power to manipulate,
exploit, displace, consume, waste, and torture with impunity. Many animals have
their own “territories,” specific environments to which they have adapted, but 6.6 “Magic
what happens when they are forced to comply with the human spatial ordering? Mountain” flower
petals model.
Although some orders are created exclusively for human-animal interaction, most
© AMID.cero9.
involve the rigid caging or fixing of animals in a given area (the zoo, the farm, the
slaughterhouse). Only a few animals have the ability to transgress the imagined
and materially constructed spatial orderings of human societies, and then only
to a relatively small degree. When they are able to evade human domination (by
spreading plague, for example), they are usually persecuted for it.
6.7 “Black “Black Cloud” is a gigantic open cage that connects a former slaughterhouse
cloud” site plan. to the Monte dei Cocci, an artificial hill in Testaccio, built up of shards of ancient
© AMID.cero9.
Roman amphorae (Figures 6.8 and 6.9). It is a tool for redefining the relationships
between humans and post-natural species. The cage – an artificial ecotope
inhabited by starlings – allows us to revisit the way we interact with the animals
(including invasive species) that live with us in big cities, the use we make of
different species, and the way we perceive animals culturally. The strange cage is an
open knitted basket that serves as a temporary communal roost for the immense
swarms of starlings that arrive in Rome each spring, dyeing the sky black with their
clouds (Figures 6.10 and 6.11). Visitors can enter the “Black Cloud” via platforms
that take them from the former slaughterhouse, the site of the industrialization of
meat production and animal suffering, to the second component of the institution,
6.8 “Black cloud” programs, paths and structures. © AMID.cero9.
an archive of genomes of post-natural species, a huge excavated pit on Mount

6.9 “Black Testaccio’s western slope. This part is organized as a robotized columbarium
cloud” bunches. (replicating the ancient Roman type), containing the genetic material of animal
© AMID.cero9.
species that humans have modified either directly (through domestication or
breeding) or indirectly (through creating artificial ecotopes such as cities and
parks).
Albena Yaneva: How is the agency of other species and objects taken into account
in architectural design? How do you make explicit the connection of humans to a
variety of entities with differing ontologies? What are the specific techniques used
to create new conditions and new spaces for their co-habitation?
Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda: In our case the usual way to foster
the connections between our world and nature starts with the incorporation of
a large and almost excessive amount of widely heterogeneous material. This
6.10 “Black cloud” plan detail. © AMID.cero9.
6.11 “Black cloud” is used to produce compositions that are rich (by number of connections and
cage and flocks. number of things connected through these numerous links with the project),
© AMID.cero9.
logical (with an inner logic despite their richness, although not at all apparent),
extravagant (referring to expanded worlds, beyond the usual physical, cultural,
productive, and political contexts), conflictive (that encourage discussions about
its value, concerning both the established connections and the environment),
and therefore initially ugly, meaning able to define an altered form of beauty (first
of all transgressing, second challenging and finally redefining our idea of beauty
associated with a particular subject).
The first action that we carry out to achieve those objectives is to summon
different entities, usually of diverse living species and humans from various
social groups and cultures (from living species, biotic material of a smaller scale,
social groups, subcultures, and so on) trying also to include in those assemblies
autonomous entities of markedly technological origin, whose process of definition
is a direct application of a set of available technologies.
That call is generally made in simple terms, inducing conditions of comfort that
are able to attract all this living material. Usually, such conditions of prodigality
are generated using or modulating local resources available ad-hoc (energy excess,
abundance of food and water, moderated climate, richness of cultural connections,
and so on), which are able to define an enclave of clearly differentiated conditions
in relation to the surrounding environment (see the term “Paradise” in our
Micropedia, 2014). Another usual action, which is related to human populations
constituting the immediate or overall context, is to use material and languages
that set up links – both symbolic (of high intelligibility) and evocative (less marked,
and therefore more difficult to decipher) – with materials and cultural entities
connected to the assembled populations. This action usually aims to subvert the
tendency to abstraction, which erases and short circuits all kinds of connections
with the formal, linguistic, and organizational issues of history and memory, or with
a particular culture trying to incorporate reading levels and connections – ranging
from the more ambiguous to the most direct – with other material, including so-
called trash, popular or banal culture.
Many of the projects use conflicting connections, not immediately connected
with material whose links with the subject are difficult or problematic to
reconstruct. They thus expand the notion of immediate context usually associated
with the situation, like oppositions that disrupt conventional discursive terms,
using apparently banal, absurd, or surreal language. In our case these conflicting
connections are fundamentally associated with some – few, in general, in each
project – distant shifts (from remote environments, because they belong to
subjects related to history, archetypal forms, or even of natural resonances) causing
ruptures and conflict in the usual set of connections.
In terms of spatial configuration, projects often rely on complex configurations
that prevent a direct association with uses or functions. These configurations may
nevertheless accommodate events that can be called symbolic content (rituals),
in an attempt to deny direct and bi-univocal correspondence between space
and function, typical of modernity. Spaces are thus converted into environments
to be discovered in a quest for the user’s collaborative participation and not
resulting in a merely passive consumption of the space. Usually they are based
on direct, synthetic, and powerful large-scale formal languages, developed with
precision, subtlety, and ambiguity in both physical and perceptual relationships
with the human body. In this way the scalar and relative readings in relation to
the immediate physical environments are problematized, establishing spatial
continuities and discontinuities with the surroundings, most of the time
generating an enclave whilst establishing selective spatial continuities with the
surroundings.
Commonly they are solved, evoking abstraction in their exteriors, hampering
the immediate reading of connections, and promoting a full understanding in
the inside to make legible all the records and links with the outside world. This
6.12 “Cherry
Blossom Palace.”
© AMID.cero9.
ambivalence between clearly defined and delimited exteriors connected with the
world indoors, almost always leads us to call our projects world-buildings, by which
we mean reduced-scale cosmologic models that, despite this ambition, relate to
specific, local realities.
Maybe a good example of all this, related to our own work, is the “Cherry 6.13 “Cherry
Blossom Palace” in the Jerte Valley (Figures 6.12 and 6.13). We have been working Blossom Palace”
elevation. ©
on a building, which in fact acts as an assemblage of different entities and has
AMID.cero9.
become a medium to restore the links between them through celebrations and
festivals. Almost the whole of the Jerte Valley is covered by single-species cherry
orchards that grow on stone-walled terraces.
Every year, in early spring, this landscape is briefly transformed by a natural
spectacle: a continuous blanket of white cherry blossoms covers the whole valley,
drawing throngs of tourists who sit in traffic jams in this surreal, oneiric landscape,
amid the flowering cherry trees. And every year one of Jerte’s 11 towns takes its
turn at hosting the annual festival organized partly to celebrate the flowering
season but partly also to accommodate the influx of visitors. For the Cherry Blossom
Festival – halfway between a traditional procession, a rave, and a pagan, Dionysian
celebration of the fruits of the Earth – we proposed a floating lay chapel amid a
landscape of cherry trees, oaks, stone terraces, and fog, that work as a Third Nature.
This assemblage of material of different origins reconstructs the relationships
of the locals and tourists with the environment: a completely artificialized piece
of landscape. In fact it is an activator, a place where all these entities can be re-
presented and therefore collide, clash and interact with one another.
References
Hunt, J.D. 2000. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. London: Thames & Hudson
Ltd.
Moreno, C.D and Grinda, E.G. 2014. Third Natures: A Micropedia. London: Architectural
Association.
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Part I, Contingency and The Contigengy of
Language. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
7
River Landscaping in Third Modernity: Remaking
Cosmopolitics in the Anthropocene1
Cordula Kropp
But insofar as the landscapes we create refract back to us a very powerful

naturalization of the social assumptions that sculpted such landscapes in
the first place, a revolution in our thinking may be intimately bound up with
a revolution in how these landscapes are made (Smith 2006: xiv).
Nature and society, town and country are opposites in appearance only; in the
“cosmopolitics” of urban design they are entangled and reconfigured daily, as the
history of urban river design illustrates. Considerable shifts in attitudes towards
urban rivers have been observed in European cities. During industrialization and
the process of urbanization, rivers dramatically changed their appearance and
ecology, together with their place and role in society. They were subjected to urban
growth, modern engineering, and the needs of transportation, power generation,
water supply, and sewage (Castonguay and Evenden 2012). At the same time,
early forerunners of environmentalism emerged and started politicizing the
use and perception of rivers. Environmental changes in the course of industrial
appropriation and remaking of river landscapes also explains why, as early as 1902,
the Bavarian “Isartalverein,” one of the very first nature conservation organizations,
was founded by Munich architects and artists. Concerned urban residents wanted
to protect the “nature” of the Isar River against further exploitation for hydropower,
and started by building paths on the riverside in the south of Munich. A hundred
years ago, the ways in which the “unspoilt” nature of the river and its banks were
described already as matters of concern characterized by situated evaluation
criteria, with the result that overall consensus could not be reached (Gribl 2002).
At the end of the twentieth century, not only had cities modified their rivers
to meet their economic and cultural requirements; rivers and their physical
circumstances had also, in turn, shaped cities and human geographies. To
describe these interactions, Castonguay and Evenden speak of an “urban-riverine
relationship” (2012: 2). Urban river landscaping is thus the result of an intertwining
of both social and natural processes. Generally, humans transform the world in
which they live, based on historically dominant “social relations of production”
(Braun and Castree 1998, Harvey 1996). But at the same time, concrete actor
networks rely on situated tangible opportunities, technologies, imaginaries, rules,
and resources, which shape the ways in which changes occur. The inevitable and
perpetual transformation of given environments in materially and socially new
“landscapes,” still named “natures,” takes place in the interactions of human and
non-human actors, without stopping at artiﬁcial divides between what is purely
natural, technical or social (Latour 1993, 2004). In so doing it crosses the boundary
between signs and things by scientific, technical, and economic means and
discourses (Latour 2005, 2009).
Bruno Latour calls “collectives” (Latour 1999) the resulting hybrid worlds of, for
example, humans, rivers, banks, cities, sceneries, dikes, dams, and turbines, and
“trajectories” the traceable courses of the mobilized entities in time, that are our
common “geostory” (2014). He invites us to follow the trajectories through such
“collectives” in order to reject the typical “modern,” delusive, and risky efforts to purify
and hide the ongoing work of modeling, combining, and mixing (“translation”), by
speaking in abstract dichotomies (nature-society, technology-politics, economy-
ecology) within which articulations of one side gain legitimacy by referring to
the other. Instead of the modernist beliefs in natural conditions and site-adapted
management, hybrid riverscapes represent large materialized re-compositions
as “cosmograms” (Tresch 2007), that is, temporal reifications of the collaborative
intermingling of things, signs, and actors into ever more complex compositions as
a kind of cosmopolitics – perhaps masked for too long. Cosmograms, “represent
the universe as a whole to themselves and to others in objects – in concrete,
visible artifacts.” Tresch notes that, in order to codify and simplify complex systems,
“human groups have always created external depictions of the elements of the
cosmos and the connections among them.” (Tresch 2007: 92). An urban riverscape
of one given definition can, however, be modified in “its makeup by articulating
different associations,” and by the extension of existing relations to further actants
as “series of coherent moves” (Latour 1999: 194).
Compared to pre-modern societies we, the moderns, have succeeded in
involving, connecting, translating, crossing over, and mobilizing an ever growing
number and vast variety of elements in a rapid upward movement, constantly
overcoming ourselves, making up modern cosmopolitical collectives of unseen
heterogeneity, spreading faster and shortening spatial and temporal distances.
But, the “relation between the scale of collectives and the number of non-humans
enlisted in their midst is crucial” (Latour 1999: 195), because the longer the chains
of action are, and the greater the number of redefined properties of objects
and subjects is, the more difficult it will be to identify and control the created
“infrastructures of risk” (Beck and Kropp 2011) in these cyborg cities. Floods in
recent years, biodiversity losses, and hormones in groundwater are one indication
of it; exploding real estate prices and the exclusion of certain population groups
from the shores are another.
Urban river-collectives are locally experienced as an assemblage defined by
water with multiple functions and symbolic meaning. Endowed with political
power and cultural meaning, they are considered as local manifestations of
“nature in the city,” of “the nature of cities,” of “urban nature in urbanized societies,”
River Landscaping in Third Modernity 115
and of the “urban production of nature” (Heynen et al. 2006). The temporary river
landscapes shape a city’s place-making and – under capitalism – further capital
accumulation trajectories and strategies (Swyngedouw 1992, 1996, Heynen et al.
2006). At the same time, in “climate changing societies,” parts of the public are
concerned about the state of urban river landscapes. River design consequently
has to find location-specific ways of dealing with both the pressures of societal
interests in urban rivers and the countervailing ideas of river restoration into
green nature reserves.
This is why urban planning can no longer address cities’ rivers as mere
waterways, dividing lines or restrictions on urban development. Rivers and canals
are currently being “transformed into the core of public domain” (Nyka 2007: 4). In
many cities, representative river promenades and waterfront restaurants upgrade
the center. Urban river beaches, for example, are an invitation to citizens in Paris,
Copenhagen, London, Kiev, and Berlin, to mention just a view. Cities are improving
the recreational value of their rivers and providing areas for multiple uses, thereby
creating new urban assemblages, as in Rome, Prague, Budapest, Bremen, and
Munich. Many urban rivers are being restored or rehabilitated, as in the case of
Sheffield, Leipzig, Lyon, Vienna, and Zurich. Others are being rebuilt in the name
of intensified measures for integrated urban flood-risk management, as defined by
the EU Flood Directive. One of my informants at EU-level told me that about three
quarters of all European cities have created various forms of experimentation with
the urban river environment.
Munich, a Bavarian city in the south of Germany, can be considered a pioneer 7.1 Bathing in
the urban river
in the movement. The Isar River attracted considerable attention in the days when has a strong local
the rivers of most other cities were still largely neglected and often not perceptible tradition. Photo
in public spaces. by the author.
Since then, public interest in its recreational usage, its protection, and its
multidimensional design has constantly grown. In the following I will sketch the
eventful history of its making and remaking. Today, the different authorities in
charge of river restoration projects and use of the river for energy production
and local recreation have to integrate perspectives not only from city planning,
river engineering, flood control, and nature conservation, but also from city
marketing offices and citizen associations – all of which claim to define the local
meaning of the river. Not only does the role of the water vary mile after mile and
from one type of use to the next, the citizens’ relations to water also vary greatly
in terms of their aesthetic judgment and their concepts of human existence and
co-existence with nature (“cosmopolitical arrangements”). It therefore comes as
no surprise that all of the planning and development of the last decade has
led – and continuously leads – to intensive and very controversial negotiations
on the river, its appearance, and its distinctive features. There is no silver-bullet
response to address diverse concerns and claims. Moreover, past and future
transformations of the Isar are embedded in unfinished political, economic, and
social procedures and constellations, in which contradicting “justifications” from
quite different spheres of argumentation have been articulated, with conflicting
superior principles of worth referring to the “common good” (Boltanski and
Thevenot 2006). How are we to establish compromises between the specific
values of multiple orders of worth and justification? Who would be able to
represent both the various humans and non-humans, together with their
future requirements? How can a river be evaluated against the background of,
at once, shifting civic solidarity claims, city marketing rationalities, real estate
interests, energy supplies, and global climate change? How can urban river
design be justified when nature is no longer salient, ecology is a moving target
(Blühdorn 2014) and the economy refocuses the place-making in competitive
cities (Musterd and Kovacs 2013)? What is the “value” of an urban river in the
global competition for energy, investment, employers, tourists, residents, and
recreational areas?
Inconsistencies, contradictions, and restrictions of past efforts in both river design
and urban planning are qualified to cast doubt on the concept of “representation”
as a whole (Kropp 2002, 2005). In the 1990s a typical modern understanding of
dealing with the river and its various functional capacities was still prevalent. For
instance, in 1992 the river’s primordial character and its essential attributes were
required to be made visible and calculable by experts so that competing claims
and priorities could be evaluated scientifically, and conflicting demands on the
river reconciled. But as we will see, a study in this respect and the subsequent
controversies showed that representing the river, its components, and it banks
is an unsuccessful exercise, because no ultimate arbitral award is at stake when a
multidimensional assessment is carried out. Moreover, most postindustrial interests
and ecological claims to water resources and water bodies in urban contexts do
not originate from the traditional water management sector and its expertise. As a
result, new evaluation skills, including socio-psychological concepts were needed
in this case, along with new ways of building bridges between technical evaluation
and public deliberation. In addition, growing environmental concerns and the

emerging discussion on side-effects of technocratic representation working for
instrumental domination of nature had progressed so far that claims for more
reflexive representation carried new weight. The resulting imbroglio of scientific
controversies, political disputes, and strategic changes regarding the requirements
of the management of ecological functions of watercourses, as well as the integrity
of the river landscape from citizens’ perspective, were recognized by the competent
authorities as a moving target:
Now we remove the water construction that we implemented 20 years ago,

and in 30 years we will probably change the flood protection again, perhaps
returning to these techniques, that are at odds with current views (Interview).
The river, its components, functions, and the diverging claims on its utilization
could not be represented in a straightforward way. But the factors and criteria
to be taken into account were finally seen to originate legitimately only from
negotiation and public involvement. During the subsequent deliberation
processes, no decision about the river’s recomposition could claim to have
universal validity, but all river management was considered to be “urban river
design” (urbane Flußgestaltung) with necessarily temporal and local relevance.
Such an interpretation relativizes planning expertise and democratic decision-
making, as well as ecological justification (Blühdorn 2014), insofar as every
claim on the river and on river design needs to be qualified in an idiosyncratic
manner, relating stakeholders, things and signs to new and unseen amalgams of
cosmopolitics. And the urban river changes its appearance kilometer by kilometer.
As I will show, in the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002: 23) the central question is
“who produces what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom” (Heynen
et al. 2006: 2) and which references are used to redesign riverscapes for “our
common future.”
The remaking of rivers in contested city space is thus related to a broader
cosmopolitical transformation that has to be reconsidered by taking into
consideration scientific plurality, conflicting goals, and post-ecological decision-
making, together with cities’ economies and growing demands for participation.
Is such a “river landscaping” (Kropp 2005) a promising way towards cosmopolitics,
which may give birth to more sustainable “urban assemblages” (Latour 2004,
Blok 2013), or is it a “post-ecologist governmentality” working for “politics of
unsustainability” (Swyngedouw 2009, Blühdorn 2014)? What kind of postindustrial
design of space (Lefebvre 1991) is happening on European urban riversides?
To better understand what the role of design might be if a river is no longer
salient enough to provide a background for human activities and decisions
(Yaneva, Introduction, this volume) I will focus on the contested and changing
remaking of the Isar in Munich. Its recomposition was the subject of a case study
for my dissertation at the end of the 1990s (Kropp 2002, 2005) and then again ten
years later in 2011, with a focus on civil society participation. Both times, huge
media coverage, public controversies, and expert hearings had accompanied
urban river restoration projects and the various conflicts they stirred up. But
7.2 The Munich something had changed. In the first investigation, many of the participants
Isar as postmodern struggled to bring “nature” and its “‘intrinsic value” into city politics and, more
playground. Image
generally, to put environmental considerations on the political agenda. In recent
courtesy of dpa.
activism, however, the goals are more diffuse, the participants more plural, and
great uncertainty prevails among all parties involved, as to which decisions can
be regarded as success and which as a failure in achieving “sustainable” solutions
for the river and the city. Ecological, but also democratic assessment criteria are
uncertain and the relationship between the two has been fundamentally altered.
To grasp how cosmopolitics have changed in Munich in these two phases of my
observation, I outline how the cosmos and the political assemblies have been
recomposed in the two phases of river landscaping, which can be regarded as
typical for second (reflexive) and third (postmodern) modernity (Beck and Lau
2004, Blühdorn 2014).
River Landscaping at the End of Industrial Modernity (Second

Modernity)
In 1994, to the south of Munich, the first of several licenses for hydroelectric power
stations on the Isar River expired and in so doing paved the way for considerations
about alternative river landscapes. It was from this start that several environmental
movements and citizen associations united to protest about the unscrupulous
use of natural resources and the environmental damages caused, and to demand
that the river be restored to its original state. Original state? The Isar came into
existence during the Würm ice age. It is a 300 km (163 mile) long mountain torrent
that starts in the Alps and flows into the Danube. As the destinies of Upper Bavaria
and the capital Munich are closely tied to the Isar, it continues to play an important
role in Bavarians’ self-image. It is valued highly and, in spite of systematic river
engineering over the last hundred years, is still often referred to as the “Reißende”
(raging torrent – the translation of its Celtic name) and revered. Perhaps it was
due to this cultural relationship that, with the issue of renewal of their license, the
power station’s operators felt threatened by the far-reaching demands to return
the river to its former whitewater state. In fact, this process had begun several years
before the license renewal date and enjoyed considerable public support. Years of
debate followed on how the river, the power station, its canal, and the surrounding
landscape should look in the future.
The history of the “taming of the former wild torrent,” which in dramatic
metaphors the conflicting sides dubbed “the vital artery of Bavaria” that had
become but a “corpse in a concrete corset,” is almost a hundred years old. During
this time, a vast amount of concrete was used to dam, regulate, straighten, channel,
and reroute the river. As a result, the gravel disappeared from its bed. Additionally,
there was considerable pressure on the river ecosystem from agriculture, sewage,
the consequences of dense population, and stress resulting from recreational uses
by the inhabitants of the nearby city. In the early 1990s, conservationists sounded
the alarm: ecological damage to the entire river-floodplain system due to the Isar
being turned into a “sluggish residual rivulet in a concrete corset” would result not
only in a dramatic reduction in species diversity and changes in the landscape,
but also in a rapid deepening of the river bed (deep erosion) and thus to sinking
groundwater levels, concomitant dangerous increases in bacteria, and increased
risk of flooding. Of course, these projections had to be proved. The main culprit
was found very quickly: the hydroelectric power station, which only a few years
previously had been hailed as an emissions-free source of energy and basked in
its acceptance as a renewable, and thus environment-friendly, energy technology.
This pitted against one another not only ecological and economic interests, but
also nature and environment conservationists with very different ideas of “nature”
and “society” and their correct ordering.
The power station in question is a good example of Jugendstil industrial
architecture. It attracts many visitors and is situated in the charming landscape of
the upper reaches of the former whitewater river. A dam redirects most of the river’s
water into a concrete canal; after nine km, the water runs through the station’s
turbines where it generates power, and then the canal feeds the water back into
the riverbed. In the first 70 years of its existence, the station left its mark on nature
and society in many different ways.
Built originally in spite of opposition and objections from the conservationist
“Isar Valley Association” – the very first German organization for nature conservation,
mentioned above – it promised industrialization and modernization. Initially
it played a major role, especially in the electrification of Upper Bavaria and in
bringing the railway to the Isar Valley. Later, the power station and its intervention
in ecosystems drove out a number of animal and plant species, for which the
remaining water in the river was insufficient and which were unable to adapt to
the concrete canal embankments. The dam furthermore presented a barrier to fish
species that moved up- and downstream, as well as to seeds transported by water.
Although other species found ideal conditions in the secondary biotopes that were
created, and consequently proliferated, biological classification – which like all
scientific systems of order pronounces upon what is and what should be – rejected
many of the new arrivals as non-autochthonous neophytes. Additionally, as the
gravel beds and water meadows were no longer flooded they disappeared, together
with their typical users: not only flora and fauna, but also human romantic fans of
wilderness. On the other hand, less challenged pedestrians enjoyed strolling along
the level dikes of the canal, which they liked precisely because of their straightness.
So whose wishes were to be respected here? The river that remained, which had
once carried an average of 65 cubic meters of water per second, 90 during the
snowmelt, and now transported little more than 2.5, had lost its dynamism. Its
capacity to transport and deposit sediment and gravel from the mountains was
severely reduced, causing it to lose its ability for self-purification and for linking
gravel banks and water meadows, and to dig deeper into the riverbed. Rafting,
previously a dangerous form of transport, changed into a branch of tourism with
tranquil journeys on the calm waters of the canal for pleasure. Forestry land-use
expanded right up to the sluggishly flowing stream.
Each of these changes had its supporters and opponents. All intervened more
or less vociferously in the debate on the future of the river and the power station
that was fuelled to a large extent by the media. Much that had been regarded as
self-evident or conclusive in the period of early industrial modernity was now
called into question; for example, the scientific description of intact rivers, the
beauty of the Isar Valley above Munich, the usefulness of the power station, as well
as the environment-friendliness of hydropower, the importance of indigenous
species, the emancipatory experience of wild natural rivers versus engineered
channels, flood protection through fortified banks and faster drainage, the
character of the Bavarian Alpine foothills, and the cultural tradition of rafting.
Participants in the debate surrounding the renewal of the power station license
included not only the state authorities involved and the power company, but
also a specially founded “Isar Alliance” that united various associations and
individuals, along with their conservation interests and aesthetic concerns, other
environmentalist and nature protection groups, political parties, residents and
their mayors, school classes, fishermen and raftsmen, historians and biologists,
the media, and actively involved citizens. The arguments and evidence advanced
to support the highly divergent claims and demands, however, were unable
to cite any shared evaluative vocabulary or authoritative ultimate criteria for
evaluating ecological systems.
To make progress in this matter in the face of such diverse opinions and
perspectives, and to remove all ostensible grounds from “ideological” positions,
the government of Upper Bavaria commissioned what was known as the
“Restwasserstudie.”2 In addition to evaluating the authorities’ plans for water
treatment, the study was designed to provide a basis for sound policy decisions that
would take into account the concerns of the power company, urban recreational
users, the river itself and its ecological needs, and various human and non-
human stakeholders. The investigation succeeded in obtaining eighteen expert
assessments from different perspectives, and in rendering them comparable.
Each examined the existing river landscape, its current qualities, and possible
deficits from the point of view of an expert in the field. From this, projections were
derived for a future ideal state with regard to the form of the riverbanks and to the
remaining water, albeit within a predetermined framework.
The study reflected the interests of wild birds and fish, energy users and
supplier, people who liked walks and open-air barbecues, flooding, water
dynamics and gravel, raftsmen and residents, global climate, and local traditions.
In many instances, this required the development of new methods and techniques,
for example, taking into account the ecological, morphological, limnological,
psychological, and aesthetic needs of the many different stakeholders. However,
certain viewpoints were excluded: not all opinions were deemed legitimate. Despite
the considerable efforts that had gone into it, this was one of the reasons why the
finished study came in for harsh criticism from many quarters when it was finally
published after much hesitation. First, none of the standards selected possessed
uncontested authority or represented a general consensus, which resulted in
increasing numbers of experts with different opinions being engaged to deliver
counter-opinions and assessments. Second, the entire system of evaluation was
called into question for being inadequate, tendentious, only seemingly objective,
and politically biased.
Once again, the modernist hope of depoliticizing a conflict through the
involvement of scientists and experts, that is, negotiation of facts instead of values,
failed. After months of heated discussion and media coverage, the press could only
report wearily that an “embittered dispute among experts was taking place at the
bedside of the ailing Isar” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 18, 1993). In the end, in
an election year, the relevant state department in consultation with the Bavarian
government and the then Federal State Prime Minister (who had the river in his
constituency) decided to prescribe an increase in the water flowing through the
riverbed, from the average quantity of 2.5 m3/sec that had voluntarily not been
diverted to the canal, to a prescribed 15 m3/sec. They also decided, together
with the power station operators, to finance extensive restoration measures to
improve connections within the river-floodplain system. The authors understood
this decision to be based on a rational agreement between conflicting interests.
Ultimately, it was founded neither on recourse to “nature” nor with sole reference
to economic interests, cultural traditions or political power, although all played
a reconstructive role in the decision. Since then, the implementation of these
measures and their unforeseeable impacts – after all, the river was being allowed
to shape a considerable stretch of the riverbed itself again – have been closely
monitored and commented upon by the authorities, stakeholders, interested
individuals, and the media. Large information boards on the river banks explain
the philosophy behind the measures to hikers and visitors and present results of
the restoration efforts.
7.3 Educational
work on behalf
of public
understanding of
river design. Photo
by the author.
The debate and conflict surrounding the license renewal of the power station
represented a precedent, which set the course for a new search for valid criteria and
better procedures in decision-making. With the adoption of the European Union
Water Framework Directive 2000/60/E.G. of October 23, 2000, the administrative-
technocratic command-and-control approach was definitively abandoned and the
way was open for a more plural search for how to recompose local collectives of
human and non-human actors (Brackemann, Markard, and Rechenberg 2002). But
it still remained a democratic challenge to develop governance procedures that
reflected the emerging politics of cosmopolitical things.
River Landscaping in the dawn of the Anthropocene
In the meantime, many further restoration projects have been carried out on
the Isar. All have been concerned with negotiating a sustainable co-existence of
humans, river, plants, animals, technology, and neighboring communities, and
with mediating between widely heterogeneous interests. However, all claims
and demands have become subject to a general suspicion that they are doubtful:
science, politics, and nature have forfeited their unquestioned authority. Against a
background of contradictory certainties, as well as categorical uncertainty about
“the right way” and its consequences, the burden of decision-making has since
been spread across as many shoulders as possible: politicians, administrators,
scientists, the public, civil society, as well as the river and its inhabitants, all sit with
their representatives at the negotiating tables. Flyers, brochures, and informative
publications provide interested citizens with information and seek to stimulate the
public debate.
In the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of an Earth transformed by human
action, one “nature” as a point of reference is no longer enough. Together with
growing public claims to participate in urban planning and river design, this insight
has opened the way for a fundamental debate on the co-existence of rivers and
humans. The shaping and management of river landscapes has become a political
issue, in which all sides, humans and non-humans, are seeking to be heard. It has
long been recognized that the future lies in diversity and preserving a variety of
options. Acting upon this knowledge, strategies have been developed in Munich
in the last two decades, and are still being developed, to set community with the
river on a new foundation. The result is not “the perfect river” nor a final model
of balanced conflicting interests, but a postmodern interplay of possible river
landscapes.
Nowadays, the interested observer will find “their Isar” in Munich’s urban space
in a variety of forms. In the heart of the city, on the west side of Museum Island,
there is the ultra-urban, stern, and completely straight watercourse in a solid
riverbed between high vertical embankments, flowing under classical bridges.
Level with this Isar, on the other side of the island, flows the right arm: a more
natural, inaccessible river with small tributaries. A beaver has taken up residence
here, exactly between the island of the German Museum and the Culture Center
on Gasteig. A little further south, the Isar provides Munich’s sun-worshippers with
a breathtaking bathing area with waterfalls. As a “relatively intact river landscape,”
it has served as a model for restoration measures on other stretches of the Isar
and for many other subsequent restoration projects. Further along the river there
are floodplains where it is possible to play sports and games, ride surfable waves,
and enjoy “beach life,” generate electricity with canals and turbines, or go for
walks under shady trees on the banks. That these possibilities exist side by side is
the result not of incomplete modernization or a helpless lack of system, but the
playing out of “both … and … :” the “as-well-as” that is beyond the rigor of modern
schemes of order and has been described as characteristic of the post-industrial
second modernity (Beck and Lau 2004).
River Landscaping in the Third Modernity
Today, in a climate-changing world, the meanings of “sustainable urban planning,”

“ecological responsibility,” and “democratic decision-making” have become even
more contested and unstable, while global competition – over signs and flows
– is gaining ground. Urban design affects the very makeup, functioning, and
evolution of local and of global ecosystems. But the more stakeholders engage
in the discourse about “sustainable” urban planning, the more various positions
and definitions come into play, and the more uncertainty increases about
justified criteria, options, and procedures. The many stakeholders involved, such
as companies and planning offices, citizens’ initiatives, authorities, experts, and
non-humans represented by science, push urban rivers and landscapes in new
postindustrial and open directions (Kropp 2015). The term “Anthropocene” and
the new reality it refers to have consequences for the founding principles of
environmental management, in my case better seized as urban river landscaping.
The use of the past – a chosen historical moment to represent a more “natural world”
to be imitated and restored – is simply no longer an option. The use of assessment
criteria from specialist perspectives – minimum/maximum amounts, bar charts,
statistical comparisons, and trends – lacks the needed holism and notoriously does
not cover current aspects. The number of scientific disciplines involved increases,
but the information from science is no longer respected as “objective fact;” it is
generally suspected of being “entangled” (Latour 2014: 2), partial, selective and
inappropriate, given the complexity and dynamics of the subject matter. The on-
going work of associating, configuring, mixing, and recomposing rivers and cities,
economy and ecology, democracy and marketing is pushing ecological systems
out of the Holocene’s security into new and barely understood cosmopolitical
creations – and all conception of a “river” is losing ground.
What has been exceptional in river landscaping at the end of industrial modernity,
and made the case a pioneer in river management and design, has become a norm
in postmodern practices of river landscaping in Third Modernity’s cities. Rivers can
generate societal debates about uses and benefits, and civic claims to change their
given outfit. They are the boundary objects of contradictory ideals of urban co-
existence across the borderlines of different cultures and backgrounds. At the same
time, river landscapes are the very material foundation of sometimes opposite
metabolisms of recreation and energy production, tourism and transportation.
Subsequently, all perception is situated and partial, no definitive interpretation
will give ultimate answers. The result is not a final model of balanced conflicting
interests, but a continuous postmodern interplay of possible and desirable river
landscapes affecting present and future margins for maneuver. This is all the more
true in the age of global cities, which have become “institutional laboratories” for
globally commercializing urban sites (Brenner and Theodore 2002, Novy, Coimbra
Swiatek, and Moulaert 2012).
In Munich “the Urbanauts” (die Urbanauten), a newly established citizen
association, has been interfering loudly and media-effectively in urban politics
since 2008, with regard to the required river design. “It is our major driver to inspire
people to watch the river landscape with fresh eyes, to use its public spaces and
to encounter each other at its shores in social and cultural meetings,” explained
its spokesperson and founding member Benjamin David in an interview. When
discussing possible river states, his colleagues, all geography, architecture, and
urban planning graduates, exchange experiences and ideas developed during their
travels. They no longer raise issues like “alpine river system,”“ecology,”“regenerative
energy” or “endangered species.” Instead, reference is made to the infinite
opportunities of water landscapes in cities, which the activists have experienced in
the newly designed harbor area in Barcelona, at the Paris city beach and during the
“Summer Stage” at the Danube canal in Vienna. They counter arguments of urban
anti-flood measures with hints on digitally available concepts for river landscapes
in the new millennium.
The Urbanauts and other involved stakeholders underpin their plea for “more
public space” with their insistence on having a beach bar on the banks of the
Isar, where cultural encounters can take place and young urbanites have a place
to meet and relax. It has to be pursued and won year after year in the Munich
city council. With political and artistic means and prominent media presence,
the citizens’ association is managing to draw the river cosmopolitics to public
attention and once again to shape the urban-riverine relationship. Their claim is
the “rediscovery of the Isar” (David, July 18, 2010 at a panel discussion, a quotation
often used by the association and by the media). The advocates of a new “joy of
the Isar” (Isarlust – the name of a former Vienna-style restaurant on the river banks,
founded at the beginning of the last century and alluding to the typical German
“Wanderlust”) challenge the status quo of the river landscape in the various
contexts of roundtables at the city hall or on the river banks, at art happenings,
river trails, cultural events, and in panel discussions. Since 2008 the Urbanauts
and their sympathizers prevail over river politics in Munich through numerous
articles in both the local press and national newspapers, as well as information
brochures, display panels, art installations, and actions held in river areas. They are
supported by prominent citizens, such as Willy Michl, a well-known Munich blues
singer “from the Isar tribe” and engaged architects and planners from the Munich
7.4 Public
discussion about
options in river
landscaping in
2012. Image
courtesy of Elena
Orth, Institut für
internationale
Architektur-
Dokumentation
GmbH & Co. KG.
universities and planning offices. All of them take up this new line of reasoning,
develop it further, and publish articles on the claims and the possibilities in various
press media, especially in Standpunkte (standpoints),3 the publication of a Munich
citizens association engaged in urban planning.
They justify their engagement with the finding that the citizens questioned
are not able to differentiate between the bridges in town, or are not aware of
the fact that the river landscape does not have enough “salient points,” or that
the river islands are not attractive enough for tourists. What for many years has
been presented as a unique urban agreement, the classification of the river as a
countryside conservation area (Nr. V900, §2s) from Munich’s southern borders up
to the northern part of the city in 1964, is now considered as too strong a focus.
Would a more vibrant public and civic life be desirable instead of the existing
ban on restaurants at the riversides? Beaches, art happenings, leisure facilities,
guided nature experiences as well as waves for surfing contribute to new feelings
of urbanism. In the fierce global competition for attractive space in sought-
after locations, the River Isar is seen both as a natural scenery asset, which will
attract tourists, consumers, and investors, and as a distinctive and emblematic
representative of localized culture (Appadurai 1990: 27). “Once restoration brought
back the nature,” explained an activist, “the task is now to give back a part of urban
nature to the citizens in the heart of Munich” (Interview). A Greens Party politician
added, “the achievements of nature conservation may serve as a model, but can be
limited to individual sections of the river for a wider use of creativity in dealing with
the urban river.” In 2013, in cooperation with the state capital of Munich, students
of the art academy were invited to “play the substance of this difficult space” under
the project title “Notre Dame sur l’Isar.” All parties agreed on the “necessity of
making every effort and cooperating fully in order to awaken the Sleeping Beauty
of a river” and “to put in its place nature or monument conservation.” The time had
come “to realize the cosmopolitan character of the river landscape” and “to release
the room for an innovative plural density [“Vielfaltsdichte”], “exploring new shores”
(joint press statement of various activist groups). Naturalness or sustainability have
become a pure question of design: evaluations are to be made against contested
urban imaginaries and ultimately are in the eye of the beholder.
Remaking Cosmopolitics in the Anthropocene
Modern twentieth-century urbanism has forgotten to take into account the

“metabolism” of cities: the variety of flows that connect city life to nature (Cronon
1991). But in the face of climate change, a common conviction has developed
across milieus, namely that all urban planning should better respect “planetary
boundaries” (Rockström et al. 2009). Thus, eco-efficiency and nature conservation
have become a matter of course for urban planners – but still, apart from abstract
targets there is no real awareness of the urban metabolism (Haynen, Kaika
and Swyngedouw 2006). A broader understanding is lacking, of which urban
places, which imaginaries, which cosmopolitical compositions, innovations, and
exnovations a future city might need; in other words, a future-oriented urban

vision. To collectively experiment with cosmopolitical assemblages, building urban
imaginaries enabling us to monitor, mentor, and reflect on the cosmopolitical
composition of these assemblages seems to be one of the pressing challenges of
the next decades (Hajer and Dassen 2014).
Therefore we, the academics, should not only invent new categories but also
give them normative and political valence. To fail to do so is to give carte blanche
to bureaucratic planning perspectives and to business to fill the vacuum with their
own needs (Burawoy 2005: 232). This is why well-known powers of isomorphism
drive municipalities of nearly every “global city” into claiming “sustainable town
planning” in order to create “pretty environments and human friendly structures
for space and housing, as well as comprehensive concepts for energy and
resource-saving buildings, [which] will be absolutely essential for the cities and the
architecture of the future” (Munich – International Sustainable United in Solidarity,
S. 20) – regardless of which movements, emissions, and damages are caused.
Working groups, alliances, and expert rounds are built, booklets are designed,
guidelines, role models, and even laws are printed, projects of integrated actions
are planned and prizes awarded. However, sustainability is not much more than
a very blunt eco-political instrument, a lip service for concerned citizens, and CO2
emissions continue to rise.
If urban river assemblages are to be designed and re-designed through
cosmopolitical processes, attention has to be paid to these processes, to their
details, meanings, and to “the obvious question of good versus bad design …
as if materiality and morality were finally coalescing” (Latour 2008: 5): “This is of
great importance because if you begin to redesign cities, landscapes, natural
parks, societies as well as genes, brains and chips, no designer will be allowed to
hide behind the old protection of matters of fact” (Latour 2008: 6) – be it natural,
technical or cultural matters of fact. A normative dimension is intrinsic to design.
Against this background, we should take care to better grasp the “cosmopolitical
becoming” of various humans and non-humans, of objects and signs in today’s
riverscapes, and what the consequences of the selected design might be in relation
to other options. For most of the parts of a river collective, it is very difficult to identify
the liberating potential of a riverscape with all the ambivalences of a space full of
opportunities, under the pressure of exploitation, exclusion, and marginalization.
New ways to take the plurality of worlds and the endangered pluralism seriously have
to be found in dealing with the situation and its multifaceted compositions that no
nature “out there” can guide but that nevertheless each production of “assembled”
urban-riverine relationships may prove to be meaningful and rich in consequences,
full of entanglements and side-effects for all those involved: “Testing different
ways of assembling and harmonizing the world rather than quickly suggesting a
‘compromise’” (Yaneva: Introduction) in order to make us hesitate, experiment, start
again, and modify the composition in respect of all the actants and materialities
that we are otherwise at risk of losing, will become even more important, when
even grassroots environmental organizations are seeking to manage riverscapes
as an object in the global flow of commodities. Ecology was once a powerful
vehicle for re-ordering the political agenda and claiming more participation and
democratic empowerment by rejecting the pure instrumental use of collectives
in a technocratic manner. In the meantime, technocratic authorities, regimes,
and managers have acquired key roles in defining environmental problems and
solutions, setting targets and devising policy. As a consequence, the environment
(and more generally sustainability) has metamorphosed from a justification for
a radical expansion of power towards non-governmental organizations, into an
issue that may justify the disempowerment either of citizens or of responsible
authorities. Whereas the introduction of ecology previously destabilized industrial
river design, nowadays the introduction of plurality destabilizes environmental
river design; alas, a corresponding morality is still pending. It must be a morality
for entangled human and non-human subjects in order to “advance our common
cosmopolitics” in shared agency when both sides – nature and society – have lost
their autonomy (Latour 2014: 5). Beyond both approaches and the riverscapes they
produce as specific historical results of a cosmopolitical re-ordering, more attentive
arrangements are to be developed for the futures of the cyborg worlds of cities,
and for democratizing the politics through which they are built.
Notes
1 This chapter is a revised and extended version of the article: Kropp, C. 2005. River
landscaping in second modernity, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,
edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel. Massachusetts, MA: The MIT Press, 486–91.
2 Study of the remaining water.
3 See http://muenchner-forum.squarespace.com/standpunkte-archiv/
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8
An Interview with David Benjamin, The Living
David Benjamin: Design is an ecosystem. It involves interconnected loops of ideas,

materials, technologies, culture, humans, non-humans, construction, growth,
buildings, cities, and environment. No loop is passive. No loop stands alone. All
of the loops influence other loops. And each loop makes sense only through its
links to the others. In this way, each design project is a composition of forces and
influences that work together to produce a new hypothesis about the material and
living world.
In my design practice, The Living, we have always been interested in prototyping
as a design method. The premise is that the ever-changing world requires new ideas.
And new ideas require testing. And testing requires prototyping – in our case, full-
scale, functioning prototyping. There is nothing like making it and putting it out in
the world to learn about the new idea. Our work aims to think big and to be future-
oriented. But it is also raw and immediate. We get our hands dirty. In other words,
we try to address today’s urgent questions with today’s available technologies.
The living world is a clear part of this approach and this design ecosystem.
The living world adapts and responds and provokes us. It is clearly not a passive
backdrop. It is one of the most important ingredients of design, but it is an
especially rich ingredient because it is dynamic. Designing with the living world –
with dynamic, breathing, growing elements – is a fascinating process. And it is not
a just an obscure experiment; it is part of all projects by all designers, whether or
not this is explicitly recognized.
This was on our mind when we created the project “Lifecycles,” an installation for
Art Center Nabi in Tomorrow City, near Incheon, South Korea. For this project, we
deliberately designed with the living world, and we made our design ecosystem
explicit.
8.1 “Lifecycles”. Our idea was to design a small ecosystem that would grow and decay and
© The Living. transform over 30 days of an exhibition without any intervention from us after the
moment it was born. The ingredients for the ecosystem were a natural material
(liquid moss), a synthetic material (melted plastic), and a “material of ideas”
(real-time Web searches). The rules of the ecosystem involved the automated
construction of an enclosure by layering moss and plastic onto each other. The
rate of adding moss was controlled by real-time Web searches about terms like
“environment,” while the rate of adding plastic was controlled by real-time Web
searches about terms like “construction.”
Over the course of the installation, the ecosystem first developed an equilibrium
as an extruded cylinder, then it experienced a tipping point and a phase of chaos
and disequilibrium, and then it developed a second more complex equilibrium as
a structure of braided bands (Figure 8.1). The project was an experiment and a very
specific test of composing the constructed world. Yet for our practice it pointed to
several concepts and approaches that are relevant more generally and that seem
essential in a rapidly changing world – including design with rules rather than
forms, design with uncertainty, and design with shifting and unknowable forces.
Albena Yaneva: Can you provide examples that illustrate how your design works
turn nature into cause for thinking and mobilize a variety of entities in new
compositions? What are the specific techniques you use to create new conditions
and new spaces for the co-habitation of humans and non-humans?
David Benjamin: A few of our recent projects involve creating dynamic interfaces
that make visible the invisible conditions of the environment. These projects are
open-ended, and they are experiments, but they are directly intended to provoke
human thinking and to engage non-human entities in cycles of feedback.
One of these projects is “Living Light,” a permanent pavilion in a public park in
Seoul, South Korea (Figure 8.2). It is a giant map of the city that glows and blinks
according to air quality data and public interest in the environment. The broad
idea of the project is to combine real-time information about the environment
with dynamic LED façades in order to offer an alternative vision for building
envelopes and urban skylines of the future. The specific design of the project
An Interview with David Benjamin, The Living 133
involves a representation of the city that continually changes in three ways. First, 8.2 “Living Light”.
each neighborhood of the city illuminates if its air quality is better right now than a © The Living.
year ago. This is a register of air quality improvement. Second, every hour the map
goes dark, and each neighborhood lights up in order of best current air quality to
worst. This is a register of real-time air quality. Third, the project invites citizens to
text message a postal code to our project hotline and receive back a message with
current air quality compared to average levels for the neighborhood and the city. In
addition, whenever anyone texts the hotline, the requested neighborhood blinks
twice. So this becomes a register of collective interest in the environment. The more
blinking, the more people are interested in the environment. If one neighborhood
blinks more than others, this tells us something about the collective. This third
method of interactivity takes the layer of personal digital communication in the
city – the flow of data through our mobile phones – and attempts to make it public
in an important and legible way.
To some degree, this project turns the environment into a cause for thinking,
and it materializes collective human thinking in a tangible construction in the city.
In other words, the project suggests that building envelopes of the future could
be thought of as public space, as a territory for collective thinking. The project also
activates an inanimate object – a pavilion – as a kind of agent in the city. As citizens
text message our pavilion becomes a contact in their phones. This reframes and
broadens our typical ideas about communication.
Another project is “Amphibious Architecture,” a layer of dynamic light in the East
River in New York City (Figure 8.3). This project was developed in collaboration with
8.3 “Amphibious artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko. It involves a network of floating tubes with
Architecture”. sensors below water and lights above water. Using ideas and techniques similar
© The Living.
to “Living Light,” the project detects water quality and captures human interest
in the environment through a text message hotline. In addition, “Amphibious
Architecture” detects presence of fish, and this gives it another layer of information
and feedback. When fish swim under the tubes, lights illuminate to trace their
path. When humans send a text message requesting information – when they text
the river – lights blink twice. This simple interactivity gives fish and humans an
interface to communicate. When a fish swims near shore and triggers the lights, a
human may see the pattern and in turn send a text message causing the lights to
blink. When a human sends a text message inquiring about the condition of the
water, a fish may see the lights blinking and swim toward them and in turn trigger
the lights. In this way, the project invites fish, as non-humans, into the collective
thinking about the built environment.
Albena Yaneva: How does your work contribute to “slowing down” reasoning,
“slowing down” the construction of the common world, and creating a space for
hesitation?
David Benjamin: One way we attempt to hesitate and slow down is to question
rules of thumb and conventions and standard ways of doing things. When we
hesitate as designers, we often discover new insights and possibilities. In addition,
we often find ways to invite our audience to experience this same hesitation. When
it works well, the project appears both familiar and completely new. It provokes 8.4 “Hy-Fi”
wonder. It opens up new ideas and questions. exterior. © The
Living.
This was part of the idea for our project “Hy-Fi,” a temporary installation for the
Young Architects Program of the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 (Figure
8.4). “Hy-Fi” is a 13-meter-tall tower made of 10,000 compostable bricks. The
premise of the project was to create architecture that was designed to disappear
as much as it was designed to appear. We aimed to create a building with almost
no waste, no energy, and no carbon emissions – a building that would start from
nothing but earth and return to nothing but earth, in contrast to the energy-
intensive and landfill-generating buildings that represent the standard “expert”
way of doing things.
In order to do this, we explored a new building material. We created a lightweight,
low-cost, biodegradable brick that was grown from agricultural byproducts
(chopped up corn stalks) and mycelium (the root-like structure of mushrooms)
(Figure 8.5). This brick grows from a loose mixture into a solid object in about
five days with no energy required. Through many rounds of experimentation,
we engineered – or coaxed – the brick to be denser, stronger, and more weather-
resistant. Then we constructed a large-scale outdoor tower with these load-bearing
bricks. And after the tower was disassembled, we composted all of the bricks,
returning them to soil, which in turn could host new agricultural growth.
8.5 “Hy-Fi” brick. This brick built on both the “ancient technology” of mushrooms and on a
© The Living. range of recent experiments with mycelium by others. It engaged “nature” in a
new way that we call bio-fabrication – harnessing living organisms as factories to
manufacture useful objects.
Our brick generated hesitation in several ways, including the way we worked
with our structural engineers at Arup. Since structural engineering software does
not offer a drop-down-menu option for mushroom bricks, we had to slowly build
up our understanding and assumptions about material performance in a way that
would normally be taken for granted. And based on many physical tests of the new
material, we obtained a puzzling and intriguing result. A single brick could support
the weight of 50 cars, but it was 20,000 times less stiff than steel. More immediately,
this was a material that compressed a lot under load, but it never cracked and failed
– unlike traditional brick, concrete, or even metals.
It is important to note that in addition to testing the technical performance of
the brick, we tested the aesthetic performance of the brick. We played with the
way this new brick worked with light and shadow, pattern, texture, and formal
composition (Figure 8.6). We worked with the wide variation between bricks in
terms of texture, color, and flatness. We were struck by their unusual smell.
8.6 “Hy-Fi” interior. © The Living.
Everything about the bricks was off – in a good way. This project was not really a
direct challenge to the knowledge of experts, but it definitely involved an exciting
territory where no expertise existed. So it was easy for us to invert several typical
assumptions about brick and structure and robustness and advanced materials.
The final construction had an enigmatic presence in the context of the
traditional brick construction of the neighborhood and the glass-and-steel skyline
of Manhattan visible in the distance. It was both familiar and completely new. It was
both digital and biological, both high-tech and low-tech, both precise and hand-
crafted, both futuristic and traditional. It was a hybrid composition in every way.
presenting phenomena related to nature, ecology, and biodiversity? How do you
“activate thinking” through design?
David Benjamin: Many of our early projects involved bringing architecture to life
through digital technologies such as sensors, microcontrollers, actuators, and
processing algorithms. But recently we have been exploring how we might bring
architecture to life through biological technologies. Along these lines, expanding
from “Amphibious Architecture,” we created a project called “Mussel Choir,” again
working with Natalie Jeremijenko. In this project, we harness live mussels as bio
8.7 “Mussel
Choir” close up. sensors to detect pollution in the water. Then we use pollution levels to control an
© The Living. audio track, giving the mussels a way to “sing” about the water to humans.
This starts with the way live mussels open and close their shells to pull in 8.8 “Mussel
nutrients and dispose of waste. It turns out that the rate and the amount that the Choir” system.
© The Living.
shells open is a very sensitive and sophisticated sensor of water quality. And it turns
out that it is very simple and inexpensive to monitor the rate and the amount that
the shells open by attaching a Hall Effect sensor to one half of the shell and a rare
earth magnet to the other half of the shell (Figure 8.7). With this apparatus in place,
“wired” mussels can live normally in a typical environment and at the same time
send us real-time signals about the condition of the water.
This gives us a hybrid of artificial intelligence and “natural intelligence.” In other
words, it combines some of the best the computer has to offer with some of the
advanced processing of living, biological systems (Figure 8.8). It suggests that
designers can harness both computation and biology in the same project, and
even in the same device.
In terms of a design ecosystem, the project was derived from science papers,
extended through experimentation and prototypes, and enacted through
connections to a public interface. The initial version of this project, installed as part
of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2012, was both startling and humorous.
It simultaneously was unnerving and made perfect sense as a next step in well-
recognized trends such as digital sensing and studying biological systems. It
provoked questions about non-human rights. In its own way, it activated thinking.
Albena Yaneva: If Heidegger considers every object or natural entity to be the

assembly of four elements: “gods and the mortals, heaven and earth,” Latour sends
8.9 “Bio Computation” diagram. © The Living.
the inquiry into the same direction by arguing that “there are many more than four
existing deities, or dimensions, or factors brought simultaneously into play.” In a
way that is what we witness in your work: the technical and natural imbroglios you
create make us count way beyond four.
David Benjamin: Steven Chu, former United States Secretary of Energy, talks about a
Glucose Economy that may be poised to displace our current Petroleum Economy.
This means that because of new biological technologies including synthetic
biology, it may be possible to manufacture things and transport things using sugar
as a raw material instead of oil. It sounds far out, but there are already examples of
people who have genetically engineered yeast to churn out fuel and plastics that
don’t require oil but are equivalent to petroleum-based fuel and plastics.
This involves new compositions with many more than four dimensions, and
it is profound and relevant for many reasons. First, it may upend entire global
supply chains as we transform where and how we make things, where the raw
materials come from, and where the products are shipped. Second, it involves an
unprecedented level of human design, as people compose new life forms that
never before existed in the world. Third, it involves harnessing living, non-human
organisms as “collaborators” in the design and manufacturing process. Fourth, it
involves a level of complexity that is difficult for a single person, or even a single
discipline, to understand and control. Fifth, it involves simultaneous design at all
scales, from DNA with a diameter of 10^-9 meters to the earth at a diameter of
10^7 meters – 16 powers of ten at the same time (Figure 8.9).
In other words, the Glucose Economy is more than a technical solution, and it is
8.10 “Bio
about more than economics. It will have incredibly broad effects on trade, ecology,
Computation”
ethics, and our conceptualization of the built environment. And the Glucose sequence.
Economy will have to be designed. © The Living.
Our project “Bio Computation” addresses this framework and these issues. We
are collaborating with Fernan Federici and Jim Haseloff at a synthetic biology lab
at the University of Cambridge, and this kind of multi-disciplinary work seems
essential. The project involves creating a new strain of bacteria that combines
three properties of different existing bacteria: depositing rigid material like bone,
depositing flexible material like skin, and generating complex spatial patterns
(Figure 8.10). By cutting and pasting DNA that corresponds to these three functions,
it should be possible to create a single novel bacterium that can do all of this. The
idea is that this bacterium could manufacture new composite building materials
using renewable sugar as a resource – a perfect example of the Glucose Economy.
These composites could be calibrated to combine structure and envelope in the
same object, and they could be used for applications such as growing a single
flat sheet of material that can fold into a strong 3D form, or generating a wall and
operable door with no hinges or mechanical parts. In this way, these composites
could offer a new level of performance that in turn enables a new process of design,
completing the feedback loop.
9
Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design
Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Uriel Fogué
What are the Political Capacities of Design?
The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the ways in which design can matter
politically. More specifically, we want to explore the capacity of design to reorganize
what counts as political in our everyday lives. The usual way to explore this question
has been to focus on what we would like to call the “enfolding capacities” of design.
That is, the capacity of design to inscribe, congeal, or hardwire different political
programs and power relations into materials, spaces, and bodies. As a result of
this focus, most discussions about the politics of design have typically oscillated
between two extreme and seemingly irreconcilable groups: the apologists, who
see design and its enfolding capacities as a powerful tool to engineer social,
cultural, or economic change; and the critics, who see these enfolding capacities
as an insidious “ruse of Power” through which different forms of coercion and
domination are silently exerted.
In this chapter, we would like to explore an alternative way of thinking about
how design can matter politically. To do so, we will focus on a different, and largely
ignored, set of capacities, what we would like to call the “unfolding capacities”
of design. By “unfolding,” we refer here to the capacity of design to propose and
generate new entities and relations. In shifting our attention to unfolding, we aim
to open a new way of exploring the political valence of design, one that revolves
around its ability, not to prescribe and hardwire politics into bodies, spaces, or
material, but to broaden the range of bodies, spaces, and material that constitute
the cosmos of the political. This shift, we argue, opens not only a new way of
thinking about design but also, and much more importantly, a different way of
practicing design as a form of cosmopolitics.
Enfolding the Political
Design has always been an obscure object of political desire. Part of its attractiveness
resides in its ability to transform the explicit into the implicit, the visible into the
invisible, the articulate into the inarticulate, or the external into the embodied.
This enfolding capacity has been coveted by various political projects, which have
employed design not simply as a rhetorical “tool” or a “means” for politics, but as a
different way of doing politics, one in which power is not exerted against things,
sites, or bodies, but can circulate through them. Design, thus conceived, emerges
as a sui generis form of “material politics,” that is, as a form of doing politics through
things, which offers the possibility, or at least the promise, of rendering power tacit,
invisible and therefore unchallengeable by controlling that vast “sub-political”
world of physical and technological elements that silently shape our actions and
thoughts, but which typically remain outside the sphere of formal politics and
institutions (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué 2013, Marres and Lezaun 2011).
One of the best discussions on how the enfolding capacities of design can be
used as a form of material politics is found in Michel Foucault’s (1975) famous
discussion of school chairs in seventeenth-century France. These chairs, Foucault
argues, did not simply constitute the inert material background of the disciplinary
institution; they were one of the critical micro-technologies through which it came
into being. This was achieved, Foucault contends, by affording the possibility of
enfolding a new logic of power into the body. Specifically, the chairs silently brought
the body into the realm of power by setting the physical parameters of what the
“right” position for it was, and by requiring a specific alignment between subjects
and objects in a pre-defined behavioral space (Figure 9.1).
These chairs, Foucault argues, are just one instance of the various enfolding
mechanisms that emerged at the end of seventeenth century to configure a new
logic of power, one in which the body emerged for the first time not as something
given, but as something that could be produced (“se fabrique,” 1975: 137) and
transformed into a locus of power. Foucault maintains that the importance of these
enfolding mechanisms resided not so much in what they did, nor even in what they
aimed to do, but in how they did it. Unlike the gibbet, the chairs did not appear as
9.1 School chairs obvious or self-evident instruments of power or disciplinary mechanisms. Instead,
as enfolding
they operated at the level of the “sub-political” by silently creating the particular
mechanisms of
disciplinary power. ergonomics through which a new form of power, disciplinary power, and a new body
Lithography of politik gradually came into being. Thanks to these enfolding mechanisms, power
H. Lecomte, 1818. no longer needed its public representation to be effective; it could operate at the
subterranean level of the sub-political, configuring
a new microphysics of power, one in which power
was able to reproduce itself beyond the checks and
balances of formal politics. In so doing, Foucault
concludes, these enfolding mechanisms slowly
created a new political structure in which nobody
could see the architecture of power, but in which
everybody could be subjected to it.
Another great example of the political use of the
enfolding capacities of design can be found in Bruno
Latour’s theory of “delegation.” Unlike Foucault,
however, Latour offers a largely celebratory discourse
Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design 145
of these capacities. Take, for instance, his famous discussion of speed bumps.
According to Latour, speed-bumps emerge as a result of the impossibility of
relying on drivers’ individual will, or on the esoteric force of Durkheim’s “collective
consciousness,” to control their speed when, for example, they approach a
school. Speed bumps, argues Latour (1999: 186), solve this problem by enabling
the “translation” of a collective moral demand, such as “slow down so as not to
endanger students,” into a self-interested demand, like “I should slow down and
protect my car’s suspension.” Thus, like Foucault’s school chairs, speed bumps
operate as sub-political mechanisms that make it possible to silently enfold a
specific version of “civility” and the “public good” into asphalt. Unlike Foucault,
however, this enfolding process is seen in a largely positive light. It is thanks to
the speed bumps, Latour claims, that civility can be enforced on the reckless
individual. “The driver,” he writes, “modifies his behavior through the mediation
of the speed bump: he falls back from morality to force” (Latour 1999: 186). Latour
therefore sees the enfolding capacities of design as constituting a critical and
positive mechanism in the creation and reproduction of (civil) order, thanks to
their ability to create “black boxes” in which various tasks and responsibilities can
be delegated.
Although it is possible to find examples virtually anywhere of how the enfolding
capacities of design have been used to articulate different political programs, it is
perhaps in urban and architectural design that we can find the best examples. The
development of the modern city, for instance, can be seen as a history of attempts
to use design as way to enfold various political and moral projects into urban form.
Such was the project of nineteenth-century reformers like Haussmann and Cerdà,
who saw the design of a new urban form based on wide streets and sidewalks,
leisure spaces, and parks, and a carefully concealed system of underground
infrastructures, as a way of enfolding a new model of citizenship based on the liberal
principles of security, morality and the free-circulation of persons and things (Joyce
2003). The same belief in the transformative power of these enfolding capacities
has captivated urban planners and architects ever since. This it is evidenced in the
Garden Cities movement in Britain and its attempt to develop a new type of urban
form that could optimize relations between the individual and the community
with Nature; in Le Corbusier’s radical attempt to enfold the principles of rationality
and productivity into every single scale of the city, as in his famous 1922 “Ville
Contemporaine de 3 Millions d’Habitants;” or in the Soviet constructivist group
OSA and its attempt to use architectural design to shape individual and collective
behavior through the development of what they called “social condensers.” And it
is the same belief in the enfolding capacities of design that we find in the current
obsession with “smart cities” – which, from one perspective seem to offer a version
of Latour’s blackboxed haven of delegation and distribution of agency, while
from another they seem to embody Foucault’s worst nightmare of a high-tech
panoptican hell in which citizens are reduced to largely passive and infantile roles
in a deproblematized cityscape (Sennett 2012).
These examples illustrate some of the ways in which the enfolding capacities
of design have been conceptualized by theorists, and how practitioners have put
them to use. The arguments, as we have seen, can be divided into two camps. On the
one hand we have the apologists à la Latour for whom these enfolding capacities
offer an opportunity to enhance and extend our agential capacities by enabling
us to delegate tasks and competencies in various networks. Design, in this view,
emerges as a useful governance mechanism owing to its capacity to solve problems
and reconcile opposing individual and collective interests by material means. On
the other hand we have critics à la Foucault, for whom enfolding implies the risk
of creating a massive sub-political world engineered by different forms of expert
knowledge operating largely beyond the democratic control and accountability of
citizens. Here design emerges as a potentially dangerous tool, due to its ability to
produce and organize tacit and unchallengeable landscapes of power.
Our aim in this article is not to discuss the pros or cons of these positions, or
to try to find a plausible justum medium between them. Instead, we would like
to raise the question of whether both camps have not equally overestimated the
enfolding capacities of design. Despite all their differences, it seems that both
apologists and critics tend to take for granted the performativity of design by
assuming, perhaps too readily, what design makes us do. In other words, both
tend to create a “performative illusion” by focusing on the intentions and programs
that organize design and by assuming their effects as some sort of automatic and
inevitable result of the original design. This, needless to say, does not mean that the
enfolding capacities of design are a mere illusion. We just need to look around us
to find examples attesting to how design is capable of creating soft and tacit forms
of power that influence many of our daily behaviors and decisions: from nudging
us into buying certain products rather than others in the carefully designed aisles
of the supermarket, to conditioning us to peeing into the urinal rather than on the
floor, by placing target-flies on the former (Thaler and Sunstein 2008), and even to
pushing us into becoming game addicts by silently playing with our unconscious
behavioral inclinations (Schüll 2012).
These examples are powerful reminders of how important it is not to
underestimate the enfolding capacities of design. And yet, we argue, it is equally
important not to overestimate them. As Harvey Molotch (2003) reminds us, design
objects are continually changing as people creatively re-appropriate them and as
designers try to make sense of and adapt to these re-appropriations. Moreover, the
line linking the programs enfolded in design objects and the kinds of results that
these objects end up producing is rarely as straightforward as critics and apologists
seem to imply. After all, Foucault himself probably sat in one of those chairs and was
subjected to a myriad of carefully designed disciplinary mechanisms, and judging
from his magnificent oeuvre, they did not achieve much in terms of successfully
disciplining him. Drivers always seem to find ways to avoid and bypass speed
bumps (and, with them, public morality). Likewise, not everybody ends up buying
the same products in the supermarket, just us many men keep peeing outside the
urinal in spite of the carefully placed flies; and only a few of us end up becoming
addicts in the carefully designed spaces of the casino. Yet there is perhaps no better
place to illustrate this performative illusion than urban and architectural planning.
One need only think of the fate of those grandiloquent projects that sought to
9.2 Left,
clothes line in
Le Corbusier’s
Chandigarh
Capitol Complex.
Photo taken
c. 2010 by Vinayak
Bharne © 2010
Artists Rights
Society (ARS),
New York ⁄ ADAGP,
Paris ⁄ F.L.C. Below,
abandoned
headquarters
of the Bulgarian
communist party.
Image courtesy of
Thomas Jorion.
use architecture to enfold different visions of a new society, like Le Corbusier’s

project to “modernize” Chandigarh – eventually turned into a domestic space and
a flea-market – or the now derelict and abandoned buildings that constructivist
architects built across the Soviet Union to bring forth a new type of person and a
new society (Figure 9.2).
The tragic fate of these grandiloquent projects can be seen as an ironical

commentary on the enfolding capacities of architectural design. Our intention,
however, is not to use this irony to discredit the political capacities of design. Quite
the opposite: we wish to take this irony seriously as the starting point of a different
way of thinking and practicing design. The ironical fate of these projects, we
argue, forces us to acknowledge the limits of the political capacities of design and
to recognize the irreducible gap that separates the programs enfolded through
design and the ways in which they are ultimately received, activated, transformed,
or simply ignored. More specifically, we argue that accepting those limits, rather
than trying to overcome them with new and “better” designs, opens up a different
way of thinking about how design can matter politically, one not focused not on
the capacity of design to prescribe codes of action and thought, but on its capacity
to propose and open up the possibility of novel forms of action and thought. In
order to explore such a possibility, let us now turn our attention to what we call the
“unfolding” capacities of design.
Unfolding the Cosmopolitical
Before we can define what we mean by unfolding, it is perhaps useful to establish

what we do not mean by it. First and foremost, we do not take unfolding to be the
opposite of enfolding. In other words, by unfolding we do not simply mean the
process of making visible or “unblackboxing” what was previously enfolded. Nor is
unfolding a critique of enfolding. As defined here, unfolding is not to be understood
as a “revelatory” or a “critical” process, but as a propositional one. Thus, one way of
establishing the difference between enfolding and unfolding would be to say that
while the former refers to the capacity of design to “inscribe” specific versions of
the political in different bodies, entities, and sites, unfolding refers to the capacity
of design to “propose” new kinds of bodies, entities, and sites as political. It is in
this sense, we argue, that unfolding can be defined as a “cosmopolitical” activity in
Isabelle Stengers’s sense of the term (2005). In Stengers’s use, cosmopolitics does
not refer to that Kantian-Habermasian project of achieving a single and unified
common world, but rather to the ongoing project of exploring and expanding the
repertoire of possible common worlds. In other words, cosmopolitics is not about
unifying the world, but about multiplying it. Design, we argue, can play a critical
role in this process by unfolding and exploring hitherto unrealized possibilities to
build the cosmos of the political. As we will now show, it can achieve this in at least
three different ways: by “enlarging” what counts as political, by “speculating” about
other possible forms of doing politics, and by “questioning” the political.
Enlarging the Cosmos of the Political
Let’s start by exploring how the unfolding capacities of design can be employed
to enlarge what counts as political. A good example can be found in the current
development of domestic monitoring technologies, like smart energy meters.
Broadly defined, the aim of these technologies is to render “energy” visible and
9.3 Device
indicating
domestic energy
consumption and
costs.
controllable. This is done through various visualization mechanisms, for example

color-codes indicating the levels of consumption of individual domestic appliances,
or software programs that make indicate real-time energy consumption and its
associated economic costs (Figure 9.3).
One possible way of discussing the political valence of these devices would be
to focus on their enfolding capacities, that is, on how (and if ) these devices are
capable of interacting with the unconscious levels of individual behavior to create
a new sense of awareness about energy consumption practices that can eventually
result in more sustainable consumption habits. Here, however, we would like to
focus on a different set of capacities: specifically, the capacity of these devices to
unfold domestic spaces and actions as possible sites of politics. They can do so
in various ways. For example, these devices open up the possibility of blurring
the distinction between public and private spaces or between political actions
and everyday practices by showing how seemingly mundane and ineffectual
quotidian actions can be integrated into other scales of action beyond the home.
One of the ways in which they achieve this is by rendering an abstract force like
energy into something visible, evident, and quantifiable, and thus susceptible of
being acted upon (Gabrys 2014). Thanks to these devices, for example, it is possible
to know how much energy is consumed in domestic activities such as boiling
water, cooking, or taking a shower, thus opening up the possibility of connecting
these “private” activities with larger political projects such as sustainable societies
or low-carbon economies. In so doing, these devices offer the possibility of

seeing the house not as a self-contained and private space, but as a space that is
embedded within a larger network of energy consumption and pollution. In other
words, they open up the possibility of unfolding the hitherto private space of the
home as a site where it is possible to make political decisions. We italicize possible
because we do not wish to suggest that these technologies are capable per se of
transforming domestic actions and spaces into political ones. In fact many, if not
most, of these meters are not used to participate in any political project, but simply
to improve monthly energy bills. However, and this is our point, they do make the
former possible. In other words, they do unfold the possibility of turning the home
into a genuine site for the articulation of different forms of political action and
participation. This is precisely the possibility that has been explored by various
environmental advocacy groups which have used these domestic energy meters
to generate new forms of political association and action regarding sustainable
energy consumption (Marres 2012) or to disrupt and challenge official discourses
and statistics about pollution in urban environments (Calvillo 2014). What these
examples show, therefore, is how seemingly mundane design devices like these
domestic energy meters unfold the possibility of re-describing everyday actions
and domestic spaces as political, and how in so doing they enlarge the cosmos of
the political by extending the repertoire of possible sites of political action and
forms of participation.
Speculating on the Cosmos of the Political
The second way in which design can unfold the cosmos of the political is through
speculation. By speculation, we mean here the capacity of design to unfold an
otherwise as a site of political action and imagination. One of the best examples
of how speculation can unfold the cosmos of the political can be found in what
has recently come to be known as “tactical urbanism” (Lydon and Bartman 2012).
Broadly defined, tactical urbanism refers to those interventions that propose
radical transfigurations of urban spaces through their temporal appropriation.
Some examples of these tactics include “Open Streets” – an initiative to temporarily
block off traffic in order to open streets for other uses – or “Park(ing) Day” – which
proposes the temporary appropriation of parking spaces and their transformation
into park-like spaces (Figure 9.4).
The political valence of these interventions resides in their capacity not to
enfold a new permanent program in these streets, but to speculate with a given
public space, like a street, and open it up to the possibility of an unsuspected
otherwise. Another excellent example of the political capacities of these
speculative tactics can be found in “El Campo de la Cebada” in Madrid. “El Campo”
emerged in 2010 when an architectural collective, Zuloark, joined forces with
other activists and neighbors to appropriate one of the many derelict spaces left
behind when the Spanish construction bubble burst. Their aim was to transform
this abandoned space into a political and cultural space for the neighborhood.
However, rather than trying to inscribe a specific definition or program into the
square, they chose to create an under-defined space that could be unfolded in
different ways. To make this possible, the square was furnished with a set of 9.4 Left, “Open
open-source, hand-made, and mobile urban furniture that enabled multiple Streets,” street
unfolded as yoga
possibilities and configurations. So far “El Campo” has been unfolded as an studio by Bradley
educational venue hosting free public seminars and workshops; as an open-air P Johnson. Right,
summer university; as a political site hosting neighborhood associations and “Parking Day,”
assemblies; as a sports facility hosting basketball and football games; as an urban street unfolded as
garden; as a cultural facility hosting music concerts, theatre, film festivals, and park, Art Monaco
Portland via,
even a weekly “salsadrome;” and, of course, as a public square where neighbors
my.parkingday.org
can socialize or just laze about (Figure 9.5).
As in the case of tactical urbanism, the political valence of “El Campo” resides not
in having transformed a hitherto derelict urban space into a new thing – a square,
a theatre, or a basketball court – but in having created a perennially undefined
and unstable space that can endlessly be explored and re-imaged. In other words,
the political valence of “El Campo” lies in the fact that its identity is never fixed
or stabilized; it remains forever “in beta” as a space of possibilities (Corsín Jiménez
2013). What “El Campo” is, or what it can become, is not something that can be
defined beforehand. This is an open-ended question that is continually explored
through each new unfolding. In this sense, “El Campo” emerges as a powerful
urban machine, a city-making machine in which it is possible to explore, imagine,
and experiment with other ways of being in the city, other forms of building urban
communities, other forms of creating material and emotional attachments, and
also other forms of political participation.
Another powerful example of the political capacities of these speculative tactics
can be found in the “occupy” movements that have spread across the world since
2011. In spite of their different histories and trajectories, all of these movements
have attempted to appropriate public squares that were enfolded, or were about to
be enfolded (for example Taskim in Istanbul), in hegemonic political and economic
projects. The occupations transformed these squares not only into “political sites,”
but also, and much more importantly, into sites of “political speculation,” that is,
sites on which it became possible to think, explore and test other possible forms of
politics. Take, for example, the case of the “Acampada Sol” in Madrid in May 2012,
which went on to win the European Public Design Competition in 2012.
During its short life the “Acampada Sol” grew from just a few tents to a massive
object of architectural design made of disposable and makeshift materials like
plastics, cardboards, beach chairs, and picnic tables. One of the most interesting
9.5 “El Campo things about the Acampada as an object of architectural design is that its growth
de la Cebada” did not follow a pre-ordained design or vision. The Acampada was an open-ended
and its multiple
design object that grew organically as new ideas and possibilities emerged and
unfoldings.
Image courtesy of were discussed and tested in the different committees and working groups. In
Zuloark. just three weeks, the square was furnished with a library, a nursery, community
gardens, a radio, an internet hub, and a myriad of “committees” and working
groups on themes like infrastructures, education, art, psychology, economy, and
so on, in which proposals were drafted and then presented and discussed in an
9.6 Map of “Acampada Sol” during the third and final week of its life. Image courtesy of Miguel de Guzmán.
open-air general assembly acting as a political agora. Crucially, the aim of these
makeshift architectures was not to materialize previous ideas or plans, but to
create structures that would “activate thinking” (Stengers 2005: 1001). In other
words, the aim was to transform the square into a lively life-size political laboratory,
into a site where it was possible to speculate about the potentialities (and limits)
of different political vocabularies and modes of political participation and
organization. Over those three weeks the assemblies, committees, and working
groups transformed the utterly banal Sol Square into a “collective machine for
thinking” in which it became possible to experiment with and test miniaturized
forms of direct democracy, forms of collective discussion and decision-making,
and to examine broader questions about democratic politics such as: Is it possible
to re-imagine forms of democratic participation and decision-making outside
of current institutional structures? What kinds of physical, technological human
means infrastructure would be required to articulate such forms of democratic
politics? What are the possibilities and limits of such endeavors?
For three brief weeks, the “Acampada Sol,” along with other similar Acampadas
that mushroomed across the country, transformed ordinary public squares into the
epicenter of Spanish politics. They managed to short-circuit the public sphere with
questions that had previously been outside the political debate and discussion.
Three years later, however, there is no trace left of these Acampadas in the squares,
which have returned to their old reality as banal sites of passage. Yet this should not
deceive us into thinking that the Acampadas were ineffective devices. They remain
one of most powerful transformative forces in contemporary Spanish politics. Their
importance resided not in the makeshift physical infrastructures that were built
in the squares, but in the kinds of possibilities that those infrastructures opened
up. The Acampadas unfolded and activated the possibility of a different political
cosmology, one based on a new political vocabulary and a new repertoire of political
practices and forms of association. A great deal of political activity in Spain over
the last three years has revolved around exploring and realizing the possibilities
that were unfolded in the squares. As a result of this ongoing exploration, Spanish
society has witnessed a radical re-articulation of its civil society, expressed, for
example: in the creation of a massive web of civic associations and movements
emerging directly out of the working groups created in the Acampadas (Figure
9.7); in the emergence of a new cycle of political mobilizations and demonstrations
based on new political subjectivities and alliances, like the so-called “sectorial
tides,” built around the Acampadas; and in the creation of new political parties
which incorporate many of the political demands and methods of participation
and decision-making elaborated in the squares (Martínez López and Domingo San
Juan 2014).
With the examples in this section we have sought to explore some of the ways
in which design, and architectural design in particular, can matter politically.
For a long time the political role of architectural design has been understood
almost exclusively in terms of its capacity to make power “durable,” thanks to the
capacity of architecture to translate certain visions of power into physical realities
(Mukerji 1997). The architectural devices we have seen in this section offer a
9.7 Map of new associations and movements emerging from the different committees and working groups of “Acampada Sol.”
different possibility. The examples of tactical urbanism, “El Campo de la Cebada,”

or “Acampada Sol” are ephemeral interventions which are not intended to last. Yet
their transience does not make them any less powerful or important, since their
power does not reside in their ability to make certain visions of order,physical or
eternal, but in their capacity to make them thinkable. In other words, their power
lies in their ability to activate and unfold the possibility of an otherwise for political
action and imagination.
Questioning the Cosmos of the Political
In this last section we want to explore how design can unfold the cosmos of the
political by questioning it. More specifically, we want to explore the political
capacities of design when it is used not as a tool to provide answers, but as a way
to generate questions. We will focus on a particular example: the Jane Fonda Kit
House designed by the Spanish architectural studio elii (www.elii.es). The “JF-
Kit House” (JF-Kit House henceforth) was designed as a prototype for a “house
of the future.” It was initially built in 2012 in Brussels for the exhibition Paysage
in Progress. JF-Kit House (Domestic fitness. Tone up your body up and down!!) that
took place at the Centre International pour la Ville, l’Architecture et le Paysage
and was later rebuilt in Guangzhou for the 2013 Asian Art Curators’ Forum, held at
the Guangdong Museum of Art. Within the architectural tradition, “houses of the
future” have traditionally been designed to enfold desirable models and narratives
of the future, such as Le Corbusier’s, L’Espiritu Nouveau, 1922, Jacobsen’s, House of
the Future, 1929, and Alison+Peter Smithson’s, House of the Future, 1955–6. Unlike
these “houses of the future,” the “JF-Kit House” does not try to anticipate what the
future holds, nor does it attempt to provide technical solutions for future problems.
It takes a different route inspired by some of the “houses of the future” developed
in comedy or science fiction films, such as the one featured in Buster Keaton’s 1922
film Electric House. In this tradition, “houses of the future” are not used to solve
problems, but instead serve as ironical models that help to radicalize and test the
potentiality and limits of technological promises and utopias. Following this route,
the “JF-Kit House” has been designed to test hegemonic and taken-for-granted
models of sustainability and green architecture. The House does not attempt to
offer a desirable or even plausible model; it simply aims to propose a polemic
model of the future that can be used to question existing discourses and imagery
about sustainability. It does so by exacerbating a current model of sustainability
that seeks to mobilize bodies and transform them into active agents in the process
of energy production. Taking this idea to an extreme, the “JF-Kit House” offers a fully
functioning and replicable off-the-grid house that can be attached as an add-on to
any building.
The House proposes a radical future scenario of sustainability in which citizens
have to meet all of their domestic energy requirements with their own physical
activities. Thus, in the “JF-Kit House” things like turning a light on, watching TV,
checking your email, or cooking, all require different degrees of physical activity,
which the house has systematized in the form of exercise tables that transform
domestic life into a set of choreographies of physical exercises to be performed 9.8 Left,

individually or collectively (Figure 9.8). This new choreography requires a radical installation of the
“JF-Kit House,”
reevaluation and reformulation of domestic space. For example, since cooking a Guangzhou, China.
dish of pasta or doing the laundry require a considerable amount of energy, the Right, exercise
traditional living room needs to be redesigned to make domestic life and energy- tables for checking
generating workouts compatible. your email, talking
over Skype, or
By taking the idea of energy-efficiency to the extreme, the “JF-Kit House” aims to cooking. © Uriel
produce a real-life domestic model to explore some of the elements neglected in Fogué and elii.
current discussions on sustainability and green architecture. Specifically, the house

aims to engage with those approaches that have conceptualized sustainability
as a purely expert and technological problem that will eventually be solved with
the design of more efficient devices and architectures (Guy and Moore 2005). It
is intended to reveal that sustainability also needs be understood as a cultural
and political problem that calls for an open debate on the new kinds of domestic
spaces, practices, and ways of co-habitation that these sustainable futures would
require to be realized. One of the ways in which the House does this is by offering
an ironical model of citizenship for future sustainable societies: the “Jane Fonda
model of citizenship,” which defines the ideal citizen as an individual who can
satisfy all her domestic energy needs through her own physical exercise. Through
the radicalization of this model, the “JF-Kit House” aims to open a debate about
the kind of bodies and practices that are required to participate and achieve the
imagined sustainable societies. Specifically, it asks: What kinds of bodies and new
practices are imagined to fulfill the promises of these sustainable futures? What
kinds of infrastructures are required to produce those bodies and practices?
What kinds of transformation of domestic spaces and rituals do these sustainable
models demand? Which bodies and practices are excluded from participating in
those sustainable futures and their promises? And how can design bring together
different entities and actors?
The “JF-Kit House” raises all these questions but does not attempt to answer them.
In other words, it does not aim to be a “black box” in the usual techno-scientific
sense. It does not aspire to be a device to solve problems through technical and
expert knowledge, as did previous “houses of the future,” Foucault’s school chairs
or Latour’s speed bumps. Rather, the “JF-Kit House” aims to be a “black box” in the
theatrical sense of the term, which is to say that it aims to be a space in which
it is possible to stage problems, to render them evident and public. In this sense,
it does not attempt to use technology and architecture to “solve” the problem of
sustainability; rather, it uses technology and architecture to unfold sustainability
as a political problem. The political value of the “JF-Kit House,” therefore, does not
reside in its capacity to offer a model of “sustainable” ways of living together which
can bring some sort of cosmopolitical pax romana. Instead, its political value lies
in its ability to unfold a fictional scenario that operates as a polemic playfield in
which sustainability emerges not as a technical problem requiring a technical
solution, but as political problem requiring a new system of co-habitation, a new
cosmopolitical regime which requires the production not only of new technologies
but also of new bodies, a new set of cultural practices, and a new set of connections
and attachments between all these elements.
The “JF-Kit House” can be seen as an example of how architectural design is not
just about constructing buildings, but can also be about constructing questions
and controversies. The House seeks to create a critical context by designing a
controversial battlefield in which it is possible to stage, test, and interrogate the
conflicts and interests of the different agents participating in the creation of these
sustainable futures. In this sense, it offers a valuable example of how the role of
design is not just to provide answers to political questions, but also to work as a
way to generate questions that have to be resolved politically.
To Enfold or To Unfold? That is the Question
The aim of this short chapter has been to discuss the political capacities of design.
By talking about the political capacities of design, rather than the usual “politics of
design,” we have aimed to highlight the fact that design does not have a single
politics, but is capable of articulating and generating different political logics and
forms. Here, we have explored two sets of capacities, which by no means need
to be the only ones. First, we have explored what we have called “the enfolding
capacities” of design, which, we have argued, have unduly dominated the
debate about politics and design. We say unduly, not because these capacities
are unimportant but because, as we have shown, they are not the only way in
which design is capable of working politically. Unfolding, we have argued, offers a
different and largely unexplored set of political capacities.
Drawing a contrast between enfolding and unfolding has enabled us to map
out some of the different ways in which design can operate politically. While
enfolding enables design to work as a prescriptive mechanism, unfolding allows
it to operate as a propositional mechanism. Moreover, while enfolding enables
design to produce answers to political problems, unfolding transform design into
a mechanism to generate political questions and problems. And while enfolding
enables design to work at the level of the sub-political by making it possible to
inscribe political codes into things, sites, and bodies, unfolding allows it to work
at the level of the cosmopolitical by making it possible to extend, interrogate and
speculate about the kinds of things, sites, and bodies that constitute the cosmos of
the political. The question for us, therefore, is not so much which of these capacities
are better or preferable, but which ones are put to use and how they come to
matter politically. To enfold or to unfold? That is the question.
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10
An Interview with Eva Castro, Plasma Studio and Groundlab
Albena Yaneva: What is the role of design if nature is no longer passive and salient
enough to provide a background for human activities? How should we understand
the role of design practice in reordering the material and living world?
Eva Castro: Design practice should be understood not in relation to the material
world but fully embedded within it; woven into its filaments, affected by its
constraints and its reach, continuously enticed and (in)formed by it. Only then can
it emerge as a discipline with a certain agency and acquire political relevance.
Nature has never been passive, nor a pleasant backdrop to human activities.
In fact it is partly the challenge of domesticating it that, to a certain extent, has
constituted our very existence. “Art is not an imitation of nature, but its metaphysical
supplement raised up beside it in order to overcome it” (Nietzsche 1986: 142). We
might argue that a historical duality in the reading of the relationship between
nature and culture has fostered (excessively) distinct (op.)positions and political
postures, and that such polarization between the two has affected our ability to
understand the intricacies of the world, hence constricting our capacity to rethink
it. We have somewhat limited our operability in this regard to a relatively remedial,
singularly driven and ultimately puerile set of responses. Needless to say, this
simplistic approach has situated our design practice(s) in a rather straightforward
manner, within the boundaries of the graspable.
On the other hand, the question of the two natures, as posed by Marx and
Engels – whereby we extract our material from one and produce the “second” as
a result of our activities, turning it into a commodity – might hint at the root of
the uncontrolled, almost compulsory, growth of our capitalist civilization and its
consumerist appetites. And it is this colossal scalar shift what has forever altered
our relationship with “nature,” hence also affecting our perception of it, of ourselves,
of our nature … and of our agency to re-design such nature, ourselves (our bodies),
and so on.
In a very traditional manner, I shall say, our praxis continues to be a futile attempt
to re-invent ourselves in pursuit of defeating the end (death). More specifically, it
is the irreverent attitude toward any given reality and environment that makes us
vibrate, arousing first curiosity, then disbelief, often rage, and ultimately desire to
engage, to change, to design and to project new realities. At the core of it all lies
with great significance the re-definition of our values and the need to understand
that our position is framed only in relation to other positions of other objects. We
have the capacity to affect the system and to bring up specific potentials in the re-
positioning and actualization of new relationships.
This is the final call for the abolishment of medieval states and geographical
finitudes bounded by fictitious lines, along with the intransigent identities masked
behind regional localisms: cosmopolitics is now graspable – hopefully also
attainable, due to the world crisis that is indeed starting to delete differences. The
scale of such effects – many yet to be felt – is such that it demands a departure
from petty interests and individualisms, and a willingness to embrace the co-
existence of the many natures and mechanisms through which we (can) inhabit
the very same “space.” Hence, questioning the history of anthropocentrism seems
to be the most adequate step toward equipping our practices with the necessary
techniques to grasp and interact with this viscous, ever-changing matter, where all
objects have a nodal position and are constantly feeding it, consuming it, weaving
into and informing it.
Albena Yaneva: Can you provide examples that illustrate how your design works
turn nature into cause for thinking and mobilize a variety of entities in new
compositions?
Eva Castro: Our design practice (both at Plasma Studio and Groundlab), has long
held an interest in challenging the traditionally romanticized notion of nature:
landscape as a spectacle, the subject to be viewed, and represented, and always
removed from the object/viewer. In a way our work attempts to shift the aesthetic
from that interstitial space of representation toward the space of the object
itself, its body, and its actions. In this way, we feel, there is a chance to produce a
body of work whose value goes beyond its own fleshy finitude, to extend into its
surroundings and start recomposing it, generating new relationships, instigating
re-alignments and (im)balances. This attitude echoes both in our architecture and
urban proposals, in a sense reuniting the scales and forming nodal intensifications.
International Horticultural Expo, Xian, Plasma Studio and Groundlab
This project was a 37-hectare park that was to operate temporarily (for six months)
as a horticultural fair, and then become an urban park and serve as a hub for the
development of a new district (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). The transition from one state
to the other was seen as an evolution through which the project would acquire
robustness as it shifted from a highly artificial state – almost capable of maintaining
itself – to a natural sustainable state. Over time, the “second” state would develop
an identity of its own, based on the local characteristics of the soil, weather, water
availability, and autochthonous vegetation.
10.1 CAD drawing/master plan; pedestrian paths and vehicular roads woven and articulated by the various patches of flowers. © Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
10.2 Aerial view of the park. © Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
10.3 A close up into the detailed materialization within certain parts of the park.
© Plasma Studio and Groundlab.
An Interview with Eva Castro, Plasma Studio and Groundlab 165
Our strategy consisted in designing and coupling systems, such as natural and 10.4 Views of
artificial water collection, various degrees of water treatment (natural wetlands the greenhouse.
© Plasma Studio
and grey water treatment plants), and various types of paths (Figure 10.3). As all
and Groundlab.
systems have specific spatial requirements, the dialogue among them turned into
an amalgam: a woven tissue organized by the local relationships.
The overall layout of the system embraced change, concealing both present-
temporality and future emergence. We designed a geometry within a geometry,
where for example the small patches exhibiting diverse exotic flowers during the
expo were framed within larger patches that could cater later for local trees (Figure
10.4). The internal divisions were softly “drawn up” on the ground, using loose
gravel and other non-agglomerated materials that without human aid would easily
merge into the background, giving birth to a new ecology on the site.
At the same time, we deemed it necessary to calibrate the changes and to ensure
certain continuities over time. To this end we set up two anchoring points on the
site, where on-going activities would sustain the influx of visitors to the park: an
exhibition center and a glasshouse. These became nodal points of intensity, whose
10.5 Views of morphological articulation was driven by a negotiation with the landscape. Such
the exhibition dialogue aspired to challenge the notions of nature and artifice, of landscape, and
building,
of architecture, producing moments that at times celebrated a certain balance, but
articulating
the flows and always on the edge of tension.
mediating
between the Albena Yaneva: How does your work contribute to “slowing down” reasoning,
solidity of the “slowing down” the construction of the common world, and creating a space for
ground and the
hesitation?
waterfront.
© Plasma Studio
and Groundlab. Eva Castro: Our work seeks actively to escape normatives by challenging
prescriptive conditions and producing designs that in themselves can stand
as a form of resistance to everything that traditionally has been thought to be
“appropriate.” In fact we have always been interested in an aesthetic production
that is not correct, comfortable, or familiar. In other words, a body of work that
through its own unfamiliarity sets the user’s behavior in a kind of childlike attitude:
curious, daring, ludicrous, and above all always engaging.
To hesitate is to allow yourself time: spare, “useless” time to think, to question,

to doubt, to embrace uncertainties – traditionally something that architecture
has tried to avoid, preferring a rather even backdrop, a “simple” container for
everyday practice that relies on good management and organization, efficiency,
and ergonomics: all mechanisms to “facilitate” moving, working, producing (and
consuming), faster, faster, faster! This induces routine behavior and propels a body
politics of general physical disengagement, whereby the body is estranged from us
to become part of an automatized machine.
Our architecture attempts to introduce disruptions in the performance of this
functional machine, introducing a sense of unfamiliarity, retreating from any
affinities based on resemblances with a known past. The aim is to urge the user
to move away from a (pre)programmed mode – and the preconceived ideas it
implies – and to re-engage with their own body first, and then through it, with it,
to relate to their environment. We thus choose to detach our work from dogmatic
typological references and instead favor abstraction and spaces whose intrinsic
qualities engage the user viscerally and haptically, as much as cognitively.
In places where the common imaginary associates the local with a specific
traditional architectural lineage, as in South Tyrol, we have often encountered
reticence toward our mode of praxis. It is crucial to explain that in this case the
image of the place is directly linked to the biggest economic interests: the tourist
industry. Consequently, the power structures in place dictate and control the
image of the area, homogenizing the landscape and stripping it of the means to
develop its own identity. To propose an alternative identity is hence both a project
challenge and a political act of head-on opposition, which nonetheless we believe
is paramount if culture is to continue to evolve locally.
Our response to this challenge has been to use architecture as a mediation;
an interface between the city and the landscape, where the object’s body bears
the active role of assembling a new reality through its occupation of the space.
Our buildings arise as formations, weaving the ground (be this soft soil or hard
built ground) through operations that could be seen as insolent; cutting through,
protruding into, folding around, always seeking a form of engagement with the
public/open realm. We use a language that is closer to that of geological formation
than to any given existing local typology, yet our intention is not to mimic it but to
challenge it, to dispute its “natural” originality, to defy its solidity, thus blurring the
boundaries of a traditional envelope and a natural rock, connecting exterior and
interior, generating surfaces that demand appropriation rather than providing a
complacent setting.
presenting phenomena related to nature, ecology, and biodiversity? How do you
“activate thinking” through design?
… experimental noise music “puts back in” elements that used to be excluded from
the artwork: the sound of the space in which the music was recorded; the bodies of
the instruments and the musicians; the presence of “noise” that alerts us to the fact
that we are listening to a physical medium, and so on (Morton 2007: 108).
To expose the techniques involved in the creative process is to translate them

and all their spillage back into the artwork, revealing its threads and inner
structure, disclosing its aims as well as its failures, making it vulnerable. Perhaps
at this moment the aesthetic act loses its own finitude, that deathly hermetic
completeness, to instead become an on-going process seeking its (trans)formation
in dynamic collaboration with the user/subject.
This collaboration is a genuine complementation, whereby the subject is
engaged with, absorbed into and integrated within it as part of a larger assemblage
with no strict differentiation between subject and object. The body itself becomes
aesthetics. To form a material assemblage engaging the body to such a degree
has been part of our agenda throughout all our projects: nature as an artificial
construct – our construct. We avoid “presenting” (nature, ecology, and so on), as
this purely informative approach would be detrimental to the cosmopolitical view
of the world that needs to be attained. It would make us passive, put us back in the
consumerist spectator’s seat, somewhat removed from the actuality of things. Our
approach instead aims at internalizing phenomena and making our environment
a contingent part of ourselves, of our bodies, to then passionately re-engage from
within it.
Hotel Puerta America, Madrid, Plasma Studio
We wanted to challenge the hoteliers’ typical, more mainstream tendency to

provide visitors with a cozy, familiar atmosphere that would make them feel
“at home.” Instead we thought it was important to exacerbate the feeling of
strangeness and to recognize the actual geographical coordinates of the body;
free it from memory to let it rather be embedded in its actual environment. First,
we worked on the main corridor where we used the existing structures such as
partition walls, doors, and service ducts as a given rhythm into which we inserted
a new disruptive order thus establishing a new complex geometry of continuous
triangulated plains (Figure 10.6). In addition, we introduced a LED light seam
that gradually changed the color all along the corridor, giving specificity to each
segment.
The aim of the design is to intensify the visitor’s experience and destabilize the
trajectory toward the rooms, whilst simultaneously demanding attentiveness to
“find” oneself again. The circulation areas culminate in the knot: the area where
both corridor wings fold into each other and create a vortex, forcing the ceiling to
dip down and form a cocoon: a bracket in space and time onto which randomly
chosen images (from the guests’ cameras assigned upon arrival by the hotel) are
projected.
The rooms have been designed as a mediator between the artificial intensity of
the trembling stainless steel tunnel and the exterior behind the window (Figure
10.7). Reverberations of the corridor in color, material and geometry are employed
10.6 Hotel Puerta America, Madrid, the lobby area. © Plasma Studio.
10.7 Hotel Puerta

America, Madrid,
room interior.
© Plasma Studio.
not to destabilize, in this case, but to establish continuity and to organize the
required functions.
We wanted to produce an experiential deceleration within the rooms, as if
entering a different scale of the journey, where the users are made aware of each
other, entering a realm where they are both affected, mostly in relation to each
other. The space forces – or joyfully invites? – them to become voyeurs, to observe,
to (re)discover each other. The trick is simple: to override basic conventions of
prudish behavior. Our choice was to design a bathroom with no privacy, where the
internal pieces are designed as a morphological continuity of the bedroom and the
separation is given by a multifaceted glass, hence amplifying and multiplying the
image to be gazed at.
Albena Yaneva: How is the agency of other species and objects taken into account
in architectural design? How do you make explicit the connection of humans to a
variety of entities with differing ontologies: rivers, species, air, pollution, objects,
materials and divinities? What are the specific techniques used to create new
conditions and new spaces for their co-habitation?
Eva Castro: Whilst directing the Landscape Urbanism Program at the AA, London,
we developed a strong interest to bring forward the Master’s academic agenda,
testing it in the realm of praxis. Since then Groundlab’s modus operandi has been
based on the concept of landscape urbanism that we had been developing;
a new mode of practice that responds to contemporary social, economic, and
environmental conditions. With an inherently multidisciplinary approach, cities
and landscapes are seen as natural processes that constantly change and evolve,
therefore requiring flexible and adaptable mechanisms and designs to emerge, to
configure and re-configure the existing and future urban environments.
We enhance the use of representational techniques beyond the purely analytical
or explanatory, boosting these territorial readings to translate environmental,
topographical, and geographical parameters into more propositional and
exploratory mechanisms. Indexes are understood as a construct/an alchemy/an
amalgam among the territory’s existent parts, which, rather than prioritizing one
part over the others, facilitates their interaction, in addition to further manipulation
of the system whereby they are held together and ultimately operate as a whole.
This facilitates the generation of strategies that have at their core to trigger
relationships instead of embracing a remedial approach to discreet parts.
The shift from the index toward the hyper index is maintained as a continuum
or zone of action that allows us both to (infra)structure the ground as a means for
spatial organization and to return for feedback and readjustments. Hence, natural
systems (rivers, green corridors, water channel systems), urban flows (pedestrians,
vehicles), exchanges of goods and products, networks of local interactions, and
existing urban patterns are used to establish new frameworks from which nodes,
axes, routes, and paths are accentuated, enhanced, or weakened, while others
become spines to connect, separate, or differentiate between existing and new
developments. This methodology leads us not towards a blank canvas completely
free for experimentation, but to one that is replete with information with which
to work, negotiate, and experiment. The idea is to acknowledge the presence of
an existent materiality within the territory, needing to be uncovered, and then to
propose modes of relating to it, instead of avoiding interaction.
Ground Ecologies, Jiading, Groundlab
“Ground Ecologies” won the first prize in the Jia Ding Urban Design Master Planning
International Competition in 2010. The site is located in a post-industrial area
with polluted grounds, in one of Shanghai’s suburbs which is bound to become
yet another gentrified development due to the extension of the city’s metro as
part of the 2010 International Expo upgrade program. It is set to become a new
10.8 “Ground 500 ha CBD mixed-use redevelopment, potentially hosting up to 25,000 workers
Ecologies,” Jiading, and 200,000 inhabitants.
techniques for
soil remediation
We had to use soil remediation and water treatment systems to deal with the
according to existing polluted conditions which we knew would result in a series of artificial
the type of topographies (Figures 10.8 and 10.9). From there, as a by-product, we generated
contamination. in-between ground that would knit together the various disparate areas of the site,
© Groundlab.
simultaneously providing the city with spatial diversity and a coherent character
(Figure 10.10).
The design was thus initiated with a set of indexical drawings to locate various
10.9 “Ground types, sizes, and degrees of existing industries as sources of pollution. In this way
Ecologies,” Jiading, we could strategize an initial layout for the “digging and capping” process. The new
polluted water and
soil remediation (remedial) topography with elongated mounds and valleys was then subjected – as
strategies. malleable matter – to a wind simulation, which helped us to sculpt them following
© Groundlab. the summer winds.
To embrace the results of such engineering processes meant to accept a new 10.10 “Ground
ground assemblage (Figure 10.11), a new condition which, far from being sterile, Ecologies,” Jiading,
was already embedded with an inherent timeline derived from performance- new topographic
condition produced
driven parameters. The real opportunity here was to read within such techniques through the soil
possible alignments with other timelines and to weave them through and into remediation; zoom
them. We thus took advantage of this information to choreograph the following of the CBD area.
phases of the urban development, making use of the most polluted mounds as © Groundlab.
enclaves of resistance that would endure as shear voids: unbuildable pockets of
public space. 10.11 “Ground
Ecologies,” Jiading,
The ultimate ambition of “Ground Ecologies” is to mobilize the idea of bird view of a
thickened ground towards a new sensibility that incorporates infrastructure CBD’s segment.
as a form of open spaces (Figure 10.12); an activated ground that actively © Groundlab.
10.12 “Ground engages with retention and roadwork systems and storm-water management,
Ecologies,” Jiading, reinterpreting its interstices and adjacent spaces to form a network of uncharted
the new ground
morphology
urbanity.
woven into the
proposed massing.
© Groundlab. References
Nietzsche, F. 1986. The Birth of Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morton, T. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. London and
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11
Façades: Material Assemblages and Literal Embodiments
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Ignacio F. Solla and Jeffrey Anderson
Despite the considerable efforts of centuries of architectural theory to unify nature

and extract material concerns from the core of the discipline, architectural design
has never treated nature as an abstract, silent and unified entity, distinct from design
and technological experimentation. A cosmopolitical perspective would possibly
constitute a more adequate theoretical framing for an architectural discipline
which accepts a multiplicity of natures and keeps the material concerns at the core
of the practice, by accepting that the common world cannot be mapped onto a
unified nature, which is “out there.” Nature is to be done, created, instigated; it is
to be composed, and this happens with every new project. The history of façade
assemblages is a perfect example of a complex of technologies that did not require
a single, specific way of dominating nature, but rather offered ways of creating
new alliances with the forces of nature (solar energy, vegetation, temperature,
ventilation, and so on), resulting in new compositions, new assemblages, and new
“façade species.”
The role of architectural design is to contribute to this process of composition: to
make architects test new compositions, experiment, and refresh existing ones. The
contribution of this chapter to the discussion on cosmopolitics is an illustration of
how different types of façade (or façade species) have acknowledged the diversity
of worlds in their own way, and led architects, engineers, and materiologists to test
different ways of “assembling” the world. In Stengers’s language, this embodies a
“slowing down” politics which explicates what the world is made of, rather than
suggesting quick “compromises” alongside the traditional divides between Politics
and Architecture, Materials and Meaning, Technology and Art.
A Cosmopolitical Perspective of the Façade
While the façade as an element of architecture is one of the most thoroughly

theorized, the idea of the façade has been called into question since the end of the
nineteenth century. As such, the liberation of the façade from structural and climatic
performance, facilitated by modern building technologies, may inadvertently

have triggered its progressive devaluation. The traditionalist understanding of the
façade is driven by faciality and focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional
operations (proportional laws and linguistic codes) that are generally deployed
on the envelope’s surface. The exponential development of building technologies
throughout the twentieth century, coupled with the large-scale of modern
construction, has disabled the compositional and ornamental approaches to
the façade in favor of the material, quantitative, and constructive aspects of the
building envelope. Rather than a surfacial understanding of the façade, a micro-
sectional analysis is, therefore, required to transcend traditionalist forms of reading
its history.
The exponential development of building technologies during the twentieth
century, coupled with the sheer scale of modern construction, increasingly
undermined the ornamental logics of the façade in favor of material, quantitative,
and constructive logics. We could probably talk of an assemblage logic, where
architecture transcends the simple representation of nature, or the simple
implementation of natural rules with “compositions.” This has become increasingly
clear in the last decades when the ecological crisis has more critically called into
question architectural “compositions.”
The hypothesis of this study is that the façade remains a crucial element of
architecture – in fact, perhaps the most crucial – but that its performance occurs
through a literal material embodiment of the real rather than through ornamental
representation. The aesthetic and affective performance of the façade has to
become re-attached to its economic, technological, cultural, and political ecologies
in order to reconstruct a contemporary discipline of the façade, or, as we would say,
the building envelope.
I would like to explore here a new theory of facade “materiology” (Souriau 1989,
Simondon 1958, 1980, Dagognet 1997, 2000), which explores the composition of
facades. Assembling a façade is a cosmopolitical process and requires cosmopolitical
thinking because it turns a number of problems related to nature and ecology into
a cause for thinking (daylight, humidity, rain, vegetation, air, climate, and so on).
Its historical analysis also reveals that façades are never the product of a single
mind – as the traditional history of the discipline claims – but rather the outcome of
collective thinking that includes the voice of those who are usually excluded from
the architectural credits (that is, non-human entities, manufacturers, engineers,
experimenters, politicians, and contractors, among others).
Material embodiment of economic, social, and cultural processes, rather than
their superficial representations, has become the crucial aspect of the façade
as a contemporary architectural element. This implies the reconstruction of this
element, not as a history of inventions, but as an anthropological study of the
processes, ecologies, and tectonic assemblages that have evolved in parallel to
the technical and technological development of this building element. These
processes are primarily driven by the diffusion and application of dynamic
ecologies of materials and technologies. Materials such as glass, systems such as
curtain walls, and assembly logics such as rainscreens are not representations of
Façades: Material Assemblages and Literal Embodiments 177
cultural or political concepts, but are, in and of themselves, literal embodiments of

larger ecologies, politics, and cultures (Zaera-Polo 2008, 2009).
Each material aspect of the contemporary façade has direct attachments
to the complex ecology of economies, politics, and social structures to which it
belongs. The repurposing of the military industry after World War II, both in the
United States and in Germany – in many cases toward the building industry1 – the
tendency toward the use of opaque and insulated façades after the 1973 oil crisis
(Uri 1978), and the widespread use of titanium face-sealed envelopes after the
collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, are all examples of the evident connections
between the technologies and materials of the façade and their diverse socio-
political or cultural ecologies.2
In the traditional architectural discourse the solid and static prevail over
the liquid states of materials, and the durable receives more attention than the
fragile and the vulnerable. When dealing with the more symbolic human aspects
of architecture, theory has systematically neglected the role of materials and
undermined the importance of matter. Far from needing a spiritual atmosphere
or a symbolic aura that will make sense of its “simple nature,” matter has a rich and
vibrant life on its own. A materiology of the façade would address the variability
of its matters. It would not consider the materials scientifically (analysis of the
structure of architectural objects) or poetically (an interpretation that is based on
words and poetic meaning). Instead, it would account for the full deployment of
material qualities: the unexpected surprises, the technical gestures, the unforeseen
consequences and the underestimated properties of the materials (Latour and
Yaneva 2008, Yaneva 2009). Matter is neither neutral nor passive; it is significantly
more active and vibrant than symbolic and ornamental interpretations of
architecture admit.
Façade Assemblages
The concept of façade assemblage describes the incorporation of a variety of

materials to form a singular ensemble. Façade assemblages such as curtain
walls, double façades, and vegetated façades address environmental equilibrium
comprehensively, drawing multiple attachments into their processes of production
and modes of use. A façade assemblage presents a temporary moment of
equilibrium within the conditions of a particular building environment (and by
“environment” we mean a whole set of technical, climatic, social, economic, and
political conditions affecting a building).
Façade assemblages compound the complex set of agents and forces that
determine a façade. For example, we can talk about the degree of environmental
adaptation of a façade assemblage in order to understand its performance and
how changes in the environment may affect the overall design and our aesthetic
perception of it.
In articulating environmental inputs, a façade assemblage may adopt a standard
form, capable of being deployed in a wide range of projects, or a specific mode,
designed for a particular situation. The range of possibilities between generic

and specific, cheap and expensive, local and global types sets out probable
performance standards that a façade assemblage may utilize in response to
differing environmental conditions. However, a high degree of environmental
adaptation in a façade assemblage is not equivalent to good design. A perfect
environmental adaptation is also an index of the near-total submission to
predominant epiphenomenal environmental forces and may endanger the species
in the event of a sudden, subsequent change in such environmental conditions.
This willing or unwilling capitulation may, indeed, be the cause of the extinction of
the assemblage, just as ignorance of the greater complex of environmental forces
at play is often a reason for the failure of a solution.
Like natural species, façade assemblages undergo a process of development,
proliferation, and – sometimes – extinction. Unlike details, assemblages are
never architectural singularities; instead, they mobilize an evolving fabric of
elemental and impersonal forces associated with architectural materials and their
attachments. For example, the enormous success that double façades enjoyed
in Germany during the 1990s was due to a political ecology that combined the
prominence of the Green movement, the fact that employment laws made
operable windows and direct sunlight mandatory in employment spaces, and an
extraordinarily prosperous economy. A weaker economy, the pressures of space
efficiency, and the availability of affordable and superior alternative technologies
have now considerably reduced the appetite for such double-façade technologies.
There is never a singular, dominant representation attached to a façade
assemblage; a façade assemblage is always a multiplicity of conflicting narratives
and sub-narratives encompassing multiple ecologies, some of which are intrinsic
to architecture, while others are external. Façade assemblages, such as precast
concrete façades, face-sealed envelopes, or media façades do not appear suddenly
and evolve in a smooth historical continuum, following some inexorable path
toward perfection; they do not have a progressive evolution whatsoever. They may
lie dormant for decades, migrate from a parallel industry, or mutate in response to
new environmental pressures or simple accidents and fateful errors.
While architectural history presents us with a sequence of canonical buildings
and heroic architects, a narrative punctuated by instances of convergence, when
everything momentarily reaches a state of apparent equilibrium, our approach
here dissolves these moments into a dynamic evolution of assemblages, where
we might follow their rise and fall. Most heroic figures of modernist architecture
pale in relation to assemblers such as Albert Kahn or Pietro Belluschi. Avant-garde
architectural agency, as such, once in the hands of a few heroes (drinking from
the fountainhead of inspiration), nonetheless disintegrates into a myriad of what
might be called “subaltern players,” in this case apparent non-human actors, with
names such as Corning Glass, H.H. Robertson, Tyvek, among others. What would
have become of Mies van der Rohe without Pilkington’s float glass? And what fate
might have befallen Frank O. Gehry without the final collapse of the Iron Curtain
and the Soviet Union, plus the seemingly innocent or unrelated emergence of
DuPont’s advanced waterproofing membranes?
The Shifting Semiotics of Façade Assemblages
The façade has been understood (or misunderstood, by reduction) throughout the
history of architecture as a face that expressed the status of humans in relation to
their environment, natural, or cultural. It was approached as a type of organism, but
only in the most superficial sense. This resulted in a series of practices marred by
their recourse to symbolic interpretations of the façade as an ersatz pictorial field.
The “semiotic turn” of the 1960s continued this tradition by approaching the façade
as a sign or code to be deciphered. With architecture’s growing interconnectedness
to the complex gamut of social, geopolitical, and economic vectors affecting it,
the conception of the façade as a simple surface of representation seems to be
an inadequate method for determining its contemporary agency. To reclaim the
discourse of the façade and propel it forward, we must first acknowledge the
façade as a material entity subject to complex environmental processes.
Buildings are never experienced in a void. Experience is also contingent to
the cultural ecologies of a material assemblage. Our perception of a façade is
affected by the economic, cultural, and political regimes that inform its reality. The
instability and dynamism of those experiences unfold primarily on or within the
buildings’ material assemblages, where politics and economics have their most
direct attachment and expression. Gehry’s super-iconic Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, Spain, would never have existed if certain political and economic factors at
play in the Basque territories in the 1990s did not require that the project present
a radically experimental image, alien to any preexistent forms of local identity.
Yet it is also attributable to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, which made aerospace
technology affordable to architects, and titanium available at drastically reduced
prices. While those sets of political conditions are now embedded in the building
assemblage, and probably associated with the building for a certain generation of
architects, they do not preclude the reinterpretation of the building by a different
generation of “users;” for example, those born in the post-Cold War world and post-
ETA politics, or all those who are driven by present-day social media, the hyper-
commoditized international economy, plus the attendant threat of rolling global
financial crises.3 In this sub-narrative of rolling crises, one set of issues displaces or
replaces another.
Buildings and their environments are permanently changing, but they are
also constrained by a limited set of possibilities, both past and future. Façade
assemblages establish and feed these constraints, without precluding future
evolution. They produce a “design space,”4 not only a collection of intrinsic qualities
of material components (such as tensional strength, thermal conductivity, and
flexibility), but also environmental factors (such as supply-and-demand chains,
markets, political economies, aesthetic trends, and regulatory frameworks), which
delimit the possible iterations of a material assemblage.
These environmental factors modify not only the actual design of the material
assemblages, through technological development, but also their semiotic
performances and the way we experience them. Materials and material assemblages
become attached to multiple architectural narratives and representational systems
over time. For example, in the early nineteenth century, steel windows were valued
for their strength, slenderness and, in contrast to wooden windows, resistance to
decay (Louw 1987).5 They were immediately associated with modernist aesthetics
and with the obsolescence of the traditional solid façade. While originally used for
purely functional reasons, the material became imbued with ideological “worth.”
Steel windows entered into a rapid technical evolution, which made them even
more desirable for the modernist cause. Yet the technical performance of a façade
assemblage is not sufficient to guarantee its persistence as a species. The heavy
consumption of steel during World War II caused the industry to return to wooden
windows, as steel manufacturers were coerced into military production. In war-
time Italy, seriously afflicted by the League of Nations’ embargo on coal shipments
to the Axis powers, the use of steel windows came to be seen as a form of treason
(Davison 1945, Rappaport 2004, Poretti 1992). Both the signification and the
experience of a façade assemblage may be dramatically affected by the socio-
political environment as much as by raw material advantages.
While architectural culture often remains captive to outdated symbolic constructs
embedded in both material and canonical forms (regimes of prestige as much as
functionality), signification is, today, increasingly determined by performance (for
example, insulating capacity) and production (for example, how much embedded
energy a material contains), and in relation to other materials and economies
(for example, whether materials appear to be solid and/or expensive). Although
it is certainly possible to speak about the evolution of materials in some cases,
such as the progress from plate glass to float glass, or the development of high-
strength varieties of concrete and steel, a genealogy of material assemblages per
se is a more effective means than normative architectural narrative for addressing
material culture as a dynamic process affected by ongoing environmental change.
Material assemblages sometimes evolve through alteration in their composition,
but mostly through their combination with other materials, which may decisively
affect their performance and behavior. Façade assemblages have various “modes
of existence”6 and experience a constant process of becoming or elaboration; they
are not isolated from the flow of history, and they are capable of operating with a
large degree of semiotic ambiguity, adjusting over time to environmental changes.
The shift from a theory of materials to a theory of material assemblages is, arguably,
crucial to produce a new “ontology” for situated façades.
Moral claims have been common throughout architectural history, particularly
in modernism: Louis Kahn honored the honesty of bricks and the authentic
expression of the arch; Le Corbusier spoke about the sincerity of Béton Brut; and
Mies van der Rohe praised the transparency of glass architecture. However, the
complexity of the contemporary world precludes any assumptions on behalf of
the singular authenticity or propriety of any privileged material or materials.
The material ecologies operating today have become so complex that it is
difficult, if not impossible, to pass judgment on their moral, cultural, or technical
appropriateness. Materials can no longer be easily bound to certain “constants”
or constraints measuring how they should be used, but are, instead, driven by
invention and experimentation regarding how they might be used. Recent brick
applications, such as those developed by Gramazio and Kohler,7 or concrete, in

the work of Herzog and de Meuron (Moravánszky 2007), introduce entirely new
properties to conventional materials. The capacity to simulate material effects
and qualities allows values associated with materials to be perpetuated, even if
so-called authenticity is absent. Neither the brick in Mario Botta’s San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art nor the stone in James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in
Stuttgart are load-bearing; they are, in both cases, thin veneers applied to precast
concrete panels and hung with steel clamps. Yet most people will assume that
these buildings are “brick” and “stone” and associate with them qualities of solidity
and permanence.
Materials are constantly in movement; not only do they expand, contract,
erode, and decay; they are also affected by changes in their own environment,
and by their engagement with changing values relative to other materials and
their respective ecologies. As long as architecture remains a field where multiple
forces crystallize in material formations, buildings will remain a field of decisions,
conflicts, and negotiations over material selection, application, formalization, and
even substitution. In the world of material assemblages there are no inert, timeless
materials, such as the self-conscious bricks of Louis Kahn or the transcendental
glass of Mies van der Rohe. Everything shifts elsewhere, incessantly, from ideation
to new pragmatics, back to ideation and so forth.
The question is no longer about the authenticity of materials, but rather about
the circumstances surrounding the conferral of certain qualities and effects, in
relation to technical constraints and cultural ecologies. What cultural and political
values do material choices uphold, both at the time when they are made and when
their products are subjected to changing values? The agency of architecture can
no longer be maintained within the privileged and narrow sphere of the architect-
author. Architectural decisions comprise a growing field of agents, with differing
interests that change over time. This expanded constituency also includes non-
human agents such as materials themselves. Architectural agency is increasingly
vested in materiality, which in turn acts as a conductor of political, economic,
and social charges: the role that companies such as Dow Chemical, DuPont, or
Rockwool play in the construction of today’s built environment is enormous
and unprecedented in the history of architecture. Their engagement with the
historically constructed forms of the discipline is problematic and needs to be
resolved.
Some Empirical Case Studies
We have identified 12 species of façade assemblages which emerged mostly

during the twentieth century: Curtain Walls, Precast, Airtight, Watertight, Screens,
Insulated, All-glass, Double Façade, Tensile, Media, Vegetated, and Kinetic (Figure
11.1). There are probably others; maybe some of them could be rejoined in larger
categories … What these case studies have in common is that each represents
an evolutionary path which, beyond their technical prowess, involves a broader
11.1 Twelve Species of Facade Assemblages. Diagram by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Jeffrey Anderson. Diagram by author.
range of socio-cultural and political values. Their evolution is complex and non-
linear. Sometimes technologies lay dormant for decades, sometimes they were
transferred from other industries; sometimes they became extinct.
Each one of them gravitates around a certain semiotic field whose evolution
tracks certain changes in the overall environment. Some, such as curtain walls, are
grounded on their ubiquity and transformative capacity; others, such as double
façades, are extravagant experiments that remain in the architect’s imagination,
despite their chronic failure. Some base their success on economics or changes in
lifestyle, like all-glass environments or media façades. Their evolution demonstrates
the environmental forces that drove the architectural decisions on which these
assemblages were formed. Every one of those choices had and will have a crucial
effect on the understanding and experiences associated with the assemblages.
We will review only a few of these micro-histories of the modern façade here:
those which are more relevant to Cosmopolitics, more directly connected to the
assemblage of natural components – air, water, pressure, temperature, climate,
vegetation – as they are the most evident cases of the creation of a multiplicity
of natures in architectural design. Keeping to this inherently non-linear variation
of materials, we are describing these assemblages in spurts of growth and decay,
as if they were animal species subject to sometimes cataclysmic environmental
changes.
Breathless: The Airtight Envelope
The airtight envelope emerged in the early twentieth century as a result of a

momentous convergence between a series of political, social, and technological
processes that led to a complete separation between inside and outside. The
combined threat of industrial pollution, urban epidemics, chemical warfare,
and even class and racial divisions, along with the development of mechanical
ventilation, synthetic membranes, and silicones, triggered rapid development
of building technologies for sealed envelopes. The development of industrial-
strength weapons industries, the new technologies of the Space Race, the paranoid-
schizophrenic behavioral patterns of the Cold War, the rapid suburbanization of
cities in the developed world, and, more recently, Sarin Gas attacks, SARS epidemics,
and PassivHaus technologies have fostered the implementation of “hermetically
sealed” mentalities and technologies. Many of these technologies have even
developed their own overt or latent pathologies, such as the infamous “sick
building syndrome” (Fisk, Mirer, and Mendell 2009). The breathability of buildings
has, as a result, become a conundrum, to be carefully weighed and parsed, in light
of new environmental and security risks, both real and imagined.
The surface barrier system is an assemblage that attempts to halt the infiltration
of any water, vapor, and air at the very outermost layer of the envelope, effectively
making many of the layers of the façade proper a part of the interior environment.
Also called “the perfect wall,” the single-surface barrier emerged after World War
I as the new technological paradigm of the building envelope. There are two
technological lineages of air-tightness: one that focuses on the exterior membrane

as an all-encompassing and all-enveloping membrane, and a second, which
focuses on the joints between panels.
The idea of completely sealing off interior air from the urban environment
came at a time when cities were increasingly perceived as toxic. A century of
industrialization and the rapid rise of the automobile created unprecedented levels
of pollution and noise, resulting in an obsession with sealing out environmental
pollution. With the rise of air-conditioning, the age of the hermetic seal called for
an interior environment maintained at a perfect 72° F (22° C), all year round.
When early twentieth-century zoning regulations required Manhattan
skyscrapers to adopt receding profiles, to encourage light and moving air to reach
the city streets, architects had to come up with new ways to keep out the water,
both vertically and horizontally. Waterproofing and sealant manufacturers used
these new regulations to promote their materials. As a result, new laws produced
new architectural forms with new problems to be solved by new products (for
example, The Barrett Company 1927).
Sealants have been part of façade assemblages for centuries. Prior to the
development of synthetic polymer sealants, oil-based putties, and caulks, as well as
direct varnishes of oils, served as sealants and waterproofing solutions. However,
with the wide commercial availability of synthetic polymer sealants, translucency
and “seamlessness” became a ubiquitous architectural detail in the United States
and, soon afterward, in parts of Europe. The transformation began in the 1930s as
General Electric and Corning Glass Works first used silicone for its resistance to high
temperatures in electrical insulation. During World War II, silicone paste was used
to prevent electrical sparking in airplanes and as a sealant for fuel tanks in vehicles.
With the rise of synthetic sealants, the ability to completely seal the envelope
to air penetration, while still permitting the movement of components within an
assemblage, resulted in façades that were flat and monolithic for easier fabrication,
assembly, and cleaning. The design flexibility and affordability of elastomeric
sealants made them highly popular and allowed designers to do away with through-
wall flashings and other durable, secondary defense barriers. But the single-surface
barrier is a boundary that relies on an absolute and total seal, and once the seal is
breached, pressure differentials, capillary action, and surface tension draws water
and vapor into the interior environment, with no way to escape.
It was during World War II that Pietro Belluschi foresaw the possibility of
aluminum (manufactured on a vast scale for the military) suddenly becoming
available for building. He designed the cladding for the Portland Equitable Savings
and Loan Building on this basis (Figure 11.2). Completed in 1948, it was the first
building with an exposed aluminum and glass continuous curtain wall and also the
first hermetically sealed building: the double-glazing could not be opened as air-
conditioning, used on a scale rarely seen before, demanded a perfectly controlled
environment. Studies in the early 1950s would provide evidence that workers
in a controlled atmosphere, exposed to the natural daylight afforded by glass
façades, were significantly more productive than those at the mercy of a changing
climate. Noting the problem of cleaning the new style of flush-surfaced buildings,
particularly in the rainy Portland climate, Belluschi proposed a window-washing 11.2 The
device suspended from the roof, circulating around the building on a track. Equitable Savings
and Loan Building
The sealed windows that created this atmosphere of comfort were intended not
in Portland,
only to keep the weather out, but also to seal regulated air in. Because employees Oregon, Pietro
were not reliable guardians of the air-conditioned office, the architecture took Belluschi 1948.
control for them, making sealed windows a norm. Image courtesy of
The automobile influenced more than planning and architectural forms, for Michelle Gray.
architects also drew heavily on automotive technologies. Many architects, including
Gropius, Wright, Le Corbusier, and Breuer, gained first-hand experience designing
cars in partnership with companies. Eero Saarinen’s post-war partnership with
General Motors and his design for the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan,
resulted in the introduction into his façade assemblies of neoprene gaskets, similar
to the gaskets in car windshields. Unitized panels with gaskets made assembly
easier, but H.H. Robertson Company’s pre-sealed and insulated panels were
among the earliest airtight composite panels. First used in factory façades, the
panels minimized poor on-site craftsmanship with factory-applied sealant and
compressible gaskets (Metal Curtain Walls, 1950).
Designers of new façades, desperate to develop a single exterior surface with
a perfect seal, found their greatest ally first in polysulfide sealants during the
1950s and, finally, in silicone after the early 1960s (Boller 1976). Silicone forms an
impermeable, web-like membrane, which is able to fill seams and gaps between
materials. It sticks strongly to nearly any modern construction material, including
metal, concrete, masonry, vinyl, and plastic; yet it is flexible enough to absorb the
movement of thermal cycling. When traditional oil-based caulking compounds

would no longer fit the bill, the universal panacea became “sealant.”
The post-war period suffused the American consciousness with Space Race
imagery. The aerospace engineering industry has always been particularly
concerned with the tight seal and the air-lock. The weight constraints of launching
materials into orbit pushed engineers to find ever-lighter materials that still
maintained impermeable, airtight qualities. Challenges unique to the orbital
space environment, such as rapid thermal expansion due to abrupt changes in
solar exposure and corrosion caused by high-energy particles and atomic-oxygen
bombardment, required unique material solutions (Toub 2002).
The widespread implementation of HVAC systems after World War II reflected
a new proclivity toward synthetic environments that would enable “easy living.”
When Levitt and Sons began rolling out suburban buildings on an assembly
line in 1947, many included built-in central air-conditioning. The Levittown
developments were not only built to be commuter towns, but also self-contained,
“airtight” communities with their own schools, shops, and community centers. The
imagery of the Space Race, with its capsules, air locks, moon bases, and space suits
allowed controlled-environment technology to grow in the public consciousness.
Additionally, the Cold War threat of imminent nuclear annihilation generated a
paranoid aspect to society in the USA, whose citizens built backyard fallout shelters
and engaged in all sorts of preventive construction.
While façade assemblages clad with sealant- and gasket-filled joints became a
norm in high-rise construction, continuous membrane systems came to prevail in
the small and mid-scale construction industry. Rather than creating a complete seal
between exterior and interior environments, modern air-barriers were generally
to be used to create controlled breathability. Typical air barrier assemblies were
to include self-adhered sheet materials, fluid-applied materials such as sprays and
foams, and mechanically fastened board stocks and films, commonly referred to as
“building wraps.”
The dangers of exterior air quality contributed to the rise of airtight façades,
but in the 1980s and 1990s a new danger entered public awareness: the interior
environment. Reports emerged on the relationship between indoor air and health
effects, heralding a return to the necessity of “fresh air.”
Although intended to keep out harmful exterior climates, airtight façades
contributed to the rise of harmful interior environments, including Sick Building
Syndrome (SBS) and mold propagation. The tight-but-imperfect seal had the
disastrous effect of trapping moisture inside the wall assemblage with no means
of escape. Water and vapor infiltration of the single-surface seal led to façade
failure and health problems for building inhabitants. Although volatile organic
compounds (VOCs), bacteria, mold, and pollen are all contributors to SBS, the
airtight envelope and inadequate ventilation exacerbated the many contributing
factors. In the first half of the twentieth century, building ventilation standards
called for approximately 15 cubic feet per minute of outside air for each building
occupant. Humorously, this was primarily instituted to dilute and remove body
odors. However, as a result of the 1970s oil crisis, energy conservation measures
reduced the regulation to 5 cubic feet per minute for each occupant (What You
Should Know About Indoor Air Quality, no date).
SBS and poor indoor air quality came to international attention in the 1980s and
quickly became a cause for widespread fear, plus wide-ranging legal maneuvers.
In 1984 the World Health Organization estimated that up to 30 percent of new
and remodeled buildings worldwide could be cause for complaints relating to
SBS (Indoor Air Facts #4 …, 2001). The relevance of SBS to the tight-seal mentality
triggered interest in a return to the breathability of buildings through semi-
permeable skins, operable windows, and ventilation, as well as a substitution of the
fear of outdoor pollution with indoor contaminants. Indoor air, in much the same
way as outdoor air, was now permeated with “unknowns.” The perfect barrier was
no longer considered a protective measure to separate a “harmful” exterior from
the “healthy,” conditioned interior.
The fixation with airtight buildings and sealed building envelopes intensified
as the atmospheric and social conditions of American (and, to a lesser extent,
European) cities became increasingly toxic. All sensory exposure to the city, apart
from visual, was shut off. The metropolis became an object to observe from lofty
towers or enclosed boxes, its environment kept, at the least, at one remove.
PassivHaus is a recent German-developed standard for energy efficiency in
buildings that aims to reduce their ecological footprint.8 It applies to ultra-low-
energy buildings that require little intervention for interior heating or cooling,
primarily through their impermeability to temperature, vapor, and air.
In an interesting parallel to early air-conditioned skyscrapers, certified
PassivHaus designs often feature sealed windows, attempting to acquire complete
control over all air exchange processes in order to boost the house to maximum
efficiency. One would not enjoy a cool breeze passing through a PassivHaus in the
summer since air intake occurs at only one point, and air supply and exhaust are
mechanized. Once again, people are not trusted to maintain the temperature and
energy efficiency of their own living spaces.
Although there are nearly 30,000 certified PassivHaus buildings in Europe, the
movement has been slow to catch on elsewhere. In the United States, only 90
houses were certified in the last decade, although many houses have been built
according to the less stringent “Pretty Good House” formula, a trend in building
that, while it does not meet the requirements of PassivHaus, strives to achieve a
better-than-code performance (Maines, no date). This resistance may be attributed
to lower fuel costs in the United States and other countries than in Europe.
Watertight: Face-sealed Envelopes
Watertight and airtight assemblages are closely related, but distinct; though
an airtight assemblage is always watertight, the opposite is not necessarily
true. Traditionally, façades were constructed as breathing or, at the least, semi-
permeable assemblages, while roofs were designed to be watertight, serving to
shed water and move it away from the building. As the façade was relieved of its
structural duties in the twentieth century, and the use of mechanical ventilation
in buildings became widespread, the breathability of the façade became a less
stringent requirement. Roof technology and façade technology began to look
more and more similar. Additionally, the growth of the lightweight metal cladding
industry facilitated this progressive migration of roof technologies to the façade.
The watertight metal envelope has two lineages that continue to this day: a
low-end cladding solution used to deliver economic and time-effective building
systems; and a high-end solution used to afford flexibility in the geometry of the
envelope.
The watertight metal envelope was first employed as a malleable cladding
solution for highly complex geometries in specialized buildings. For centuries,
thin copper or lead sheets or plates would be used for waterproofing. Churches,
government buildings and other highly visible and well-funded architectures were
among the first to be clad in metal. The most recognizable use of early watertight
assemblages occurred in the cladding of domes on palaces and cathedrals.
The dome, part roof, part façade, needed a waterproof cladding that was
highly durable and geometrically flexible. The metal standing seam was the
most common solution to shed water, while negotiating from roof to façade and
adapting to geometrically complex architecture. The first use of aluminum sheets
in architecture was for the cladding of a dome, that of San Gioacchino Church in
Rome, in 1898 (Construction Product Innovation …, 2006).
For centuries, copper has been the most common metal used for overlapped or
standing-seam roof assemblages, due to its resistance to corrosion, its waterproof
surface, its relative cheapness and availability, and its handsome green patina.
Even the dome of the Pantheon in Rome was clad in copper plates and copper
tiles before the material was pilfered for use in other projects (Copper in Roman
Buildings, no date).
Because the process of making a watertight metal envelope involves overlapping
and locking joints, this assemblage characteristically takes on a distinct pattern
of parallel, upraised joints (also known as standing seam joints) with the subtle
appearance of tiled units. Additionally, because this assemblage is most effective
as a monolithic surface, any aberrations require unique details to maintain its
waterproof performance.
The watertight façade saw a massive proliferation in colonial architecture. For
example, during the colonization of Australia, where resources were difficult to
process locally, buildings had to be manufactured elsewhere, transported to the
site, and quickly assembled and disassembled.
Finding a broad audience during the Dublin Great Industrial Exhibition of 1853,
several British manufacturers began competing for Australian prefabricated and
portable housing contracts (Mornement and Holloway 2007). Manufacturers,
including Samuel Hemming, H. John Manning, and J.H. Porter, all produced models
for the colonization of Australia and other endeavors (Portable house proposed to
be erected …, no date). Though these houses were typically clad with corrugated
iron, they would come to be known affectionately as “tin houses.” These buildings
were characterized by their lightness, portability, water-proof or, at the least,
water-resistant façade and roof

and by a disregard for insulation.
Responding to poor transportation
infrastructure, every piece of the
Hemming’s Portable House (Figure
11.3) was designed to be carried a
reasonable distance by a man or
boy.
In the early twentieth century,
a booming industrial economy
sought metal to quickly clad
massive factories that had been
commissioned to feed the US war
machine. Albert Kahn, the most
famous industrial architect of
the time, designed hundreds of
modern factories throughout the
United States, employing not only
primitive curtain-wall technology,
but also panelized or overlapped,
watertight metal cladding systems
for some of the largest buildings the
world had seen. Other firms such as
the Austin Company thrived in the
design and construction of metal-
clad factory buildings.9
In addition to huge, swiftly
assembled factories, mass housing
had to be erected for the workers
who would operate them. Drawing
on the tradition of the nineteenth-
century portable house, vast arrays of government subsidized housing, constructed 11.3 A portable
either as travel trailers or as mass-produced units, appeared adjacent to wartime town for Australia
factories as a solution to housing shortages and rent gouging by locals (Davis 2007: erected at
Hemming’s Patent
100–102). Portable House
While the watertight façade’s genera could be defined as overlapped, capped, Manufactory in
dovetailed, or locked, then each genus would contain its own set of species: single Bristol, England
lock, double lock, snap lock, trapezoidal lock, and so on. Every species occupies in 1853 to be
dismantled
an environmental niche that has certain economic, environmental, and aesthetic
and shipped to
advantages. Some joints negotiate between façade and roof more effectively, the Bishop of
some work better in environments with less thermal expansion and contraction, Melbourne.
and some may be constructed with fully prefabricated units and little skilled labor
or equipment.
In the post-war period the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights),
triggered a suburban home-ownership boom. Corrugated metal technologies
immediately interested contractors seeking to deliver large numbers of homes

while benefitting from the surplus left by the war industries.
In 1947 the Reconstruction Finance Corporation granted a loan of $12.5 million
to the Lustron Corporation to manufacture industrially produced, prefabricated
homes on a massive scale in response to a housing shortage for GIs returning from
World War II. The baked-on porcelain enamel finish over steel made the Lustron
home an extremely durable, low-maintenance, and inexpensive post-war housing
option (Fetters 2002).
While other mass-housing strategies emerged at the time, such as those
employed at Levittown, it was hoped that the futuristic quality of the all-metal
Lustron House would appeal to modern tastes and especially to those who dreamt
of a technologically advanced, utopian future. These metallic techno-fantasy
houses also found expression in homes such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion
11.4 A landscape
of Kalzip used on
House, redesigned in 1945, and in popular culture in cartoons such as The Jetsons.
an urban scale During World War II, the United States Navy called for the development of
at the Southern a versatile, lightweight structure that could be shipped to any location and
Cross train station assembled without skilled labor (Mornement and Holloway 2007: 124–9). With
in Melbourne, an already well-established reputation as highly portable, water-tight, and light
Australia, by
weight, overlapped metal cladding was an obvious choice.
Jackson and
Grimshaw, 2006. The Navy selected the George A. Fuller Construction Company to manufacture
Image courtesy of the Quonset Hut. The half-cylinder design’s generic interior space could be adapted
Orin Zebest. to many functions, from barracks and offices to latrines and isolation wards. The roof
was constructed with sheets of galvanized corrugated steel, while the ends were 11.5 Kalzip: A
made of plywood or brick, allowing for easier adaptation in the field for windows, surface curved
from roof to façade
doors, or the joining of multiple units. The Quonset Hut was a perfect embodiment
on Foster and
of the slippage of roof technologies to the façade plane. Over 150,000 units were Partners Scottish
manufactured during the war, with the surplus sold to the public at its conclusion.10 Exhibition and
Adapted to commercial and residential use, the Quonset Hut took on a humorous Conference Centre,
Glasgow, Scotland,
pop iconography.
1998. Image
The recycling of the wartime military industrial complex into construction courtesy of Jean-
industries saw the emergence of many large corporations manufacturing metal Pierre Dalbéra.
cladding. For example, Kalzip appeared in the 1960s as a division of Kaiser
Aluminum, an American company that had directly converted wartime factories
into aluminum manufactories (Figures 11.4 and 11.5). KME, a German-Italian metal
manufacturer, also saw international growth in the decades following the war (The
KME History, no date).
Increasingly capable of cladding complex geometries, watertight cladding
systems enabled thin metal panels to produce complex curvatures in any shape,
size, or disposition. Although the first watertight façades formed a characteristic
vertical and horizontal pattern of seams, an architect might now work with a metal
cladding manufacturer to develop façades with different panel-to-panel seam
types, seam orientations, types of metal, finishes, and colors. The watertight façade
could be identified as the most effective and economic cladding system, or as a
facilitator of highly sophisticated architectural geometries.
Despite its large-scale proliferation

in quick, prefabricated, and provisional
structures, the watertight façade
would also remain tied to its origins
as a cladding solution for high-end
and unique architectures. This history
embodies the contradiction of this
type of façade: through its use of
metals (materials that were once rare,
then common, then thrown away in
overabundance and disuse), it has been
used for the most complex and precious
architectures, as well as for some of
the most generic, ubiquitous, and
temporary buildings ever assembled.
11.6 Gehry’s Frank O. Gehry has recently brought about a resurgence of the highbrow
Guggenheim in watertight façade (Figure 11.6). With advanced software, complex geometries may
Bilbao, Spain,
shows the full
be clad with surfaces composed of unique metal tiles. Newly available materials
potential of the such as titanium have made the watertight façade thinner, more durable, and
metal cladding more easily installed and manufactured. Additionally, the aperture, once requiring
of the monolithic special and unique components to maintain a watertight seal, has returned in
watertight
force to this assemblage. All of this is becoming increasingly viable through the
façade, 1997.
Image courtesy of development of high-end metal manufacturers, such as Permasteelisa Group,
Angelica Louis. Zahner, and Waagner-Biro, all sharing the same sophisticated computer-modeling
tools (for example, Catia or Rhinoceros).
Screens: The Making of the Mask
Multi-layered façades were invented to improve the environmental performance

of the envelope by making it hollow or porous. The façade as an assemblage of
layers – a vertical geology – has become the dominant model of contemporary
envelope design. Functional reasons such as ventilation, pressure equalization, and
solar shading were the original reasons for this assemblage (Suresh 2000). Having
evolved into the most paradigmatic contemporary assemblage, function has been
left behind in favor of expression.
Due to their thermal and climatic behavior, rainscreens have a vernacular genesis.
The earliest surviving examples are found on eighteenth century Scandinavian
barns and were born of pure pragmatism. These systems featured an air chamber
between an inner framed or masonry construction and an outer layer of lightweight
siding, equalizing the air pressure across a building’s façade and preventing wind
and pressure-driven moisture infiltration (Straube 2001a: 1–9). Interestingly, early
examples of rainscreens were only built on the wind-facing façade. At a time when
few buildings had insulation, this additional layer also produced the mediating
buffer of an air space between inside and outside.
11.7 Top, the façade of the San Francisco Federal Building. Architect, Thom Mayne of
Morphosis, 2007. Bottom, the San Francisco Federal Building, a detail. Architect, Thom Mayne
of Morphosis, 2007. Images courtesy of John Zacherle.
11.8 Left, the The rain screen assemblage has several lineages. Most often, the rainscreen has
Cooper Union been called upon for economic construction and duplicity, where a certain material
building in New
is used to produce an appearance of another construction type which is no longer
York City under
construction. affordable or viable, such as stone masonry. However, while this assemblage is
Morphosis, 2004. often deliberately deceptive in its attempts to hide the thin and artificial nature of
Image courtesy modern construction, there is a contemporary trend in which the reveals between
of John Hill. materials are exaggerated deliberately to expose the thin cladding veneers and the
Right, the Cooper
geology of the façade as a layered assemblage.
Union building
in New York City. By contrast, the rainscreen’s open joints defamiliarize façade materials. Not
Morphosis, 2004. only are finishes exhibited for precisely what they are (a material image), they also
Image courtesy of reveal the contrast between the precision of the screen and the imprecision, or
Vincent Desjardins. low resolution, of the actual environmental barrier. The rawness, ugliness, and
inexactness of workaday construction which lingers just under the rainscreen is
now unashamedly exposed, denuded for anyone to see: chipped concrete on the
San Francisco Federal Building (Figure 11.7); the brazen exposure of layers in the
Cooper Union Building in New York (Figure 11.8); and the waterproofing membrane’s
random, lumpy patchwork on the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Physics in
Pasadena, California. Most of the materials in façades and envelopes are rough and
installed with a characteristic lack of precision which defies the traditional textures
of stereotomic rigor and the decor of construction. Rainscreens have opened up
the abject and irregular nature of modern materials and membrane construction
for all to see and, potentially, to understand.
Insulation: The Rise of the Cellular
The insulated façade is perhaps the most closely tied to economic ebb and
flow. Over the last 100 years, every economic downturn has seen a subsequent
thickening of the envelope and an increase in thermal resistance, whereas times of
economic prosperity have sponsored emaciated façades that use energy wastefully.
Insulation and economy are so closely linked that the energy crises of the 1970s
engendered a national shortage of insulation material in the United States as home
owners scrambled to increase the thermal resistance of their homes. Crucially,
there is no technology capable of producing visual transparency and insulation
at once; insulation is therefore inevitably linked to opacity and all of its associated
semiotics. Hence, the free-flowing, borderless, transparent space of modernism is at
odds with energy-saving measures and the postmodern cellularization of society.
The first known insulation material was volcanic wool, a material found at
volcanic sites that was both fire-resistant and thermally insulating. Its artificial
equivalent, slag wool, was first produced by chance in 1840 in a blast furnace in
Wales. In advanced methods for producing slag wool, molten rock is spun into a
fibrous material on high-speed wheels – akin to the act of making cotton candy
(Wikipedia contributors 2015a).
It was not until the 1880s that mineral wool insulation was first installed in
American homes. Rigid and semi-rigid board materials, under brands such as
Celotex or Insulite, started to be found in American housing between 1910 and 1930
(Dowling 2009). In subsequent years, as a result of the industry’s response to high
energy prices during the Great Depression, alternative insulation materials began
to appear. Some were organic products, such as cork or wood fiber, some were
mineral products, such as asbestos, and others were completely synthetic, such as
the foamed plastics developed by BASF in 1951. However, product availability did
not mean extensive use just yet: the first thermal insulation standard in residential
buildings did not appear in the United States until 1946, prepared by the ASTM
Committee C16 (founded in 1938). The Lustron House, primarily built between
1947 and 1950, was one of the first examples of an industrialized, lightweight,
residential-scale building system with integrated insulation (Figure 11.9). Simple,
cheap, and lightweight insulation became necessary in order to keep pace with
the demand for housing in the United States following World War II, when the
government transformed financial institutions to make home loans more readily
available to decommissioned military personnel.
Once hailed as a miracle material, then disdained as a killer, the history of
asbestos demonstrates that material value systems are unstable and even volatile.
What is commercially known as Asbestos is actually a set of six silicate minerals
that were widely used in buildings and industrial products. However, as we now
know, exposure to the material can cause severe illness and cancer (Wikipedia
contributors 2015b).
Builders and manufacturers became enthusiastic users of asbestos because of
the product’s resilience and strength. Fashioned into mats or mixed with other
materials, its versatility and usefulness expanded.
By 1918, several studies in the United States had found that asbestos workers
were dying unnaturally young and the first diagnosis of asbestosis was made in
1924. Suppliers ignored the danger for the sake of profits, much like the tobacco
industry some years later.
Post-war reconstruction and booming economies saw a strong increase in
global demand for asbestos, and by 1977 some 25 countries were producing
11.9 Top, Lustron house on Roselawn. Image courtesy of Philip Pessar. Bottom, the Lustron Houses from
1947, scanned postcard. Photograph by Arnold Newman. © 1984 Arnold Newman © Fotofolio.
almost 4.8 million metric tons per year. However, by the late 1970s, as the public
began to understand the connection between asbestos exposure and debilitating
lung diseases, and liability claims were filed against asbestos manufacturers, many
of them started to market asbestos substitutes.
By 2003 new environmental regulations and consumer demand helped push
for full or partial bans on the use of asbestos in 17 countries (History of Asbestos, no
date). In 2005 asbestos was banned throughout the European Union but, as a result
of industry influences, it has not banned in the United States to this date. The risk
still exists in many older buildings, in imported automotive products, and in places
where natural deposits of the mineral are commonplace. The once magical mineral
is now widely acknowledged only for its toxic effect, its threat to health, and as a
representative example of capitalist rapacity.
The first systematic use of insulation materials in façades emerged in the
industrial facilities that grew in secondary cities during the recovery from the
Great Depression. Having migrated away from cities, most of these industries
concentrated in what is now known as the Rust Belt to take advantage of readily
available raw materials and fluvial transport. Albert Kahn installed hectares of
insulated light-metal façades, either in panel or in sheet form, both in the Rust Belt
and other industrial locations in the United States.
Meanwhile in Europe, Jean Prouvé, a metalworker and self-taught architect,
was busy developing lightweight insulated panellized systems for the French 11.10 The
intellectual elite: the 1931 Maison du Peuple in Clichy, the 1935 Aéroclub Roland Alcoa Building
Garros near Paris, and the 1947 Fédération Française du Bâtiment in Paris are in Pittsburgh,
all paradigmatic examples of these technologies, developed in a very different Harrison and
Abramovitz, 1953.
environment, but one that was still reeling from both the Great Depression and
Image courtesy
World War II. After the war, Prouvé committed himself to finding ways to transfer of Meredith L.
prefabricated, insulated metal-panel construction methods to residential and even Clausen. Source:
refugee housing (Wikipedia contributors 2015c). Cities/Buildings
In the years following the Great Depression, Pittsburgh and Cleveland emerged Database.
Available at:
as the centers of industries that would bridge military production and building
http://content.lib.
construction and navigate between the Great Depression recovery and World washington.edu/
War II: Allegheny Ludlum, Republic Steel, Armco, Corning Glass, Alcoa, and H.H. buildingsweb
Robertson were all located there and had
to reconcile the needs for energy savings
and cheap building solutions with the
demands of the US war machine. While
nobody on Wall Street was making money
or building, Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt
cities became the center of building
production, fed economically by their
own industries. Harrison and Abramovitz’
1953 Alcoa Building in Pittsburgh (Figure
11.10) became the first clear symbol of
insulated assemblages just as they were
becoming unfashionable.11 The Alcoa
Building was the swan song of light, unitized, and insulated systems. Glass would
dominate the surface thereafter.
Modernism had no interest in insulation. The Great Depression’s drive toward
energy saving in buildings, which lasted through to the end of the 1940s, was
terminated by economic revival in the American post-war period. The best
illustration of this is none other than the arch-nemesis of the insulated wall, Lever
House, the first canonical example of the curtain wall. Built in Manhattan (where
almost no buildings had been built since the Great Depression), the building marked
a shift towards Wall Street and a move away from the Rust Belt industrial centers.
Lever Brothers’ architect-trained leader, Charles Luckman, identified the brave new
world of corporate capitalism and encapsulated it on Park Avenue. The prototype
of a transparent corporate America had single glazing units, no operable windows,
and almost no thermal insulation as it relied on active systems to produce heating
and cooling on demand. Insulation was anathema to the new optimism regarding
transparency. One could replace the oppressiveness of traditional buildings and
achieve transparency through the use of unlimited, free-flowing, “too cheap to
meter” energy.12 Insulation was seen as a hindrance to the social ambitions of the
erasure of the inside/outside limit that constituted the modernist paradigm.
Around 1970 two global events triggered the return of insulation on both
a technical and an aesthetic level. The first was the socio-political crisis of 1968,
which challenged the hegemony of the techno-corporate culture of post-war
America. The myths of social justice and a global technology effectively and
universally applied in the name of democracy disintegrated as the social contract
forged in the Great Depression was torn apart by the political unrest caused by
growing inequality and the Vietnam War. Post-war society effectively underwent
re-stratification and the American Empire collapsed into competing regions. To rub
salt in the wounds, in 1973 the world went through the first global oil crisis, causing
the price of energy to multiply tenfold. The modern utopia of transparency was
no longer affordable and architects turned their eyes to experiments developed
before or right after World War II in search of insulating solutions for a more cellular
or atomized society.
The European welfare state offered a perfect opportunity to explore these
technologies. The Greater London Council was one of the pioneers. In 1968 it built
the Elgin Estate Tower as part of its “slum clearance” policy, which called for the
construction of cheap and fast council-housing towers (Porter 1995: 353). This trend
was closely followed by the Japanese Metabolists: Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Nagakin
Capsule Tower in Tokyo is not only a demonstration of composite technologies, but
a very visible sign of a cellular society of “co-insulated” individuals.
Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Nicholas Grimshaw adopted light
construction following their early exposure to industrial technologies in the
United States. They collaborated with Robertson, one of the pioneers of light
construction in the US, and developed a new language of panels and joints which
was no longer transparent, defying the abstraction of modern architecture by
insisting on an assembled quality. This high-tech aesthetic used panelization as an
antidote to abstraction and claimed the expression of the construction technique
as a legitimate architectural ambition (Herman Miller Factory …, no date). Team 4’s

unbuilt Zip-Up House, an entry for the “House for Today” competition, addressed
issues of the residential use of panelization and cellularization as early as 1968.
The following year, Richard Rogers designed a house for his parents in Wimbledon
in which the side walls were of organic-coated aluminum panels assembled with
a neoprene “zip” system rather than built on site (Richard Rogers: Beginnings, no
date). More mature examples of panelized façades include Foster’s 1978 Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England, and Grimshaw’s 1983 extension to the
Herman Miller Factory in Chippenham, England.
In contrast to the aesthetics of assembly and panelization of postmodern high
tech, another insulation technology was revived with a vengeance and deployed
throughout Central Europe and America in everything from domestic residences
to shopping malls: External Insulation Finish System (EIFS) (Brock 2005: 174). This
façade system, valued for its jointless appearance, its capacity to produce complex,
abstract volumes, its facile incorporation of color, and its easily produced moldings,
was a crucial vehicle of the implementation of postmodern architecture (Straube
2001b).
One of the more emblematic implementations of EIFS can be seen in Michael
Graves’s 1982 Portland Municipal Services Building. Today, following the aesthetic
delirium of postmodernism, thermal insulation is going through an apotheosis
and is likely to become the dominant preoccupation of architectural thinking
about envelopes in the near future. This is happening not through the mimicry
of an image, but through the deployment of a barrage of parametric coefficients
that are taking over the world, U-value being the most important of them. While
other sustainable technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and green
roofs, are highly visible and therefore suitable for architectural expression,
insulation is by nature a concealed technology that is difficult to visualize
and must be implemented primarily through regulation. Having developed
significantly since the late 1940s, the current insulation standard, ASHRAE 90.2,
issued by the US Department of Energy, has become a powerful, empire-making
weapon. U-value, Péclet’s 1850s’ invention, is well on its way to world dominance
through its presence in LEED certifications, its impact in other legal frameworks
(such as Part L in the United Kingdom, Minergy in Switzerland, and EN in Europe),
and through voluntary classifications such as BREEAM or Energy Star. In US
regulations, the mandatory requirements for the thermal transmittance value of
walls in residential buildings has tripled from the first ASTM regulation in 1946 to
the current ASHRAE 90.2.
If the modern curtain-wall aesthetic of thinness is now clearly receding in
response to these regulations, there is a brewing conflict between U-value and
net-to-gross ratio (a measure of usable space compared to total building area).
Insulation is becoming so “fat” that it is beginning to eat away at the profit margins
of reduced usable space. Moreover, the increasing occlusion of daylight (due to
the fenestration ratio’s exponential decrease) promises to evolve into a true war of
coefficients within these regulatory frameworks, as the provision of daylight is now
considered the most important factor for energy saving in office buildings.
In order to resolve these conflicts, the building industry is currently developing

a variety of insulating yet thin and transparent products; for example, double,
triple, and argon- or krypton-filled glazing. Meanwhile, the appearance of vacuum
cavities, vacuum-insulated panels, and nanogel translucent insulation technologies
may indicate that an even newer, high-tech solution is on its way to answer to this
endless problematic associated with energy efficiency, architectural econometrics,
and environmental aesthetics.
The push toward the retrofitting of buildings to meet increasing regulatory
demands is being implemented progressively by way of government subsidies
and has spurred the development of entirely new industries. As opposed to other
technologies, which had great potential to generate visual effects, retrofitting is
a technology in disguise. One has to look for its presence with a detective-like
attitude. It is generally given away by a tendency toward detail fatness: the growing
thickness of UPVC window frames, larger reveals which indicate the thickening of
the insulation layer, double and triple reflections on glass panes, the progressive
opaqueness of façades, the reduction of window transparency and sizes, the
slightly dampened sound created by layers of closed-cell urethane or mineral wool,
the weight of new doors, and so on.
Double Façades: Climate Incorporated
Double-façade assemblages are designed around glass’s capacity to serve as a trap

for infrared radiation. A double set of glass panes with an air space in-between
produces a benign micro-atmosphere that insulates while simultaneously enabling
maximum daylight intake and transparency. First used in cold climates, where there
was a need for maximum insulation and maximum daylight, the double façade
was a global technology that has progressively become locally specific. From the
Mur Neutralisant to the Trombe Wall, the double-façade envelope became one of
the beacons of passive-building technologies. However, its relatively high costs in
materials, maintenance, and space have now weakened its strength as a species.
It was the development of glass-making technology that led to the modern
greenhouse and conservatory. The arrival of large-scale glassmaking technologies
coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, and there is an association to be made
between the transparent qualities of glass and liberation from the obscurity and
superstition of the Dark Ages. While this assertion loads glass with ideological
content, the double façade’s relevance as a façade assemblage emerges not merely
from its use transparency, but also from its capacity to incorporate air, climate, and
even nature into the façade.
The double façade’s genesis may be traced back to two phenomena: first, the
greenhouse effect and its capacity to generate microclimates contained by glass;
and second, the ability of an air space to act as thermal insulation. Plate glass,
manufactured in the Royal Glass Factory in the La Granja de San Ildefonso, an
enlightened factory promoted by Spanish royals, was sent to Ferrol for glazing
the sterns of large Spanish galleons as early as 1759. Mimicking shipbuilding
construction, the Galician gallery originated as a solution for the enclosure of

exterior balconies, using wood-framed glass wrapped around stone masonry
buildings to produce an assemblage of glass, air and masonry as a climate-
regulating device.
In Central Europe, conflicting demands for more daylight (requiring larger
windows) and well-tempered environments (requiring more insulation) were
behind the development of the Kastenfenster or double window. An air chamber
between two panes of glass performed both as a thermal insulator for large window
openings and as a heat collector (Klos 2010). In prosperous cities such as Vienna,
Prague, and Berlin, the Kastenfenster became a standard assemblage applied on
an urban scale.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, English garden architects started
to create buildings with glass and cast iron that were dedicated exclusively to
housing a population of climate-sensitive plants. Throughout Europe, aristocrats
discovered the possibility of creating exotic winter gardens in rural settings,
where they could generate artificial climates, significantly extending the length of
the growing season and the range of plants cultivated. Albert Crosby has called
this process “ecological imperialism,” a phenomenon that permitted prosperous
European nations, such as England and the Netherlands, to extend their pool of
species well beyond normal bio-geographical limitations (Crossby 2010).
The first test of the double façade was to appear in the 1903 Steiff Toy Factory
in Giengen, Germany (Steiff Factory …, 2007). In the early twentieth century, Stalin
imported Albert Kahn’s Detroit factories as an image of modern production for the
fast-developing Soviet Union. Glass and steel represented modern technological
construction, and because this image of progress was at odds with the local
climate, Russian modernist architects became early adopters of double-glazed
technologies.
By embedding a water heater designed to heat the air between the two panes
of glass, the window was an early version of Le Corbusier’s Mur Neutralisant
concept. The potential of combining air-conditioning systems with double-glazing
technologies would become an obsession for Le Corbusier during a brief period
of time in the 1920s. In 1916 the Kastenfenster technology inspired him to use
a monumental double window in his Villa Schwob. This “neutralizing wall” was
essentially a sealed air cavity tempered by controlled stack-effect ventilation, or
Respiration Exacte, a type of internal air-conditioning applied only to an external
air cushion.
In 1928 Le Corbusier proposed a double-glazed Mur Neutralisant for the 1933
Centrosoyuz Building in Russia, which did not survive the client’s cost-cutting
exercise.13 The Mur Neutralisant was cut from the Salvation Army Cité de Refuge
in Paris and replaced with a single-glazed, south-facing glass wall, which caused a
disastrous performance during the summer (Sobin 1996).
After these failed attempts at a technologically dominant (though energy
inefficient) global architecture, the double façade was to fall into obscurity for
nearly 40 years. In the 1970s the looming energy crisis and increased awareness
of energy scarcity and the fragility of the global environment inspired a number
of low-tech, energy-saving double-façade

assemblages. In 1967 Félix Trombe, a
French engineer, built the first solar
furnace and developed the Trombe wall
(Figure 11.11), a type of passive solar wall
that could act as a ventilation engine in
the summer and a heating device in the
winter (Mazria 1979: 45). The Trombe wall
signaled an evolution of double-glazing
technologies from mechanical to passive,
coinciding with the 1970s oil crisis.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lee Porter
Butler and Tom Smith began building and
advertising Double Envelope Houses.
These homes were essentially a building
within a building, with a one-foot cavity
between the walls and a larger, south-
facing solarium.
11.11 Trombe In the wake of the oil crisis and the energy conservation measures that
wall. Courtesy of followed – including the Energy Tax Act under the 1978 National Energy Act, and
EcoGeekDan.
later the Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act of 1980 – one of the most noteworthy
and exemplary double-skin systems appeared abruptly in a fully-matured form,
seemingly without precedent. Upon its opening in 1981, the Occidental Chemical
Building featured not only a double-glazed façade, but also automatically
controlled mechanical louvers for light management and motorized dampers for
ventilation, making it both the first double façade in the United States and perhaps
the first “smart building” (Dixon 1983). At this point, not only had air become an
important building material, but its dynamic management was inherent in the
logic of the assemblage.
In the following decade an increasingly large, environmentally conscious public
in Germany was to come to terms with the double façade as a commercially viable
technology. The environmental image associated with the double façade influenced
corporate architecture to adopt this type as “green,” a label which had become
popular and politically influential. As double façades became highly performative,
their advantages were associated with double glazing, dampers, solar shades, and
other architectural devices that had become integral to the functionality of the
façade. Reborn as an assemblage attuned to site-specific conditions, the double-
façade species was to see its consolidation in Germany.
As in the political context of the Soviet double walls of the 1930s, Germany in
the 1990s witnessed an ideologically driven resurgence of double-wall technology.
The combined effect of environmental consciousness and employee rights (unions
had negotiated the worker’s legal right to open the office windows) produced a
new golden age for double-façade buildings. Yet increasingly expensive, high-
maintenance buildings were built more as an image of political compromise than
for actual technical performance. The capital and maintenance costs of these
buildings, and the resultant loss of net floor space,

were justifiable only in terms of political ambitions
for environmental sustainability.
The double façade is now facing extinction.
Not only does it consume a substantial amount
of space that is difficult to recover in terms of
cost efficiency (or in the onrushing imperatives of
cost engineering) but, as the Occidental Chemical
Building and German experiments conducted
in the 1990s have demonstrated, also requires
intensive and costly maintenance.
An entirely different trend can be observed in the
expansion and occupation of these conservatories’
liminal spaces, no longer exclusively devoted to
technology, but increasingly occupied by secondary
programs. This is perhaps a return to the original
galleries in Galicia, or to the conservatories and
winter gardens explored by northern European
aristocrats.
After many attempts and uneven success over
the last few decades bridging the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, it has transpired
that the effective performance of the double-
façade assemblage depends on the possibility of enlarging it to the point that it 11.12 The School
can perform as a programmed space with a different environmental performance, of Architecture,
turning the area between the interior and the exterior into an occupiable buffer Nantes. Architects,
Lacaton and Vassal.
space. The progressive reoccupation of these liminal climates, not only by humans Image courtesy
but also by plants and greenery, is a noteworthy contemporary trend. of Jean-Pierre
Lacaton and Vassal’s work explores this possibility by repurposing low-cost, low- Dalbéra.
performance greenhouse technology to afford a substantial increase of building
space that, though it is only partially conditioned, may be used for such buffer
programs (Figure 11.12). The systematic introduction of a type of space that is
neither internal nor external, where certain parts of the building program can be
re-located, is an inventive assemblage that couples the double wall with economies
and functions leading to new building typologies.
Vegetated Façades: Greenwashed
The incorporation of vegetation into the façade has a long vernacular tradition
– for example in the potted flowers seen in Andalusian, Swiss, and Flemish
buildings – while its incorporation into enlightened architecture dates back
to the Corinthian Order. These lineages have developed from the theories of
Vitruvius and Marc-Antoine Laugier, to William Morris and Louis Sullivan. But it
was not until the twentieth century that living matter became a literal part of the
architectural expression of buildings, and only very recently that technologies have
enabled planting to occur literally on the façades of buildings. With the rise of the
environmental consciousness in the 1970s, and the more recent Stern Report and
Kyoto Protocol, green façades have risen in popularity and become a more or less
generic assemblage. Green has been loaded with symbolic value for an ecological
strand of architecture, while the true environmental benefits of maintaining a
green façade remain under scrutiny.
Several trends in environmental façade construction have emerged. One, a
technological solution, deploys advanced assemblages, including living walls and
greenhouses, and new materials such as low-emissivity coatings; another, a natural
solution, utilizes sustainable and recyclable materials, passive solar technology,
and ancient and vernacular building techniques; and finally, a symbolic façade uses
“green” to signify the greenness of the building behind it.
The modern green wall comes from nearly a century of research in hydroponics
and botany, but has been used extensively in architecture only in the last two
decades. The first patented green wall assemblage was invented by Stanley
Hart White, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. The wall, which integrated a hydroponic nutrient delivery
system, growth medium, plant matter, and structure into a single assemblage,
was developed between 1931 and 1938 (Hindle 2012). These early concepts were
not fully developed until a political shift initiated in the 1960s, substantiated in
the 1970s, and expressed in the 1980s, which entailed increasing public demand
for green technology, both as a technical solution and as an appliqué symbol for
environmental consciousness.
Though developed in the 1980s, full-scale exterior green wall assemblages
did not make an appearance until the late 1990s. The final moment of broad
dissemination of the green façade was after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, at which
point vegetated buildings came to be seen literally as carbon traps and oxygen
producers. A flurry of literal-green projects, from those of Patrick Blanc to those
of Edouard Francois, Lacaton and Vassal, have continued the exploration of green
technologies – now politically correct and aesthetically crowd-pleasing – toward a
literal form of the Cosmopolitical Arcadia which uses buildings as carbon traps and
air purifiers. Life cycles and even the notion of biodegradability have shifted from
the organic world of gardens to the mineral world of buildings.
The recent boom of green walls may be categorized based on construction logic
and the intention of the façade (Figure 11.13). Either integrated into the construction
or applied as a facing to an existing structure, a green wall may be seen either as a
symbolic coding for ecological sustainability or a performative layer attempting to
achieve ecological sustainability in and of itself. A rise in prefabricated and modular
green wall technologies, years of successful assemblages, and do-it-yourself
greening strategies proliferated by the internet have increased the accessibility
and viability of greening, expanding literal greenwashing at an exponential rate.
The goal of the green revolution is to perpetuate literal greening both as a symbol
of an environmentally conscious society and as a means to cull our environmental
impact by any means available. As greenwashing continues to increase its public
demand, architecture will certainly continue to accommodate.
11.13 Left, Parkroyal on Pickering,

Singapore, WOHA Image courtesy
of Aussle Assault. Above, detail of
Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore,
WOHA. Image courtesy of Jonathan
Choe.
Conclusion: Toward an Ecology of Façade Assemblages
Façade technologies often evolve or migrate from parallel industries. Their shifting
material alliances within assemblages can be studied in terms of their adaptation
to specific environments. A façade assemblage may exist for a long time in a latent
stage, before it finds an appropriate environment to flourish. For example, the
Exterior Insulation Finishing System (EIFS) was developed in the early 1950s in
post-World War II Germany as an effective and economic system for reconstruction
and retrofitting of inadequate buildings during an energy-scarce time. However,
EIFS had to wait until the early 1970s, and migrate to the United States, to find
its ideal environment; that is, the large residential suburban developments that
became the perfect niche for this technology, which was able to provide a well-
finished, crafted appearance at a relatively low cost.
Environmental adaptation is crucial to these processes. The invention of a
particular material, often transferred from another practice, is only a step in the
process of its creation. Its transfer to façade assemblages is another step in the
evolution of artificial ecologies. Extruded aluminum technologies were developed
in the military aerospace industry well before migrating to the post-war building
industry and becoming the predominant technology in the construction of high-
rise curtain-wall assemblages. But there was also a combination of different
environmental factors that tilted the renascent building industry toward
extruded aluminum: for example, its superior resistance to corrosion and its price
competitiveness (Doordan 1993). Not unlike the emergence and battle for survival
of animal and plant species, over eons, it takes a similar combination of complex
factors for any architectural species to prevail. The difference in time scales hardly
matters.
Attempting to understand material assemblages in this manner requires
searching beyond their innate properties, toward the context of a permanently
changing or mutating environment of various and sundry attachments. Innate

properties are obviously important: asbestos, for example, was for decades a semi-
mythical material, both insulating and durable, or apparently “unassailable” (Handy
(Jam) Organization 1952). Its full material impact, specifically its long ignored – or
concealed – incompatibility with the respiratory systems of humans, subsequently
became an exceptional example of the catastrophic implosion of a single material
species.
Innate material properties, however, do not account exclusively for a material
assemblage’s vicissitudes; an immaculate technological, environmental, or
economic performance does not guarantee its survival as a species. The divergent
evolution of glass products is a good example of this. Both glass sheets and glass
blocks are perfectly viable façade systems, tried and tested through extensive use.
However, they have quite a different aesthetic effect. The intensive use of glass
blocks in residential developments in the 1980s made it so ubiquitous that its
utilitarian appeal rapidly faded, foremost in comparison to the contemporaneous
multiple and simultaneous applications that sheet-glass technology developed.
The glass block industry became a victim of its own success, a type of architectural-
material pop star, and decline followed quickly as the fashionable celebration of its
youthful “workmanship” faded.
The rise and fall of materials that captured the interest of a certain time is a well-
known narrative: mirror coating in curtain walls after the 1973 oil crisis, corrugated-
steel cladding in the harsh economy of the early 1990s, perforated and expanded
metal rainscreens during the “spectacular” late 1990s and early 2000s. Façade
assemblages have a much higher metabolic rate than façade materials, without
any of their honorable stability and permanence.
Legal and regulatory frameworks are often an important factor in the dynamics
of façade assemblages. The prosperous economies of post-war America, which
largely sponsored the explosion of suburban, single-family housing, produced
a massive development and deployment of allied technologies, including the
incorporation of air-conditioning systems into the typical American home. In
order to provide the necessary internal controls (for example, regarding humidity
and temperature), headlong research into waterproofing membranes, moisture
barriers, and insulation systems, concluding in the ASTM insulation standards
developed by Committee C16, made thermal insulation and moisture restraints
compulsory elements in standard wall assemblages for all suburban houses of this
decades-long period (Ray 1952). Such changes in the economic and regulatory
environment always act as powerful environmental incentives in the creation of
façade species.
The different modes of adaptation between a façade assemblage and its
environment can take multiple forms. While highly customized assemblages
designed for a very specific application tend to have much less evolutionary
potential than those designed for more widely used applications, the ambition
to produce unique architectures has often triggered the creation of new façade
assemblages which, in turn, have become broadly used.
Like a purebred dog, a highly integrated assemblage contains a form of hypertelia,
an extreme adaptation to a unique environment that curtails its evolutive potential
(Simondon, no date). For example, the POLA Ginza Building Façade, a project
designed by Chuck Hoberman to provide adaptive shading, is less likely to become
a dominant species precisely because of its sophisticated and highly specialized
technologies. It is therefore unlikely to spawn a substantial evolutive process. By
contrast, in the last two decades unitized, double-glazed curtain wall systems or
slip-form concrete façades have gone through a striking development process in
terms of insulation values and speed of construction, precisely because of the scale
and ubiquity of their markets.
The other extreme is also true: the development of point-fixed structural glazing
assemblages in the late 1960s by Pilkington, and the development of LED façades
from the early 2000s (Wigginton 1995), emerged as very sophisticated technologies
aimed at producing radically different visual effects, and became mainstream as
these technologies developed low-cost possibilities.
There are even more complex situations where some highly integrated
assemblages that contain the latent potential for a broad dissemination are
deliberately prevented from spreading because their commercial potential as
façade assemblages is much smaller than the revenues obtained from their
uniqueness outside the building industry. For example, Apple’s “proprietary” details
of the Apple Stores demonstrates that the company understands the commercial
potential of their custom-designed assemblages, and that it is trying to control the
dissemination of the species through legal means (patenting), in order to preserve
its uniqueness.
In any case, the stronger the relationship between a particular assemblage and
its environment, the greater its potential for further evolution. This environmental-
aesthetic perspective on the development, spread, and extinction of building
technologies supports Banham’s disdain for Giedion’s “firsts” (or patents) as truly
transformative vehicles (Banham 1969: 16). For Banham, arguably, what mattered
foremost was the Darwinian side of all of this; the arc and sweep of a species in
“full flight,” versus its emergence from the primeval soup of creation itself. From
this perspective, the relevant agents are neither the inventors nor the eminent
personalities of architectural history, but a much more complex set of agents. In this
alternative history of the facade, the heroes are more likely to be people like Albert
Kahn, Pietro Belluschi, or Felix Trombe, the veritable materiologists and assemblers
who were able to ride the waves of technological invention, geopolitical struggles
and economic upheavals on their way to new cosmopolitical arrangements.
Notes
1 In relation to aluminium, see: for the US, Muller (1945), and for the UK, Goldsworthy
(1944: 230–41).
2 For a general treatise on the construction of US power and its transformations across
various socio-political platforms, see Wright Mills (1958).
3 ETA is the Basque separatist movement founded in 1959 and still active, albeit in a
mostly demilitarized manner since 2014.
4 “Design space” is a concept proposed by Daniel Dennett to define design within an

evolutionary process (Dennett 1995).
5 It is impossible, for example, to imagine the architectural effects in Walter Gropius’s
1913 Fagus Factory or Albert Kahn’s early twentieth-century Detroit factories without
monolithic walls of glass and steel.
6 See the “Introduction” in Simondon (1958).
7 Gramazio & Kohler Architects, Gantenbein Vineyard Façade, Fläsch, Switzerland, 2006.
An example of the non-standardized brick façade.
8 For the criteria to meet Passive House standards, see: Passive House Requirements
(2012).
9 For example, see the article on an Austin Company designed and built plant: Factory in
a Stock Room: Lincoln Electric’s New Cleveland Plant (1950).
10 For plans and details of wartime and Post-War Quonset Huts, see the blog: US Navy
Quonset Hut: Weapons of Mass Construction. Available at: http://quonset-hut.blogspot.
co.uk/p/quonset-hut.html
11 See Harwood, J. and Parks, J. (2004: 49–56), published in conjunction with an
exhibition held at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New
York City, New York, September 14–December 11, 2004.
12 For Lewis L. Strauss’s famous “too cheap to meter” remarks, made in a speech to the
National Association of Science Writers (New York City, 1954), plus its context, see
Strauss (1954). Strauss was, of course, Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.
13 “Your proposal will demand approximately four times more steam and more than
twice the fan energy to heat and ventilate the building than would be necessary
with the current methods employed … to heat and ventilate a building exposed to
the same atmospheric conditions.” The American Blower Corporation, on Corbusier’s
Centrosoyuz, 1920s, in Bryan (1991).
References
Banham, R. 1969. The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Boller, L. 1976. Polysulfide sealants, in Building Seals and Sealants, edited by ASTM,
Committee C-24. Philadelphia, PA: American Society for Testing and Materials, 40–53.
Brock, L. 2005. Designing the Exterior Wall: An Architectural Guide to the Vertical Envelope.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
Bryan, H. 1991. Le Corbusier and the “Mur Neutralisant”: An early experiment in double
envelope construction, in Architecture and Urban Space: Proceedings of the Ninth
International PLEA Conference, edited by S. Álvarez, J. López de Asiaín et al. Berlin:
Springer, 257–62.
Construction Product Innovation: Bright Future for Aluminium. 2006. What’s New in Building.
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12
An Interview with Philippe Rahm, Philippe Rahm architectes
Philippe Rahm: First, I share some of the positions of Bruno Latour and Peter
Sloterdijk on the relationship between human and non-human. The idea that
the human is no longer in front of nature but inserted within it is something that
I explore in my work too. This means that the distinctions between inside and
outside are blurred. I think that contemporary knowledge does not just happen
through the five senses, but also through physiological link. If you think of the
relationship we have with architecture, it is not just a visual relationship any longer.
You see a building, you see a wall, but it could also be the quality of the air that
you can sense when you breathe. It could be that the quality and the spectrum of
the light have an impact on your skin, go deeper into your skin, touch the retina
of your eyes and have an effect on you. This all creates some hormonal reactions
inside the body. This impact is also architecture. To give you an example, a very
precise example: the baby’s bottle. The bottle is an object, but if the baby drinks
the milk it becomes something more than an object. You know that bottles used to
be made of plastic that could be toxic and could cause cancer or other endocrinal
or hormonal disorders. There are now new European regulations banning this
kind of plastic and we need to use different materials. In reality what happens
is that a bottle is not outside of you, but it affects the quality of the milk as these
plastic particles go into the body and act on it. So the relationship between body
and outside should be understood today in terms of chemical or electromagnetic
continuity. I think in this case we need to think architecture not like an outside
element in the world, but rather as something that is being build as a connection
between inside and outside, human and non-human. This understanding draws
on Peter Slotredijk’s notion of sphere and also Bruno Latour’s work. We could also
say that the relation is no longer that of humans facing a world; instead, humans
are inside the world. This kind of relationship is something that I have explored
extensively with my work.
In our work “Hormonorium” for the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
in 2002,1 elements like air and light did play a central role in qualifying space
(Figure 12.1). We gave a special chemical quality to the air as we changed its
composition between oxygen and nitrogen and the other gasses in order to
have less oxygen and more nitrogen. This creates a reaction inside the body
that causes the body to generate more red blood cells and more EPO (this is the
hormone Erythropoietin) that is used by sportsmen as it regulates red blood
cell production and stimulates bone marrow to produce more hemoglobin.
For this reason EPO is commonly used amongst endurance athletes; it means
better oxygen transportation and so a higher rate of aerobic respiration. When
you breathed the air in the “Hormonorium” it felt like being in the mountains
because you had less oxygen and it had this doping effect. For the light it was
the same: the bright light would create an effect on the retina and would affect
12.1 the melatonin that would block the reaction of sleepiness. This is the kind of
“Hormonorium,” projects in my practice where there is no distinction between human and outside
the Swiss Pavilion nature/space. The human is placed not between two walls; it is rather something
at the Venice that is distributed between two scales, different scales in fact, in particular at
Biennale in 2002. microscopic level and on a physiological level.
© Philippe Rahm
and Jean-Gilles
Décosterd / Photo: Albena Yaneva: This is very interesting that you do not take air and light for granted.
Jean-Michel You rather rethink their composition and how they interact with human bodies in
Landecy. architectural settings. This is an excellent example of cosmopolitical design that
An Interview with Philippe Rahm, Philippe Rahm architectes 215
turns a number of problems related to nature into a cause for thinking. Can you
provide other examples or elaborate on this example, to illustrate how exactly
you mobilize, through the work you are doing, a variety of entities into new
compositions?
Philippe Rahm: I am primarily interested in air and light not only as natural
elements but also elements of architecture. Traditionally when we talk about
elements of architecture, we talk about walls and columns, and some visible
structural material elements. Yet, the real target of architecture, I will argue, is not
the visible, it is not the sculptural quality, in the sense that you can stay in front
of an object, but it is rather the fact that you go inside. So, the real target is more
the space rather than the structural and visible elements. What defines space,
and the chemical qualities of space, are elements such as heat, humidity, gas,
light, and so on. If you think how to compose with different elements in modern
architecture you try to reduce heat, to produce homogeneous space inside, and
so on. It is not that much the role of the architect but that of the thermal engineer
and the people working on the mechanical system of the building as they want
to create the most convenient space. My question is: is it possible to introduce
new elements of composition that will change the traditional composition, that is,
the geometrical composition? So the tradition of symmetry/asymmetry, inclusion,
addition (for instance the addition of columns or room) will not create a building.
I wish to change this language of composition into a more meteorological one
that would use elements like humidity, light, heat, evaporation, conduction,
pressure, and so on. The aim is to introduce a meteorological language into the
architectural field in order to compose the space through natural phenomena
such as convection for example, that is, the warm air going down and the cold
air going up, and it creates wind. This is also the reason for wind on the planet. As
we receive more sun on the Equator and less sun at the North Pole, this creates
a thermodynamic imbalance between the Equator and the Northern lines of the
planet. Because of the two different temperatures the air moves and it generates
a different movement: wind. This meteorological knowledge informs my work and
that is why I ended up doing different projects around 2008. But today we are still
working on this. We create different poles in a building – a cold pole and a warm
pole – in order to generate a different climate inside, with distinct areas that are
colder and warmer. It is like using meteorological phenomena (and knowledge)
to design the building. Climate is no longer located outside the building and
we assume that there is no climate within it either. Rather, it is a homogeneous
world. This distinction between inside and outside can be reintroduced inside the
building. It is of course related to sustainability. In some traditional buildings it is
warm under the ceiling and very cold on the floor level, so you use a lot of heat
because of this natural rising of the warm air. And so in my case I have to say that
I am less interested in introducing animals as non-human entities in architectural
compositions, than substances and climatic phenomena. This is how I understand
the elements of architecture.
Albena Yaneva: These are not the traditional elements in which we accommodate a
space indeed, but they take part in space-making.
Philippe Rahm: There is no architectonic, but climate-tectonic. The idea is to

introduce climate as a tectonic of the building.
Albena Yaneva: How do people react to this type of architecture? How do you
trigger hesitation and make them “slow down”?
Philippe Rahm: In traditional terms, there is always a narrative of architecture. The

building is always supposed to say something. In our case, we prefer to create
phenomena, to have an action on the climate itself. Not in a metaphorical way,
but in reality. The idea is that architecture and space are about void, emptiness,
and climate. The most fundamental reason for architecture is to create a cool
place when it is too warm and a warm place when it is cold. So, we try to “slow
down” this quick narrative and expression by going back to the climatic issues of
architecture.
Albena Yaneva: By highlighting these elements of architecture that are usually

hidden by other, more architectonic ones, what is extremely interesting is that
these are conditions and elements that we usually pack into bigger concepts
like “sustainability” or “climate change.” Yet, we rarely think about the smaller
components like heat, evaporation, air, and so on. This on its own is a very
interesting way of thinking cosmopolitically through the different elements that
will constitute a climate and make architecture work. Have you looked at other
elements, like rivers, floods, and so on: bigger natural entities and phenomena?
Philippe Rahm: If you analyze buildings today there are some true sustainability
reasons. In the Nordic countries you need a control of the ventilation inside the
building because you need to control the quantity of air you introduce, so you
do not need to spend a lot of energy for heating and electricity to warm the air.
The passage of the air is controlled and if the ventilation is important inside the
building, then the whole building can be interpreted as rivers of air, as flows, as
winds of air. The air arrives, there is a flow of air with a certain speed in some areas;
if you enlarge the size of the building the speed will slow down, and if you reduce
it, the speed will increase. In some of my projects, like the library we did in Nancy
(Figures 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5), and other projects, we designed the building as a
flow of air by decreasing and increasing the size of the inside space in the building
in order to create a pocket where the speed will be slower and other pockets where
the speed will increase. There is this idea of a river of air, or canyon, this kind of
relationship.
Albena Yaneva: How do people react to this kind of architecture that is also a work
of art: very provocative. How do you get them thinking? There is a new definition
12.2 The Library in Nancy, plan. © Philippe Rahm architectes.
12.3 (top) The

Library in Nancy,
diagram of the
temperature.
© Philippe Rahm
architectes.
12.4 (middle)
The Library in
Nancy, diagram of
the air ventilation in
the winter.
© Philippe Rahm
architectes.
12.5 (bottom)
The Library
in Nancy, the of architecture here but also a new definition of climate and climatic architecture.
amphitheater. What is this new thinking regime that you propose with your work?
© Philippe Rahm
architectes. Philippe Rahm: My work was more inside the architectural practice and inside the
field of architecture before, talking about void, invisible, space and energy. But
today it is linked to sustainability and energy reduction. If you work on the climate,
on conduction, evaporation, and so on, this is of course related to the energy you
use to heat the building and you could achieve some energy savings. There is a
strong link to my original work about the invisible and the contemporary searches
of energy reduction and gas reduction. All these aspects are of course aspects of
sustainability. I subscribe to this sustainability agenda, so that my work can suggest
a new aesthetic answer to the many questions that the sustainability agenda sets
for us.
Albena Yaneva: Do you also aim at creating news conditions of co-habitation of 12.6 Jade Eco
humans and non-humans by the way you mobilize evaporation, ventilation, air, Park, Taichung,
Taiwan, 2012–2016.
and light?
© Philippe Rahm
architectes,
Philippe Rahm: I think that twentieth century architecture set the function as Mosbach
completely abstract. If you look at the history of architecture, you will see that the paysagistes, Ricky
climate also invented different types of architecture. For instance Jared Diamond, Liu & Associates.
professor from UCLA, wrote a lot about the relationship between history and
climate. He studied a number of climatic phenomena and how they influenced
the history of humanity. There are many examples of climatic problems that have
created functional space. For example, if you think about the well from which
you draw water in old cities. The well used to be the place from which you could
draw water and take it to your house; a lot of people started gathering around
the well and it became the plaza; and little by little the plaza became a social
place, not because it was primarily designed as a social place, but because the
well as a functional space was there. In modern terms you can say there is a place
or a street, but there is no reason to go to that place because there is nothing
there. Designing a place with a functional program is a mistake. Perhaps if we
start with a physiological reason or a climatic reason you can generate social
interactions through the need to go there and you will end up designing and
shaping a place. That is precisely what we are doing now in a Taiwan project. Two
years ago we were awarded a project in Taichung, a 70-hectare park which is now
under construction (Figure 12.6).
The master plan of the park is based on climatic issues: on heat, air humidity
and air pollution, which we try to reduce through various elements like trees and
climatic devices that help us increase the humidity of the air, and so on. We did
some CFD computer simulations to understand where on the site it would be a bit
colder and where it would be less polluted or less dry; then we reinforced these
qualities by placing a lot of trees that have some special properties like cooling,
12.7 Jade Eco Park, Taichung, Taiwan, 2012–2016. © Philippe Rahm architectes,
Mosbach paysagistes, Ricky Liu & Associates.
depolluting, and drying, and also some depolluting and cooling devices; we
also added drying devices which are medium-sized structures that will provide
coolness by blowing cool air, or dryness by blowing dry air or clean air (Figure
12.7).
So the park is made on the basis of climate analysis in order to create a real space
with physical climatic effects. Thus, it is not the program that creates the park; it is
the climate that creates a master plan composition of the park.
note
1 See http://www.philipperahm.com/data/projects/hormonorium/
13
Why Cosmopolitical Design is Performed
Seth Harrison and Ariane Lourie Harrison
From air to algae, from birds to bats, non-humans are gaining recognition as actors
in fields as diverse as geography, philosophy, and anthropology. Two philosophers,
Peter Sloterdijk and Isabelle Stengers help us to approach these emerging
relationships. Sloterdijk coins the term “explication” to describe the process by
which hidden subjects and our hidden relationships with them are made visible:
If one wanted to say … what the 20th century … contributed … to the history of
civilization, answering with three criteria could suffice … : the praxis of terrorism,
the conception of product design, and concepts of the environment. Through the
first, interactions between enemies were established on postmilitary foundations;
through the second, functionalism was able to reintegrate itself in the world
of perception; through the third, the phenomena of life and knowledge were
entwined to depths hitherto unknown. Taken together, these three criteria
indicate the acceleration of explication of the revealing inclusion of latencies and
background data in manifest operations (Sloterdijk 2009: 41).
Discussing such ideas in an architectural context, Sloterdijk underscores the

constructed or designed quality embedded in the term: “An explication covers
only those parts of the context of life that can be technically reconstructed”
(Stengers 2005: 995). Twentieth-century gas warfare, in Sloterdijk’s example,
revealed that the atmosphere itself became a subject of intention. Consider aging,
industrial food animals, psychotropic drugs and the definition of species: each of
these topics reflects the incursion of human technology into the environment; each
offers an ethical problematic worthy of explication; and each is a topic that we have
explicated through our performance-installations.
The idea of cosmos, in Stengers’s multivolume work, Cosmopolitics, points to
a politics open to entities marginalized by the anthropocentric world view. In
considering the interests of rocks, industrial food animals, chemicals, and other
non-humans, the “multiple divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they
could eventually be capable,” Stengers advances the idea of “diagnosis,” which she
aligns with the performative, as a means of affording these entities a voice:
A true diagnosis, in the Nietzschean sense, must have the power of the
performative. It cannot be commentary, exteriority, but must risk assuming an
inventive position that brings into existence and makes perceptible the passions
and actions associated with the becomings it evokes (Stengers 2010: 12).
The performative, as we understand it, refers to the capability to enact, not simply
the presence of entities we may seldom consider, but also our relations with them.
According to Stengers, diagnosis may require techniques outside of those typical
of the sciences; in Cosmopolitics, she invites propositions from the non-scientific
disciplines to give form to these “becomings.”
As designers, we propose that our relationship to entities all too rarely represented
in cultural production can be invented and performed, an opportunity that we
have pursued via an ongoing and iterative series of performance-installations. For
us, the invention of possible relations – through designed objects, installations and
spaces – and their performance represents a means of explication through design.
Using several of our own works as examples, in this chapter we will describe some
of the guiding principles we have come to in performing cosmopolitical design,
namely: call upon fictional frameworks to account for the diversity of the cosmos;
challenge design to materialize these fictional or alternative worlds as collectives;
and encourage the enactment of new relationships both within and potentially
outside of the designed space.
Because Fictions Present the Cosmos
The cosmopolitics that Stengers envisions is not the same concept as the
cosmopolitan constitution – or the “use of the right to the earth’s surface which
belongs to the human race in common” – described by Kant in his 1795 essay
“Perpetual Peace.” Politics, in Kant’s formulation, was a vector for exclusively human
concerns, played out against industrial capitalism. Stengers’s usage makes politics
a vector for humans’ and non-humans’ shared concerns, as these play out in the
Anthropocene epoch. The term cosmos, according to Stengers, dislodges the
anthropocentric bias of what is typically understood as politics among humans, and
insists that we turn our attention to how a politics may be forged among humans,
non-humans, and beings not necessarily sentient. What links Stengers’s idea
with those of other ecopolitical thinkers – Latour’s political ecology, Heise’s eco-
cosmopolitanism, Morton’s hyperobects, Whatmore’s hybrid geographies – is the
requirement that hybrids and non-human entities be considered as parts of a more
encompassing politics; that is, that they no longer be regarded as raw materials to
satisfy human wants and needs (Latour 2004, Heise 2008, Morton 2013, Whatmore
2002). Each writer proposes a form of collective thinking and action that risks
disagreement, and in so doing, resists prescribing a single solution regarding how
humans should behave toward nonhuman others. Ongoing debate – or relation-
making activity – continually reforms the issues as new human and nonhuman
actors are incorporated into politics, shifting the content and parameters of the
discussion.
Why Cosmopolitical Design is Performed 225
The term cosmos is perhaps a difficult one for designers. Its vaporous expanse
eludes architectural spaces of containment; the term comes freighted with mystical
orders and belief systems that conflict with contemporary architecture’s pragmatic
turn. Architects’ slogans – from Koolhaas’s “fuck context” to BIG’s id-driven “yes is
more” – attest to the success of an entrenched architectural anthropocentrism.
Similarly, discourses that focus on the interior of the building envelope center
on human programs and conveniently withdraw from a politics that could lodge
design within the concerns of more diverse groups (Mostafavi 2008). Yet, as Albena
Yaneva has demonstrated in the architecture-centered debates that she includes
in Mapping Controversies in Architecture, buildings are ecosystems larger than the
site.
By cosmos, I do not mean a world that is “out there” but a world whose
ingredients and list of entities we must take into account when we explore the
compositions that buildings constitute, including all the vast numbers of non-
human entities making humans act (Yaneva 2012: 67).
Yaneva traces the actor-networks immanent in esthetic preference, ecological

impact, costs, sustainability, new technologies, public opinion, and political
affiliation, and labels them, rightly, as controversies in architecture. Maintaining
rather than resolving controversies is one of the reasons why, Yaneva points out,
architecture exists “in the making;” and why controversy may be said to reside at
the core of what Stengers defines as “ecological practice.”
Ecological practice (political in the broad sense) is then related to the production
of values, to the proposal of new modes of evaluation, new meaning. But those
values, modes of evaluation, and meanings do not transcend the situation in
question, they do not constitute its intelligible truth (Stengers 2010: 32).
But the production of an ecology of practices also requires the … abandonment

of the opposition between “faithful description” and “fiction,” between “fact”
and “value,” for an openly constructivist approach that affirms the possible, that
actively resists the plausible and the probable targeted by approaches that claim
to be neutral (Stengers 2010: 57).
Stengers suggests that ecological practice produces not facts but “new modes of
evaluation” that result from the intentional disruption of disciplinary boundaries.
The openness of this approach proliferates alternative outcomes that fall outside
of disciplinary conventions. These speculations are attempts to make visible more
inclusive versions of cosmos and, as such, they confound categorization as fact
or fiction, as they are produced from an active exploration of “the situation in
question.”
Counter-fictions Perform “the Situation in Question”
Harrison Atelier’s performance-installations deploy narrative strategies – counter-

fictions – as frameworks to create more inclusive versions of “the situation in
question.” For example, our 2010 collaboration with the choreographer Jonah
Bokaer, titled Anchises, took as “the situation in question” the problem of medically
extended human longevity. Aging today is not a monolithic concept, but a
contingent mixture of genetic, economic, social and technological factors: a space
of controversy. We chose the discipline of dance, in which the aging body itself is
the site of controversy – in that for many dancers the body is considered “old” by
age 35 – to counterpose our cultural myths of aging against the reality that many
older people spend their final years in isolation.
The narrative framework of Anchises borrowed from epic accounts of filial piety
in the story of Anchises from the Aeneid. When the Greeks invaded Troy, they
allowed the Trojans to take with them whatever they could carry. Most took up
gold and jewels. Aeneas, the Trojan war hero who would eventually found Rome,
chose to carry his aged father, Anchises, to safety. Aeneas’s perfect act of filial piety
contrasts with the reality of aging today – nursing homes, extended hospital stays,
medicalization and estrangement among the generations. Our narrative played
out a contemporary counterfiction of medicalized longevity, by asking: Could
Aeneas have sustained the ideal of filial piety had technology extended his father’s
life? How would the burden of an elderly parent have weighed upon the epic hero?
Might Aeneas have turned to a nursing home as the best means of “assisting” his
elderly father, had Anchises – somewhat conveniently for Virgil’s empire-building
hero – not died at sea?
Early research for the work involved a residency at Bournemouth University,
during which we spent several days in a motion-capture facility digitally
diagramming the ranges of motion and gestural vocabularies of retired professional
ballet dancers, who were in their sixties. We sought to record these movements
13.1 Research for in order to avoid stereotypical “old” gestures in the choreography – thereby,
Anchises included in Stengers’s terms, to “not transcend the situation.” Later, in developing the
work at motion
capture lab at
choreography, we used the motion capture files to provide a repertoire of accurate
Bournemouth rather than clichéd “older” gestures. We further confounded the given movements
University, 2010. of the old by distributing the roles of the two mythological characters, Aeneas and
Anchises, among a multigenerational
cast of five dancers, ages 24 to 75
(Figure 13.1).
These layers of counterfiction – the
“scientific” capturing of the qualities of
motion of older professional dancers,
and the nonlinear dramaturgical
mapping of two onto five (two
Anchiseses, three Aeneases) – became
the basis of the choreography. We
found that the gesture of “assisting”
could be interpreted and experienced
in two contradictory ways: in the first,
one performer guides another, or
receives guidance from another; in
the second, which is the opposite of the first, a performer pretends to assist, but
only provides the requisite minimum, seeking to be unburdened and to remain
autonomous. In this gesture of assisting, which became the formal core of the
work, we saw the desire to break free from versus to support the generation prior.
A choreographic language resulted in which dancers gripped hands, straining in
opposite directions, each apparently uncertain as to when the other would let go –
a situation made precarious and uncomfortable for the audience when one of the
pair was an older cast member.
The set design interacted with the choreography of slow waltzes, bent bodies
and shoulder grasps to unite the performers, yet without eliminating the tensions
between old and young (Sulcas 2010). To create a material analogy to the dialectic
of assistance and burden, we hung a giant bundle of surgical tubing filled with
foam cylinder cores over the center of the stage. Suspended above the performers,
the set physicalized age as a burden, but also suggested that aging might be
regarded as both a cloud on the conscience and a field of potential energy. When
the hanging set eventually spilled its contents onto the stage, burden materialized
13.2 Performance
as opportunity, the dancers using the foam blocks to perform the reconstruction
of Anchises at
of a sacked city. The set imposed an ecological logic on the building project in Bournemouth
that nothing appeared or vanished from the stage that was not present at the Pavilion Dance,
beginning of the piece (Figure 13.2). After the blocks fell and for the remainder 2010.
of the performance, the vinyl tubing dangled freely, twining performers within
transparent strands. Dancing within a hanging field of surgical tubing requires
that performers assist one another, while resisting attachment; but ultimately they
must break free in order to perform. The elastic tubing seemed simultaneously to
bind and to release, eventually allowing performers to find their way downstage,
where young and old collaborated using the foam blocks to create the various
performance environments that constituted the set during the second half of the
work.
Anchises emerged from a layered fiction – a counterfiction that is a projective
future connecting incarnations of a central concept across narrative time.
Rather than prescriptively point the way, in a utopian or dystopian fashion to an
inevitable end, a projective counterfiction can create a participatory milieu in
which audiences can “actively resist the plausible and the probable targeted by
approaches that claim to be neutral” (Stengers 2010). This allows us to contemplate
and engage with, even perform such alternative or integrative approaches outside
of the scripted performance environment.
Production credits: The 2010 performance of Archises was commissioned by the

Bournemouth’s Pavilion Dance and choreographed by Jonah Bokaer. Performers
included Valda Setterfield, Meg Harper, Catherine Miller, James McGinn, and Jonah
Bokaer. Aaron Copp designed the lighting. Loren Dempster’s original musical score
for Anchises included a digital re-mastering of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, a collection
of sound fragments and live performance by Loren and Stuart Dempster. Anchises
premiered at Bournemouth’s Pavilion Dance. It toured to the Arnolfini Theater in
Bristol and to the Abrons Art Center in New York City.
Thick Assemblages Create Spaces of Hesitation
Our approach to cosmopolitical design finds value in offering what Yaneva calls
“thick descriptions” of a controversy, requiring the integration of a controversy’s
participants, human and nonhuman, into an assemblage (Harrison 2013).
Assemblages integrate diverse actors (in the actor-network sense), including
performers and audience, and are the product of collaboration among multiple
disciplines. One finds that the construction of an assemblage becomes less a
streamlined, holistic process and more an emergent negotiation, which calls to
mind Stengers’s idea of “slowing down.” “We need to slow down, not to consider
ourselves authorized to believe that we possess the meaning of what we know”
(Stengers 2005: 995). What Stengers describes is the construction of a space of
hesitation, unfamiliar and resistant to ready interpretation. For us, this has played
out in the creation of assemblages among performers, audience and set, with the
goal of inviting participants to resist consensual ways of encountering charged
issues.
In Veal, our 2013 installation–performance staged at the Invisible Dog Art Center
in Brooklyn, we took on the issue of industrial meat production. Rather than adopt
the vocabulary and aesthetic conventions of moral outrage, we instead attempted

to enter into and accept the industrial logics of food-animal production, extending
from concentrated-animal-feeding-operations (CAFOs) to slaughterhouses to
supermarkets. We derived a counterfiction from the difficult facts: if food animals
are inevitably constrained by human technologies, how might animal life be
designed so that meat-production becomes more “humane”? The narrative of
Veal proposed a technological investment in reduced suffering by envisioning
a genetically modified new breed. This took form, in one installation, as a herd
of 12 “veal creatures,” fabricated using 3D-printed foam and vinyl tubing. Their
ambiguous form, an assemblage of animal and technology – tiny knob-like heads,
plump buoyant bodies, and constrained legs – rendered humane-ness in stark
biotechnological terms via the imagined genetic modification of a life-creature
into a food-creature. Stunted heads, cinched at the neck, reduced the expenditure
of biological energy, while diminishing sensory reception to pain; fluted mouths,
shaped to suck at tubing, functioned as the sole sensory interface with the world, 13.3 Performance
of Veal at The
and legs, fixed into a solid matrix, eliminated the need for a veal crate (Figure 13.3).
Invisible Dog Art
The counterfiction of Veal was not restricted to a dystopian vision of extreme Center, Brooklyn,
genetic intervention to create food animals; such a futuristic bias would have 2013. David
located the work too squarely in what Latour describes as a “modern” mindset, in Watson and
which a distinction – namely, “progress by science” – demarks nature from culture. Loren Dempster
performing with
We also integrated into the work an entire set of received stories related to animals the “herd” of
and meat, by reaching back to an Olympian myth foregrounding the subjugation penned bagpipe
of the animal to human reason: the rigged musical competition between the sun- creatures.
god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas. Apollo plays the lyre, using strings of precise
lengths that replicate Pythagorean geometry. The lyre represents repeatable,
digitizable technology, distanced from the body, played by a hand that, relying
on an opposable thumb, separates man from most animals. Marsyas’s double-
pipes, wind instruments, physical and sensual, emanating from and modulated
by the breath, are directly connected to the mouth, the gut, the animal part of
the human. In the myth, Apollo becomes furious that Marsyas’s pipes are initially
judged to make the more beautiful music, and insists on a second round in which
the instruments will be played upside-down. For the the sun-god playing the self-
enclosed technology of the lyre, this shift in orientation presents no challenge at
all; but for the satyr playing the pipes, a unipolar reed instrument, which cannot
be inverted and retain its musical function, the reorientation is disastrous. Marsyas
predictably loses, and Apollo’s chosen punishment rehearses the subjugation of
nonhumans to human technology: suspended upside-down, the satyr is flayed
alive, converted from a human-animal hybrid into meat.
Veal transformed the 5,000 square-foot Invisible Dog gallery into a sequence of
five installations, each of which served as part of a set for a performance of the “via
dolorosa” of the industrial food animal. The set up alternatively herded and freed
the audience to interact with performers and the installations, playing on the dual
nature of each installation as both musical instrument and designed object.
On entering the front gallery, the first installation encountered was a set of
eight-foot high steel-strung frames, constituting a wall-sized lyre. The frets were
3D-printed ceramic “blastocysts,” recalling the first step in the production of meat:
in-vitro fertilization. The vibrations of the strings gave lifelike movement to the
blastocyst-form frets, which when lit from above cast shadows that resembled
jittering embryos.
In the second installation, in the center of the front gallery, a herd of “veal
creatures” also functioned as bagpipes. A bagpipe chanter inserted into each
creature’s mouth was connected to vinyl tubing routed through the body and legs to
bellows beneath the installation platform; 3D-printed heads were loosely attached
to foam bodies with hidden springs and tubing, which the musicians adjusted while
playing the bagpipe chanters. Similar to the effects of the reverberating blastocysts
on the lyre, the unconventional form of this herd of bagpipe/veal creatures drew
audiences in, so that the musicians, whose gestures took on qualities of feeding
and monitoring of the animals, became penned.
Intended to invoke the cattle vans used to transport cattle to slaughter, the third
installation flanked the entrance to the back gallery: a bulging enclosure of acrylic
and steel that dancers could occupy but that doubled as a drum.
For the fourth installation we projected a stream of digitally rendered animal
feed – pellets, flakes, shreds of gristle – against the rear wall of the front gallery.
Visible from the sidewalk through the Invisible Dog’s storefront windows, washing
performers, installations and audience in a green-gold glow – especially striking
during the blizzard over the weekend on which Veal played – this slow repeated
loop of biomorphic-synthetic objects suggested the intertwined flows of feed,
feces and capital that define industrial agriculture.
The fifth installation encompassed the ceiling-wide lighting design in the back 13.4 Performance
gallery, the swirls and acid colors of which modeled the algal blooms that manure of Veal at The
Invisible Dog Art
overflows promote in bodies of water adjacent CAFOs (Figure 13.4).
Center, Brooklyn,
At the outset of the performance, we divided the audience into two groups, 2013. Silas Riener
separated into the front and rear galleries: the front gallery experiencing the performing with
music first then the dance, the rear gallery the dance first then the music. This the “herd” of
meant that, for each half of the audience, half of the performance remained penned bagpipe
creatures in the
largely hidden – revealed only in glimpses or in de-contextualized washes of
foreground, while
sound. Stengers’s notion of creating spaces of hesitation affords an aperture into the digitally-
the ethical content of the piece: how to manifest the continuous presence of the rendered animal
animal in the meat, and simultaneously the denial of that presence in order to feed makes up the
background.
consume meat? In offering partial reveals of the half of the performance that
the audience was not attending, while creating installations that encouraged an
intimate connection with strange animal-meat-production objects, we sought to
mimic the mode of seeing while not seeing, simultaneously denying, screening
out or remaining unawares, that characterizes the ethical quandaries that occur
in our midst.
During the performances, as the sounds of the lyre and bagpipes intermingled
with singers’ voices, the audience became immersed within an aural landscape that
was described as both “novel and strange” (Boynton 2013). Singers floated freely
among the audience in the front gallery announcing an idealized future (“Meat
will grow bountifully/From photosynthetic creatures lacking nervous systems/And
animals/Will be citizens”). When it was time for the front and back gallery audiences
to exchange, and for the performances in each gallery to repeat, those in front filed
into the back to surround dancers already performing choreography based upon
the confinement of food animals, a transition intended to prompt the realization of
the extent to which human technology encloses other species.
At the conclusion of the piece, both halves of the audience were reunited in
the main gallery, along with all of the performers. A deceptively lilting canon, by
that time already several times repeated, listed the non-meat products derived
from cattle (“… surfactants, drug products, blood products, gelatin, glycerin, shirt
buttons …”). This finale, in which performers, installations and audience were
pressed together, created a space of awkward beauty and ethical confrontation in
which the work’s content reverberated.
Production credits: The dance section of Veal was choreographed by Silas Riener
and performed by Silas Riener, Rashaun Mitchell and Cori Kresge. The musical
score was composed by Loren Dempster, with lyrics by Seth Harrison; performers
included Julie Haagenson (soprano), Biraj Birkakaty (counter-tenor), Loren
Dempster (lyre and bagpipes), Geoff Gersh (lyre), Arthur Solari (lyre), David Watson
(bagpipes), and Joshua Kohl (conductor) for the performances at The Invisible Dog
Art Center in February 2013.
Constructed Worlds Perform Provisional Collectives
Media and performance theorist Chris Salter defines the performative as “a

temporal constitution of identity or event that is not yet given in the world” (Salter
2010: xxv). Recall that the performative, for Stengers, also “makes perceptible the
passions and actions associated with the becomings it evokes” (Stengers 2010:
12). Such evoked becomings point to a collective, a provisionally-constructed
world that emerges from a network of relations, or in Latour’s terms, “the res that
creates a public around it” (Latour 2005: 6).
Blending the time-based (performative) and the constructed (architectural)
brings us to a concept that we have been exploring in our works and writings:
performative architecture, in which the aim is to create not only a permanent
structure but also a provisional collective. Two of our performance installations,
Pharmacophore and Species Niches, establish a more architectural format, yet one
that completes anew (as a provisional collective) with each time-based event,
be it an improvisation among dancers, an impromptu audience gathering, or a
structured, time-based, multidisciplinary work.
Pharmacophore: Architectural Placebo took place at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture in 2011. Our goal was to construct a provisional collective that
performed the complex relationships that link scientists, the pharmaceutical 13.5 Performance
industry, caregivers, patients, and psychotropic drugs in a supply-demand positive of Pharmacophore
feedback loop. To create a near- totalizing enclosure that would evoke the controlled at Storefront for Art
and Architecture,
space of corporate science, we lined the wedge-shaped Storefront gallery with a
New York City, 2011.
blue-lit steel and glass armature against which we installed milled wood benches.
We hollowed individual seats into the milled wood benching, and also carved slots
for iPhone, drink, and pills. An array of vinyl inflatables extended the length of
the gallery, cushioning the audience against the glass, the long, droopy arms of
which formed a soft network that transmitted postural shifts among neighboring
audience members (Figure 13.5).
The performance began in a state of enforced proximity among the audience
and performers in the tight Storefront gallery. Mid-performance, dancers
swung open the revolving walls of the iconic façade, admitting the red-hued
street light and traffic sounds. Audience members inside the gallery became
part of an urban performance for impromptu audiences on the sidewalk or in
passing taxis. The placebo effect (unpredictability) figured into the design in
several ways: presence and pressure of the informal audience gathered in the
street; unpredictable movements resulting from inadvertent (or deliberate)
pressure on the vinyl network behind the bench seating, ; tail-lights from the
busy street that rendered the bright red subjectivity of the city, impossible to
script, as a counter-force to the hyper-rational, calm, orderly, corporate blue-lit
interior.
In Pharmacophore, we sought to make the definition of the collective as elusive
as the placebo effect. Our intention was to design a performance installation
that was ambivalent, an inside that was also an outside, creating conditions in
which the audience wound up performing and the official space of performance
included the streetscape. All of the actors in the event – performers, audience
members, passersby – found themselves entangled. The collective remained
dynamic, constantly changing as the Storefront doors swung open or closed, or
when performers danced along the sidewalk, and were – from the perspective
of a spectator seated inside with a pre-determined sightline – in those moments
absent. When a passerby glimpsed the performance going on, and then paused,
and then peered in for a better view, they were petitioning for entry into the
collective. When performers – following directions for this contingency – danced
in an arc around these impromptu audience members, the collective accepted the
petition for entry.
We went on to explore the effect of enclosures and openings at a landscape scale
in Species Niches, our 2014 permanent pavilion at the OMI International Art Center
in Ghent, NY. The title Species Niches refers to the process by which different species
cohabitate and form worldly enclosures alongside, against and within one another’s
niches. Yet humans in the Anthropocene era are both niche-occupier and, through
technology, niche-creator, globally forming the environment in which other species
13.6 Species niche. This human role points to a responsibility beyond species interdependency
Niches pavilion by that informed both the pavilion structure and performances (Figure 13.6). As in our
Harrison Atelier at
OMI International
other works, in our design for Species Niches we sought to perform “the situation
Art Center, Ghent, in question” but without didacticism or embedded moral imperative. We created
NY, 2014. a performing object that embeds a script of interdependency, an outdoor theater
constituted of interarticulating performance niches, a system of interdependent 13.7 Species

performance spaces. Summer 2014 Dance OMI residents who climbed up and Niches pavilion by
Harrison Atelier at
explored the interstitial spaces of the pavilion to claim (or perform) niches within
OMI International
the construction, found that they needed to make physical adjustments in order Art Center, Ghent,
to keep their balance, thus performing a constant awareness of one another’s NY, 2014.
presence.
Species Niches is a 1,300 square foot network structure set within 15,000 square
feet amphitheater of cleared field at a forest edge. The pavilion is an undulating
canopy draped over a dome and proscenium arch, the design of which draws
inspiration from the structural logic of the “reciprocal frame:” no single hierarchy
governs the network of locally-sourced oak structural members; rather, the
geometries of the design are interdependent and interwoven (Figure 13.7). The
corners of each oak member are routed and each edge sanded down, producing a
structural element that is hospitable to the touch, yet strong enough to be climbed
on, a tightly woven reticulum designed for dancers to explore. The thickness of
certain spaces, such as the dome portion, also contributes to the strength of
the structure and permits performers to climb. The reciprocal frame structure
is a flexible network, transmitting the shifts in body weight from one dancer to
another, requiring that a physical dialogue be set up among dancers and between
dancers and pavilion.
13.8 Species Niches pavilion roof plan, 2014.
13.9 Species Niches pavilion in use by Dance OMI residency at OMI International
Art Center, Ghent, NY, 2014.
Conceived as two layers of reciprocal frame “mesh” that thicken with truss-
work, the pavilion enclosure seems to flicker in and out of perception, at times
registering as a dense weave of oak members, at other moments opening up
to frame the landscape. The roof plan of the pavilion provides both a sense of
containment and dispersion, as clusters of interior space compete with the profile
of the building, which presents a bristling set of extensions that diffuse into the
landscape (Figure 13.8). The density of the woven network (Figure 13.9) creates
overlapping, multifaceted, constantly shifting theater experiences. The sectional
diversity of the pavilion offers multiple performance sites, some dominant and
obvious, others receding or revealed only from certain perspectives. Thus the
pavilion enables performers to play with contingency, moving audiences around
the site as they shift among performative niches. Performers wind up making
events that seem always about to emerge, are always in the process of becoming,
and so, metaphorically – perhaps experientially for the audience – they engage
the audience in the process of making and remaking contingent communities that
characterizes species evolution.
Production credits: Pharmacophore: Architectural Placebo was exhibited and

performed at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in November 2011. The
musical score was composed and performed by Loren Dempster. The piece was
choreographed by Silas Riener and performed by Silas Riener, Rashaun Mitchell,
Jamie Scott and Melissa Toogood. The lighting design was by Aaron Copp and Nick
Houfek.
A Performative Cosmopolitics
Harrison Atelier has created a series of performance-installations in which the

audience is invited to resist ready interpretations of phenomena stemming
from the intertwining of humans and technology. These works script site as an
experimental space in which provisional relationships may be forged and explored
among varied and at times conflicting actors; the assemblages formed occupy
or territorialize space, engaging the audience in the performance of alternative
worlds. The act of performing alternative worlds has implications for ecological
practice. Performance represents an immediate action, yet one that, not driven
toward a holistic solution or consensual world-view, makes visible and preserves
a plurality of voices. By constructing fictional worlds in which nonhuman actors
are manifest, ecological theory melds with the pragmatic enactment of provisional
relationships, which, once performed, may have the potential to be reproduced
and built upon outside the realm of the performance event.
In creating these works, we hope to prompt the rethinking of collective “in the
presence of” entities that would otherwise be disqualified as having nothing to
propose. The Anthropocene period therefore encourages the designer to engage
the fictional space of performance: constructing iterative versions of cosmos that
admit rather than preclude, and that imagine relationships among entities not
typically incorporated into human politics.
References
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Crutzen, P. and Stoermer, E. 2000. The Anthropocene. IGBP Newsletter 41, May.
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York: Routledge.
Heise, U. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Index
actants 114, 127, atmosphere, atmospheres xix, 5, 15, 19–20,

Actor-Network Theory xiii, xviii, 25, 32, 36, 88, 128–9, 168, 177, 184–5, 223, 238
40, 53, 56, 129,
actor-network, actor-networks 225, 228 Beck, Ulrich xviii, 1, 19, 45, 56, 114, 118,
actor, actors 7, 9, 17–18, 23, 26, 40, 44, 123, 128
53, 58, 66, 76, 94–5, 114, 122, 158, Benjamin, David vi, ix, xv, 14–18, 125,
178, 223–4, 228, 234, 237 131–2, 134, 138, 141
adjustment, adjustments 7–8, 18, 63–4, biodiversity 17, 114, 138, 167
66, 76, 87–8, 171, 189, 235, Boullier, Dominique v, xv, 7–9, 39, 41, 44,
affect 7, 14, 35–7, 69, 76, 83, 95, 124, 162, 52, 55–6
177, 180, 213–14
affected 5–7, 17, 35–7, 39–41, 55, 68, 83, Callon, Michel 9, 19, 40, 52–3, 56
95, 161, 170, 179–81 Castro, Eva vi, ix, xv, 14–15, 161–2, 166,
agency, agencies 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 29–30, 171
40, 54, 79, 106, 128–9, 145, 161, 171, catastrophe 21, 24, 41
178–9, 181, 209 causal relation 33
air xi, xv, 5, 13, 15–18, 26, 28, 34–6, 83, causality v, 7, 33–5, 37
132–3, 171, 176, 183–7,192, 200–202,
CERN 8, 79–84, 87, 90
204, 209–11
climate adaptation xvii
air-conditioning 184, 186, 201, 206
climate change 21, 24, 32, 39, 116, 126,
airtightness 184
216
Anthropocene v, viii, 5–6, 10, 14, 20, 22,
climate controversy 24
24–30, 39, 113, 117, 123–4, 126, 129,
224, 234, 238 climate deniers 23–5
anthropology xv, xviii, 1, 90, 223 climate model 26
architectural design 5, 12, 17, 58, 77, 106, climate science 25–7
145, 148, 151–2, 154, 158, 171, 175, climate scientist, scientists 25–6
183, 210 climate war, wars 5, 21, 32
artificial 14–15, 17, 48, 94, 104, 106, 114, climate, climates 4, 13, 16–17, 24–6, 32,
139, 162, 165, 168, 172, 194–5, 201, 39, 49, 52, 55, 94, 97, 109, 115, 126,
205 176, 183–6, 200–203, 215–16, 218–19,
assemblage, assemblages vi, x, 3, 6–7, 221
9–15, 18, 26, 39, 45, 52, 57–8, 65, 68, climatology 27
111–12, 114–15, 117, 127–9, 168, 173, co-existence 5, 12–13, 15
175–88, 192, 194–5, 197, 200–207, co-habitation 15–16, 76, 106, 132, 171,
228–9, 237 218
assemble 4, 11, 14, 27, 55, 95 collective 4–6, 11, 23, 29, 114, 122, 127–9,
assembly, assemblies 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 16, 26, 133, 224, 232–4, 237
44, 52, 55, 93, 97, 109, 118, 139, 151, common world v, vii, 3, 5, 8, 18, 21, 41–2,
154, 175–6, 184–6, 199 47, 55, 66, 93, 134, 148, 166, 175
compass 41–3, 55 embodiment vi, x, 12–13, 175–7, 191

composition, compositions 3, 8–10, 12– energy viii–ix, xix, 7–8, 10–12, 22–3, 29,
17, 19, 25, 27, 30, 40–41, 47–8, 50–51, 33–6, 51–2, 79, 81, 91, 97–9, 109,
55, 57–9, 64, 68–9, 76–7, 84, 100, 108, 116, 119, 121, 124–5, 127, 135, 141,
114, 126–7, 131–2, 136, 138, 141, 162, 148–50, 156–9, 175, 180, 186–7, 195,
175–6, 180, 214–15, 221, 225 197–202, 205, 208, 210–12, 216, 218,
compositionism 27 227, 229
compositionist 19, 31, 47, 56 entangled 6, 27, 29, 113, 124, 128, 234,
controversy, controversies xiii, 8–9, 12, 238
18–20, 24, 26–7, 32, 44–5, 47, 51, 53–6, entanglements 127
66, 76, 116–17, 128, 158, 225–6, 228, envelope xix, 5, 13, 50, 52, 55, 132–3,
238 142, 167, 176–8, 183–4, 186–8, 192,
cosmogram v, viii, 8, 19–20, 27, 79–80, 82, 194, 199–200, 202, 208, 210–11, 225
84, 91, 114, 130 equilibrium v, 7, 13, 33–7, 132, 177–8
cosmology, cosmologies 12, 79–80, 95, essentialism 6, 33
154 ethno-centrism 2
cosmopolitan 1–3, 19, 42, 126, 224 ethnography xiii, xix, 7–8, 40
cosmopolitical assemblage, assemblages evolutionary 181, 206, 208
9–11, 127 explication 12, 223–4
cosmopolitical city 8, 44
cosmopolitical design 7–8, 10–11, 13–14, façade assemblages x, 182, 186, 200,
16, 42, 45, 48, 50–52, 55, 214, 224, 228
202–3, 205–7
cosmopolitical designer 7, 17–18, 52
façade species 12, 175, 202, 206
cosmopolitical ecology 4
Fogué, Uriel vi, ix, xvi, 10, 143–4, 157, 159
cosmopolitical proposal 2, 4, 6, 20, 160
cosmopolitical question 4, 6
Gaia v, vii, 6, 17, 19, 21, 28–32
cosmopolitical solution 7, 45
global climate 25, 116, 121
cosmopolitically correct 3, 18–19
global warming 26, 32
cosmopolitics v, vii-viii, 2, 4–5, 7–12, 14,
18–20, 39–42, 45, 51, 55, 81, 113–14,
117–18, 125–6, 128, 143, 148, 159, Harrison Atelier xi, xvi–xvii, 11–12, 16, 18,
162, 175, 183, 223–4, 237–8 225, 234–5, 237
cosmos v, vii-viii, 1–5, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 19, Harrison, Ariane Lourie vi, xvii, 11, 223
28, 32, 39–43, 47–50, 55, 80, 82–4, Harrison, Seth vi, xvi, 11, 223, 232
87, 89, 114, 118, 143, 148, 150, 156, Houdart, Sophie v, xvii, 8–9, 79, 90
159, 223–5, 238 hybrid forum 9
DeLanda, Manuel v, xvi, 6–7, 33 imbroglio, imbroglios 3, 9, 16, 117, 141

delegate 10, 69, 145–6 insulation 184, 189, 192, 194–5, 197–201,
delegation 144–5 205–7, 209, 211
Deleuze, Gille xvi, 20
determinism 6, 33 Jaque, Andrés v, vii, viii, xvii, 14, 17, 57–9,
Dominguez Rubio, Fernando vi, xix, 143–4, 61–7, 69–70, 72–7
159
Dona Haraway 3, 7, 19, 39, 56 Kropp, Cordula v, xvii, 9–10, 113–14,
116–17, 124, 128–9
earthlings 28
ecological crisis 3, 6, 11–12, 21, 25, 176 Large Hadron Collider v, viii, 8, 79, 90
ecology, ecologies x, 4, 8, 10, 13–17, 19, Latour, Bruno v, xviii, 2–4, 6, 10, 14, 16,
21, 45, 48–9, 56, 97, 113–14, 116, 19–20, 21, 26, 27, 32, 40–42, 53, 55–6,
124–5, 127–30, 138, 141, 159, 165, 114, 117, 124, 127–9, 139, 144–6,
167–8, 171–4, 176–81, 205, 224–5, 238 158, 160, 177, 209, 213, 224, 229,
ecologize 4, 19 232, 238
index 241
LHC 8–9, 79–85, 88–90 Rahm, Philippe vi, xi, xviii, 14–18, 213–21
Lovelock, James 28–9, 32 re-enact 12, 68, 82
representation, representations 1, 12–13,
mapping controversies xiii, 20, 26–7, 32, 17, 23, 31, 80, 116–17, 133, 144, 162,
53, 55–6, 225, 238 176, 178–9
material embodiment 12, 176 river landscaping v, viii, ix, 9–10, 113,
meteorological xviii, 16, 39, 215 117–18, 123–5, 128–9
Mies van der Rohe xvii, 57, 178, 180–81 river restoration 9–10, 115–17
modernism 40–41, 43, 180, 195, 198, 210
modernity v, viii, xvii–xviii, 9, 109, 113, Science Studies xvii–xviii, 6, 25, 40, 53,
118, 120, 123–4, 128–9 90, 129, 160
modernization 4, 45, 119, 123 second modernity 9, 118, 123, 128–9
modernize 4, 19, 147
multi-naturalism 2 Sloterdijk, Peter 3, 5, 12, 15, 18–19, 28,
multiverse 2 32, 39, 52, 55–6, 129, 213, 223, 238
sphere, spheres 5, 19, 32, 36, 39, 56, 58,
natural park 3, 15, 127 90, 116, 144, 154, 181, 213
non-human 4–5, 7–9, 11, 13, 15–17, Stengers, Isabelle 2–4, 6, 16–17, 20, 33,
40, 42, 55, 114, 116, 122–4, 127–9, 36–7, 41–2, 56, 81–2, 89, 91, 93, 148,
131–2, 134, 139, 141, 176, 178, 213, 154, 160, 175, 223–6, 228, 231, 232,
215, 218, 223–5 238
non-linear v, xvi, 33–6, 82, 226 sub-political 10, 144–6, 159
sustainability 11, 18, 58, 126–8, 156–8,
ontology 180 203–4, 215–16, 218, 225
sustainable development xviii, 52
particle physics 8, 79
performance, performances xi, xvi–xvii, third modernity v, viii, 9, 113, 118, 124
12–13, 17–18, 51, 57–8, 76, 79–80,
136, 142, 167, 173, 176–80, 187–8, urban river viii, 9, 113–17, 124, 126–7,
192, 201, 203, 206, 210, 223–5, 227–38 129
physiological xviii–xix, 213–14, 219
pluralism 17, 41, 55, 127 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2, 20
political body 14, 27
political ecology 4, 129–30 watertight x, 13, 181, 187–9, 191–2
political arts 31–2
post-human xvii, 22, 238 Yaneva, Albena v, xiii, 1, 8, 20, 27, 32,
post-humanist 11 53, 54, 56–9, 66, 69, 76–7, 90–91, 93,
post-natural 22, 28, 30, 104, 106 95–6, 100, 106, 117, 127, 131–2, 134,
pragma 4 138, 139, 161–2, 166–7, 171, 177,
pragmatism 77, 192 209, 211, 213–14, 216, 218, 225, 228,
pragmatist xiii, 41, 56, 91, 211 238
Prigogine, Ilya 6, 33, 36–7
Zaera-Polo, Alejandro vi, x, xiii, xv, 12–13,
quasi-objects 4 175, 177, 182, 211

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What Is Cosmopolitical Design?

Design, Nature and the Built Environment

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 9781472452252 (hbk)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: What is Cosmopolitical Design?  1

1 Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts

2 Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics  33

3 Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” – From Cosmos to Urban Life  39

4 An Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation  57

5 Low Resolution for a High (Tech) Cosmogram: How to Handle

6 An Interview with Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda,

7 River Landscaping in Third Modernity: Remaking Cosmopolitics

8 An Interview with David Benjamin, The Living  131

9 Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design  143

10 An Interview with Eva Castro, Plasma Studio and Groundlab  161

11 Façades: Material Assemblages and Literal Embodiments  175

12 An Interview with Philippe Rahm, Philippe Rahm architectes  213

13 Why Cosmopolitical Design is Performed  223

1 Waiting for Gaia: Composing the 3.8 A controversial project: 42 “high

5 Low Resolution for a High (Tech) 7 River Landscaping in Third

7.3 Educational work on behalf of public 9.3 Device indicating domestic energy

8.7 “Mussel Choir” close up. © The Living.

10.8 “Ground Ecologies,” Jiading, 11.6 Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain,

11.4 A landscape of Kalzip used on an 11.13 Left, Parkroyal on Pickering,

12 An Interview with Philippe Rahm, 13.2 Performance of Anchises at

12.1 “Hormonorium,” the Swiss Pavilion

12.7 Jade Eco Park, Taichung, Taiwan,

13 Why Cosmopolitical Design is

Albena Yaneva is Professor in Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester,

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is Professor of Architecture, and principal of AZPAML

Jeffrey Anderson is an architectural designer and researcher, with an MARCH 2

Eva Castro is the Director of Groundlab and Plasma Studio, Beijing–London.

Universidad Central de Venezuela and subsequently completed the AA Graduate

Manuel DeLanda is an artist and philosopher. He is on the faculty and a Professor

Seth Harrison is an entrepreneur in biotechnology and culture, and co-founder

Ariane Lourie Harrison is an architect, educator, and co-founder of Harrison Atelier.

Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific

Cordula Kropp is a Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Applied

Philippe Rahm is an architect and principal of Philippe Rahm architects, based

Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the

The Cosmopolitical Question

In recent years we have witnessed an interesting and highly debated renaissance

While ethnocentric social scientists have engaged in the intellectual undertaking

Citizens of the world may be cosmopolitan, global, and tolerant to different

a political interpretation to genes. In other words, adding a layer of symbols and

Cosmopolitics in Architectural Design

Structure of the book

What does it mean to be morally responsible in the time of the Anthropocene,

In this anthropological account the collider appears as a technical or natural

To collectively experiment with cosmopolitical assemblages, building urban

The democratic challenges consist in developing governance procedures that

materials constituting the cosmos of the political. It is cosmopolitical also because

Modes of Cosmopolitical Design

that challenge the traditional geometrical composition of symmetry, harmony,

Instead of building a fence to conceal the highly controversial building site of

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: What is Cosmopolitical Design? 1

2 Nonlinear Causality and Far From Equilibrium Dynamics 33

3 Cosmopolitics: “To Become Within” – From Cosmos to Urban Life 39

4 An Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation 57

8 An Interview with David Benjamin, The Living 131

9 Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design 143

10 An Interview with Eva Castro, Plasma Studio and Groundlab 161

11 Façades: Material Assemblages and Literal Embodiments 175

12 An Interview with Philippe Rahm, Philippe Rahm architectes 213

13 Why Cosmopolitical Design is Performed 223

End of 2011 Run