Histories of Ecological Design

HISTORIES of ECOLOGICAL DESIGN AN UNFINISHED CYCLOPEDIA Lydia Kallipoliti With the research assistance of Foivos Geralis Illustrations by Youngbin Shin

To Tony Vidler (1941-2023) my own cyclopedia a giant of life and its intellect

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PREFACE

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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NATURALISM

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(circa 1866-World War II): Searching for “Roots”

TAXONOMISTS EVOLUTIONISTS IMMERSIONISTS BIOFUNCTIONALISTS HOME ECONOMISTS ACCLIMATIZERS

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SYNTHETIC NATURALISM

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(circa 1966-2000): Searching for “Systems”

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WORLD PLANNERS OUTLAWS GARBAGE ARCHITECTS AUTONOMISTS CLIMATICISTS URBAN ACTIVISTS

DARK NATURALISM

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SUBNATURALISTS PLANETARIANS NON-HUMANS RESILIENTS LAND NARRATORS LIVING FABRICATORS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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PREFACE

For a long time, I believed that writing an encyclopedia (of any kind) was a dubious task. Dubious, because the idea of encircling knowledge and circumscribing it into a comprehensive scheme implies the supremacy of the human, which has dominated the traditions and dispositions of the Western world. The word “encyclopedia” grew out of the Greek phrase εγκύκλιος παιδεία, which can be literally translated as “well-rounded knowledge,” and is etymologically derived from the words εν+κύκλος [in+circle], that is, inscribed within a circle, and παιδεία, meaning knowledge, education, or learning. Analogous in principle, ecology has come to represent encirclement, circular reasoning, and a sense of totality based on the interconnectedness of all things. Since 1866, when Ernst Haeckel defined it as an integral link between living organisms and their surroundings, ecology has evoked the idea of holism and well-

The encirclement of knowledge, in the case of the encyclopedia, and organic life, in that of ecology, is nowhere more visually evident than in the enclosed figure of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which has long subjugated perceptions of beauty, balance, and harmony. The well-shaped male body with its center at the navel (omphalos) implies a system that is complete and thus enclosed; there is no need to add anything to it, or even the possibility of doing so. According to Vitruvius, the parts of the body relate to each other in ratios consisting of whole numbers; thus, every line designates a determined interrelationship that results in perfect balance. “The body appears as a relatively stable structure in the context of reality as a whole (cosmos).”2 We can also

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being, “a comforting roundedness, where nature becomes a universe governed by a rounded structure.”1

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think of geometry as an effort to normalize the body and as a primary prosthetic that inaugurates its identification, directing desire to recognizable social norms that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as the law.3 Encirclement grants a predetermined image to the body, one that guarantees totality; the body—as well as architecture and nature—is enclosed in a realm of canons that it cannot eschew.

Consequently, the desire for aberration or deviation is framed.

In many ways, encirclement is a mental and political construct that allows all things deemed to be known to be incorporated into controllable and determined worldviews. But the circle is not a given figure on which power acts. The very task of political action is to encircle and transform knowledge, organic life, and bodies into sovereign entities and instrumentalize them as modes of discourse and hegemonic power structures.

We must recognize from the outset that any history of ecological design is entrenched in—if not equivalent to—the exploitation and brutalization of nature enabled by capitalism and its vicious logistics, as well as the logic of human supremacy over the earth and its forces. Most importantly, all the histories outlined in this book reflect, in one way or another, hierarchical modalities of domination, ones bent on controlling knowledge and shaping the physical and material world into ontological and scientific worldviews. Architects, designers, and thinkers have long been complicit in the hubris of the position that we (humans) are the caretakers of the planet and that “I” (the self as a distinct individual entity) possess a sublime power to analyze the world, devise hierarchies, and construct

ideological cosmologies that become norms. As the Ukrainian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky noted in the 1920s during his lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris, if an organism is studied as something quite distinct from the cosmic milieu, then it is not as a natural body, as it is, but as a pure product of thought and ideology.4 But ecology is not one thing. Like water, which exists in various material states and whose power can both instill and destroy life, ecology (and consequently ecological design) comprises a universe of fragmented worldviews and their constellations. It is a cloud of stories about human and nonhuman agencies and the ways in which these encounter the earth, correlate with its parts, nurture it, or are nurtured by it.

Ecology is enveloped by ghosts and ideas of what the world should be: engineered fantasies of the interconnectedness of all things, circular reasoning, and the idealization of the natural. In today's world of climate crisis, environmental inequality, and pervasive toxicity, however, such fantasies amount to nothing more than the crumbling ruins of a world, now lost, but once regarded as whole and encircled. Despite that, these ghosts still charge the present, sometimes haunting the ways in which environmental policies are formulated, sometimes manifesting themselves in bureaucratic mechanisms and regulations that govern how we design and build.

Within the context of this book, the long and varied history of ecological design is positioned unapologetically in the plural, as a series of histories that form a matrix of open associations between diverse narratives. If ecological design is a kind

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Tony (Anthony) Vidler—my mentor, colleague, beloved friend, and inimitable force of life—is the main reason why I wrote this unfinished cyclopedia. As a living encyclopedia, his voice has always been in my head. It started even before we met.

His books and texts have inspired me and guided me towards theory, during the time that I was studying building technology at MIT. In our weekly dinners and long conversations, he persuaded me over the last years to write an environmental encyclopedia, even though I resisted and conceived it as a giant act of chronic constipation. Tony felt this struggle in a visceral way and his partially British impulse to “carry on,” and produce an enormous body of work in his life, was coming from the understanding that parthenogenesis—the state of the mind generating pure ideas, unprecedented and unmixed with anything in the physical world—is a fallen myth. Even Tony, whose

sheer brilliance connected so many dots, relied on the ethic of work and the labor of writing, that to him was a primordial need, a proof of life and an inevitability.

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From Tony, I also learned that the line between the past, present and future is an illusion. As a historian and a voracious researcher, whose mind was enlivened by curiosity, he saw the future within fragments of the past and the past within forecasts of the future. Learning from him and thinking with him, as a historian, I began to think of time as a mixture of past, future, and present stretched in spatiotemporal dimensions. In this sense, I did not necessarily view historical precedents as information to help us and educate us in the present but as a living body of ideas imagined beyond the present of their time. The various chapters and periods of this book do not speak to a benevolent pluralism, but rather,

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accumulate parts of reality and assemble them into a fictitious, broken collection that reflects our flawed nature as we encounter and conceptualize the natural world.

Tony shaped me and my life as an architect and a thinker. I owe him a debt that can never be repaid. But like me, he shaped so many others. Most importantly, he shaped the field of architectural discourse and the world of ideas itself. And yet, he maintained an unwavering optimism in life and in the power of architecture to influence livelihood. My loss, however gutting, is collective; a void that cannot be filled by another soul. It is hard to go to work at Cooper these days; I expect to see him on every corner with his Leica camera and penetrating eyes. His voice is everywhere throughout the pages of this book.

Goodbye my friend. I will always seek your voice.

It took a long time to assemble the pieces of this book and I would first like to thank Ricardo Devesa, editor-in-chief at Actar Publishers, for waiting and not casting doubts on my intentions despite the undeniably long gestation of the book. Its contents are based on those of my 2018 essay, “The History of Ecological Design,” which was published online by the Oxford English Encyclopedia for Environmental Science. While the text was revised for the current publication, the anonymous editors and peer-reviewers of Oxford gave me invaluable, productive, and insightful feedback. I owe enormous amounts of gratitude to these academics, whoever they are, for engaging so deeply in the content

without accreditation. I would also like to acknowledge the help of Emily Klein, my brilliant undergraduate student, teaching, and research assistant at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute during my tenure there between 2015 and 2019. Emily and I started working together on the first version of the online essay for Oxford. I will never forget her quiet force, determination, and sheer radiance.

In developing further the contents of the Oxford essay, I worked with Foivos Geralis, who was my graduate student and research assistant at the Cooper Union. I took a special interest in Foivos because he comes from my hometown, school, and university in Greece. But disregarding my partiality, I know that Foivos’ contribution to this book was vital. He found additional sources for each inquiry, unearthed unknown references, and most importantly, urged me to engage seriously with the question of decolonization in environmental history, a topic that demands more study.

In addition to Foivos, I worked with the Korean architect and illustrator Youngbin Shin, who gave visual character and life to each of the eighteen chapters in this book. Youngbin and I spent innumerable hours zooming between London and New York to create these drawings, all based on iconic representations of each period and tweaked to visually capture the spirit of the chapters’ protagonists. Were it not for Youngbin’s inimitable talent, dedication, and unbroken spirit, the visual identity of the various groups outlined in the book would not have come to life.

Likewise, it was pure joy to collaborate with Stergios Galikas, the graphic designer, at Post-Spectacular Office. I owe him (and

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INTRODUCTION

The term “ecological design” was coined in a 1996 book by Sim van der Ryn and Stewart Cowan, where the authors argued for a seamless integration of human activities with natural processes in fields including architecture, industrial ecology, sustainable agriculture, and water treatment; they pointed out the inherent flaws in design and production methods, which are normatively out of synchrony with the rhythms and cycles of the natural world. Ecological design, they wrote, is “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes.”10 The realization that any designed product, space or environment has an expansive presence in the world, beyond its status as an object in materialized form, is significant as it projects and extends that presence to larger environmental forces and the nexus of global flows.

Following their cautionary call, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published their 2002 manifesto From Cradle to Cradle, which proposed replacing the linear logic of “Cradle to Grave” with a circular political economy.11 Both these books have been foundational to discussions on sustainability in architecture and design, and in establishing the technical dimension, as well as the logic of efficiency, optimization, and evolutionary competition in environmental debates. Cradle to Cradle evolved into a production model that was implemented by a number of companies, organizations, and governments around the world, and has also become a registered trademark and form of product certification.

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These developments, nonetheless, imply a very short history for the growing field of ecological design. Their accounts are as longstanding as Ernst Haeckel’s 1866

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definition of “ecology” as the integral link between living organisms and their surroundings;12 or Henry David Thoreau’s famous manual for self-reliance and living in proximity to nature which he wrote from the cabin he built in Walden Pond, Massachusetts.13 The neologism “ecological design” emerged in the late 1960s, when the widely publicized image of the whole earth rose to cultural prominence. Several publications at the time portrayed our planet as a finite system with limited resources, projecting the effects of micro-actions on the macro-dynamics of the planet. In many respects, ecological design marked the rise of modern environmentalism in the post-World War II era, one manifest in social activism sparked by the prognosis of a dire future, and in viewing design as a remedial tool. By contrast, any active mobilization of design as a means to an end was decidedly absent from the first environmental era at the turn of the twentieth century, which promoted the fresh spirit of wilderness and the preservation of unindustrialized lands.

After World War II, the call for ecological design to fit harmoniously in the natural world gave way to a form of “synthetic naturalism,” wherein the laws of nature and metabolism were displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities, buildings, and objects.14 As awareness of planetary disruptions increased, ecological design came to signify not only the integration of the designed object or space into the natural world, but also the reproduction of the natural world in design principles and tools through technological mediation.

The idea of architecture and design reproducing nature ran parallel to what Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg, among others, referred to as “world planning,” that is, understanding ecological design as the design of the planet itself, as much as that of the design of an object, building or territory. Unlike van der Ryn and Cowan’s arguments, which demonstrated a deep appreciation of nature’s equilibrium, ecological design could, in fact, commence with the synthetic replication of natural systems.

The turn of the twenty-first century marked a new era in environmental debates, one ostensibly discernible in the eradication of what had earlier been regarded as “natural” and as the naturalization of a perpetual climate crisis and a widespread toxicity residing not only in the planet itself, but also within human and nonhuman bodies. As Jacques Derrida argued for the evolution of language and culture,15 which are not given but instead constructed through historical and social processes, these developments of severe environmental degradation are canonically seen as natural and inevitable. They are naturalized as the default mechanism of the evolution of technological and cultural advancements. This distortion of the problem at stake is why critical discourses in ecological design are vital to the reform and rebuilding of renewed alliances and hierarchies. French architectural critic and curator Frédéric Migayrou argues that the very term “ecological design” infers the loss of all things natural, stating that “ecology as a science is based on the negation of all things natural… This marks the end of nature as an indeterminate field of its own.”16

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NATURA

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PART [ I ] INTRODUCTION

The first period from approximately the nineteenth century until the end of World War II is tentatively described as “searching for roots.” The search is both visual, as testified by the assiduous documentation of plants and trees, along with their usage as genealogical systems, but also experiential, as seen in the long journeys taken by natural scientists to unearth the roots of the world’s living stock. The sustenance of wilderness is of key significance to this period, which regards the natural setting as a distinct “other,” beyond the practice of everyday life. Naturalism is also evident in the spirit of exploration in the open field, as well as in the intensification of ideas on the interconnectedness and immersion of humans with nature, expressed either in material terms, as in the case of Ernst Haeckel, or existential ones, as in the case of Henry David Thoreau.

The starting point for this period lies in the coinage of the term “ecology” (oekologie) by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who first used it to signify the “relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment” in his General Morphology of Organisms (1866).1 The word oekologie derives from the Greek oikos, meaning “household,” “home,” or “place of dwelling.” Haeckel’s ecology is therefore a study of the relationship between living organisms and the biotic and abiotic environment that they inhabit. Various definitions and reinterpretations of Haeckel’s ecology have been proposed since that time, most notably in Herbert Andrewartha and Louis Charles Birch’s 1954 book and later addendum,2 in which they consider the distribution and abundance of organisms, the ways in which the environment influences animals’ chance of survival and the form

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EVOLUTIONISTS

Charles Darwin’s Theory of Descent of 185936 was enormously influential on the development of environmental theories at the turn of the twentieth century. Its impact was deeply felt not only by naturalists and biologists, but also by architects, designers, and planners, who transplanted the concept of biological evolution directly to formal principles and social structures.

Based on his study of morphology, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in particular, argued in On Growth and Form37 (1917) that the forms of plants and animals could be analyzed with inordinate precision via geometry. [ FIGURE I.9 ]

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Transformation of Argyropelecus olfersi into Sternoptyx diaphana. Scottish Biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson analyzed the shapes, forms, and scales of animals and plants in On Growth and Form (1917), bringing mathematical measure and grids to the study of biology.

Visual documentations of growth and physical processes, that is, studies of evolving morphology, were of considerable relevance to artists and designers throughout the twentieth century.

Memorably, On Growth and Form served as the premise of a homonymous exhibition at

the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and was meant to accompany the Festival of Britain of 1951. [ FIGURE I.10 ]

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American Transcendentalist writers and philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller began articulating a national identity in their literature on the country’s natural landscape, which was later bolstered by accounts of untainted wilderness by those who visited, documented, and settled the West. The transcendentalists saw a direct link between divine spirituality and the awe-inspiring, scenic views and wonders of nature that came to be known in the East from the tales spread by travelers.

In addition to inspiring reverence for the sanctity of nature, the Transcendentalists alerted the American conscience to the ongoing harm wrought by human activity on the natural world. Thoreau, in particular, claimed that greater meaning could be found in experience alongside nature, and that humans live their best lives, either as individuals or in society, when cognizant of the values of wilderness.

The works of these Transcendentalists laid the grounds for the preservation movement and sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism. Indeed, many critics today believe that Thoreau’s Walden, published in 185456 as a report of his nearly decade-long stay and experiment in transcendental pastoralism near Walden Pond, marked the beginning of ecological awareness. [ FIGURE I.16 ] According to historian Leo Marx, Thoreau took to heart what Emerson called the “method of nature,” and, in his writings, adopted the tone of a hard-headed empiricist,57 describing life as it actually occurred. His reports not only of idyllic landscapes, but also of negative experiences, allegedly brought him, the subject, closer to nature, a concept that, according to Marx, lay at the psychic root of American pastoralismboth genuine and spurious.

The spirit of this raw intensity and investment in the sublime natural setting

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HOME ECONOMISTS

Twenty-six years after Ernst Haeckel coined the term oekologie in the Morphology of Organisms,96 Ellen Swallow Richards, a sanitary chemist and the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), contacted Haeckel to request his permission to use the term with an amended meaning. Although its etymology included oikos (οίκος), Greek for house, Haeckel used it metaphorically to denote nature’s household, a concept that originated in the German Naturhaushalt.97 Haeckel’s focus did not fall literally on the house as a domestic environment, but on the relations among animals (humans included) and their inorganic or organic environments. Swallow Richards, by contrast, was interested in the health of the house as a concept that extended to the health of the world at large.

Inclined to the natural sciences, Swallow Richards concentrated on sanitation and

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sewage systems, clean water, and nutritious food, as well as efficient kitchen design, such as that of the Rumford Kitchen that she exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. [ FIGURE I.28 ] She proposed that oekologie replace “Home Economics,” a term officially endorsed at the 1899 Lake Placid Conferences and by the American Home Economics Association, of which she had been chair for the first two years of its existence.

For Swallow Richards, oekologie was to be understood quite literally, as a tool for combating ill health based on the principles of environmental science and home management. She believed that the world “should be kept up like any housewife should keep her home.”98 Her initiative to promote “home economics” as a legitimate branch of environmental science was also a way of validating higher education for women.99

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ACCLIMATIZERS

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The history of Western colonialism as a voyage of violence and domination over indigenous territories and bodies has been widely explored.138 This section will examine one means of inflicting violence that manifests itself in the Western world’s control and engineering of newly discovered environments. The West’s encounter with vegetal and animal species unknown to it, as well as the fertile lands that fostered them, generated many theories on exploitation and made these territories prey to extraction and reformation. It was at this moment, too, that the notion of “acclimatization” became central to European Imperialism and its colonial enterprise, so much so, that the French botanist Auguste Hardy, director of the Botanical Garden in Algiers, declared in 1869 that “the whole of colonization is a vast deed of acclimatization.”139

Essentially defined as an adaptive process through which problems arising from entry into a new environment are managed, acclimatization in drastically different biomes and cultures involved land reformation, propagation, and the transglobal transference of Western plants, animals, and seeds with the aim of taming uncharted climates and avoiding the possible threat of degeneration to incoming populations. The effort to acclimatize species to new environments altered these environments as well, allowing them to better accommodate incoming species in the first systematic attempts in geoengineering and environmental design. Acclimatization was thus a major force in the intentional “curation” of environments for what was perceived as the improvement of human society through the enhancement of economic production and the exchange of capital. As anthropologist Henrika Kuklick points out,

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PART [ II ] INTRODUCTION

The second period, which runs approximately from the end of World War II to the turn of the century is tentatively called the “period of the system,” wherein the term “system” refers to ecological design as the planned redistribution of global resources. The post-WWII decades saw the rise of the modern environmental era, distinctly different from that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its rallies for preserving the fresh spirit of wilderness. In the 1960s and 1970s, ecologists appropriated the prevalent social and political discourse that envisioned a closed and ill-managed, planet heading towards evolutionary bankruptcy, while arguing that modern science offered the most faithful account of civilizational values. With mounting alerts of worldwide pollution levels, the implosion of cities and the physical downfalls of economic growth, such as the production of excessive waste

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flows, environmentalism displayed a sense of social activism that called for the vigilant redeployment of the planet’s environmental capital. Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg played a seminal role in promoting this line of thought by explaining ecosystems through parallels between the earth and human processes.1 The era began with the highly publicized image of the whole earth. Anticipated throughout the 1960s, it was finally captured in the famous Earthrise series shot during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. [ FIGURE II.1 ] This collective mirroring of mankind, circumscribed in the finite space of the earth, accentuated the convergence of ecology and cybernetics.

The material reality of the earth called for the mobilization of crossdisciplinary tools for the purpose of global information and systems control.

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In the 1960s, in the context of the Vietnam War and the unsettling atmosphere caused by rising pollution levels worldwide, “dropping out” of cities was a survival mechanism for thousands of young intellectuals in the US following Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn on, Tune in and Drop out.” Many took Leary’s advice to heart, rejecting the establishment of the political scene and translating quite literally his call to abandon urban life by establishing alternative living communities in remote areas. As Buckminster Fuller observed, a culture’s creativity requires outlaw areas,23 that is, settlements in marginal geographical areas with cheap and abundant land that can offer new economic and political paradigms. This turn away from the city was due in part to the American Baby Boom of the 1960s and was accentuated by complex sociopolitical predicaments that marked

One of the most notable examples of alternative living communities was Drop City, a community of geodesic domes made out of car parts, founded in 1965 in Trinidad, Colorado. [ FIGURE II.8 ] It was one of several self-sustaining communes established in the Southwest that detached itself from urban networks with the aim to recycle its waste, produce and distribute energy, and achieve a degree of autonomy while restoring equilibrium with nature. Like the other communes, Drop City was “an experiment in living”24 and functioned as a laboratory in which every effort was made to reinvent habitation and the complex interrelationships between individuals and their surrounding environment. As Stewart Brand has observed, each of these communes tried

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the city as a catastrophic environment that restrained the imagination and the freedom of the individual.

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GARBAGE ARCHITECTS

“Garbage Housing” was a pedagogical, design-built experimental movement in the 1970s to transfer the operations of nature to technological systems by reusing leftover materials from global consumption as building materials. It was mainly spearheaded by the British pioneer of “garbage architecture” Martin Pawley, whose translation of the laws of nature and metabolism was logistical and operative, rather than demonstrating a formal simulation of growth in material processes. Perceiving building as an interface of global resources, Pawley proposed that consumer byproducts be fed back into the loop of production as new building materials. With his various writings on “garbage architecture,”42 Pawley merged two predicaments of the time, the housing crisis and excessive waste flows, hoping to salvage two crises by feeding one into the other. The aspiration was that as natural systems

Pawley, an idiosyncratic, brilliantly provocative and prolific architectural critic, often contradicted himself in his diverse writings, while as confessed by his colleagues he shared a “lovehate” relationship with many of his contemporaries including Peter Cook.43 The Archigram group spoke of Pawley as obstinately resistant to his own design talent in favor of an elusive social imperative to restructure the building industry, purposefully with “unoriginal ideas.”44 On the other hand, Pawley heavily criticized the “effortless translation of technology into architecture,”45 and particularly the mindless joy and ardor

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recycle their wastes, by-products of urban environments might as well be recycled; an idea that initially sounds credible and worthy of pursuing, given that a new functional life could be attributed to material excrement.

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While autonomy as an ideational vehicle for fortifying the boundaries of

disciplinary fields was interrogated in the 1970s, it was also used to popularize an ecological and libertarian way of living and acting and to herald “autonomy” from the grid of urban supplies. In the January 1976 issue of Architectural Design, edited by Martin Spring and Haig Beck and devoted to “Autonomous Houses,” “autonomy” not only harkened back to a grass-roots mentality and a pastoral iconography,63 but also implied an existential separation of the individual from the urban fabric and ultimately from the social sphere. [ FIGURE II.17 ] After the oil crisis and a decade of environmental debates, the terms “self-sufficiency,” “self-reliance,” “life-support,” and “living autonomy” became part of a pervasive lexicon of alternative technologies that have continued to preoccupy the British avant-garde. According to its biological definition, autonomy refers to a system’s organic independence

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The use of the word “autonomy” has a twisted history in architectural production.

It is most often associated with Peter Eisenman, founder of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1960s and editor of its journal, Oppositions, who consistently argued for an inner logic exclusive to architectural thought—one so insular that it could not migrate to other disciplines or applications. As Michael Hays has argued Eisenman’s posthumanist paradigm was based on the antihumanist theories of Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss.61 This intellectual legacy helped him envisage a kind of autonomy in which “authorship can resist the authority of culture, stand against the generality of habit and the particularity of nostalgic memory, and still have a very precise intention.”62

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URBAN ACTIVISTS

When viewed through the lens of community development and urban regeneration, the history of ecological design encompasses everything from biophysical and material problems that involve natural ecosystems, to design interventions that aim at sociopolitical justice, diversity in growing communities, and the eradication of poverty, racism, and inequality. If we look at Christopher Alexander’s widely cited essay, “The City is not a Tree” of 1965,95 for instance, we can see that as urban environments after World War II grew in complexity, they came to be analyzed and celebrated as the equivalent of natural ecosystems, while the top-down planning logic spearheaded by the modern movement was increasingly deemed unnatural, sterile, and authoritarian.

From the outset, Alexander drew clear distinctions between natural and artificial cities, between those that have grown and evolved over time, versus those that were

It was in this period that the complexity of cities was increasingly studied as an analog of natural systems, not in terms of their biological and material structure, but rather in the organizational patterns of their growth. “The tree of my title is not a tree with green leaves,”97 Alexander wrote characteristically, opening his essay. Alexander also praised the well-

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designed and built at a particular moment.

As the British urbanist and geographer Peter Hall argued in Cities of Tomorrow (1988), twentieth-century debates on urban environments centered on the continual struggle between planners who wished to impose a top-down totalitarian planning logic on the populace in their belief that a better society was never designed by committee, and those who took an on-theground perspective of people’s everyday needs and desires, and wished to empower them.96

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The starting point for this period, which has been unfolding from approximately the end of the twentieth century until the present, is the contested term anthropocene, popularized in 2000 by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen but already used informally since the ‘80s by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer.1 This is a new geological era, an earth epoch in which the products of human invention and production, including the construction of buildings and cities, have unwittingly reshaped the planet’s geophysical properties. Perpetual floods, ice melts, tropical outbursts, drought, and other climatic phenomena reflect what we so often refer to as climate change or what sociologist Andrew Ross calls “strange weather.”2 If anything, the growing signs of environmental degradation that first became visible to the public eye in the late 1960s but were seen principally as problems on a local or national scale, have now escalated into an all-out global

crisis. Today the earth contains a thin layer of radioactive material over its entire circumference that has been settling there since 1945. The deposition of this layer marks a decisive geological moment, one marked by humans shaping the earth.

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We can no longer think of history as exclusively human. Anthropocene is a strange name indeed since its etymology implies the human—άνθρωπος—at the core of the stage set— σκηνή.

However, this is an oxymoron. Unlike the anthropocentric eras preceding it, this new world will not tolerate the separation of humans from non-humans. Rather it poses an asymmetrical confrontation between the human and the non-human, as the pervasion of non-human elements with human ones has become seamless, even in our own physiology. In the anthropocene, normal certainties are inverted or even dissolved.

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Within a few days of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, we all began meeting and living on Zoom.29 [ FIGURE III.10 ] Despite our isolation and anxiety, we were grateful to have Zoom.

Its windows—more operable than those of homes—offered portals into previously guarded and hidden private spheres. Daily, we witnessed inequality while crossreferencing different living conditions, yet still toasted and shared emotions with little restraint. For many, the world had turned inside. As a rite of passage to the outside, Zoom became not only a digital outlet enabled by new media, but also a means of navigating beyond the egosphere of confinement; it forced us to rethink realities across the planet and the ways in which we live together.

We not only Zoomed to communicate with others, but also zoomed inside and outside of ourselves as a daily ritual while contemplating new forms of livelihood.

In spatial terms, the daily mental journeys prompted by Zooming, which underscored a new form of planetarity, run parallel to the invisible but infinite axis vertical to the earth in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1968). [ FIGURE III.11 ] Crossing scales from the atomic to the galactic, their documentary envisaged a systemic analysis of the universe in which all patterns could be imagined as interlinked.

The Eames’s vertical journey between scales and through layers reflected the view of earth that had just become visible to the public eye.30 This crossing was

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Zooming in and out of our physical coordinates during this state of connected immobility offered us a rare opportunity for collective reflection on the fragility of our production processes, our hubris for endless growth and mobility, and finally, our accountability for how we occupy our planet.

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As a design approach, resilience emphasizes architects’ fight against climate change through the remediation of contaminated ecosystems and the re-creation of soft boundaries between dense human settlements and sparse, more rural areas. Although the term lacks clear definition, it is most commonly framed as an equitable model of governance and a means through which society can maintain its order and adapt to or manage risk.

Its main objectives are to ensure the readiness of cities, renewal of resources, and restoration of ecosystems. As a regime, resilience is not bound to any explicit design strategies. In most cases, nevertheless, it is translated into green spaces and fault-tolerant infrastructure systems, enabled by technology to absorb stormwater, remediate air pollution, and moderate extreme temperatures.

The concept of resilience was introduced in 1973 by Canadian ecologist Crawford Stanley Holling, in his paper “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.”60 Borrowing the idea from engineering-physics, Holling claimed that ecological systems were characterized by both stability and adaptability to disturbances, and defined resilience as a system’s capacity to endure and regulate change. In the late 1970s, resilience was applied as a concept in biology, where it reframed scientists’ understanding of how ecosystems function. Two types of resilience surfaced in the formation of this hypothesis: first, engineering resilience, which pertains to the amount of time it takes for the world to stabilize after a disturbance; and second, ecological resilience, which refers to the amount of disruption a system can handle without undergoing change. Holling’s substantial

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Aris Konstantinidis was a definitive force in Greek architecture throughout the twentieth century. Through his vast oeuvre, he introduced (among others) modern architecture to Greece, but with a very particular outlook. He claimed that any construction should arise from the ground like a plant, a tree, or a flower; because architecture, as he argued, was geographical and topographical, growing out of the roots of the land, just like the trees, bushes and flowers also grow from the land.81 This belief, which recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s declaration for an organic architecture, led Konstantinidis to build with indigenous materials in such a way that his structures seem to emerge seamlessly out of the rocks found on a hill [ FIGURE III.26 ]. His techniques, which have achieved mythological status in modern architectural pedagogy in Greece, were paired with another conviction for an ascetic life, translated into an ascetic

architecture. What was striking, however, was that Konstantinidis’ undeniably deep connection to the land, his espousal of primeval origins and absolute respect for

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Weekend House in Anavyssos, Greece, 1962 by Aris Konstantinidis.

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The group of architects and designers discussed in this chapter focuses on what one might loosely call biological design and fabrication. Growing from ancient alchemical practices and a genealogy of experiments on chemical computation, the ideas motivating the living fabricators lie in the blurring of boundaries between living and non-living entities as well as the aspiration to control design by animating and orchestrating inner material forces. Understanding design as a growth process of organic substances that can be steered to a projected outcome is by no means a new concept. What is different here, however, is the way in which such an enterprise has been shaped by technological instrumentation, particularly computational algorithms.

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Programming matter to perform certain tasks dates back to Nicholas Negroponte’s MIT Machine Group in the 1970s and

falls in the epistemological intersection of ecology and cybernetics. In his book Soft Architecture Machines (1975),97 Negroponte describes the computer as an “antiarchitect” in the sense that the tool (the computer) and the author (the architect) are in constant negotiation as to where the design process will lead. Slightly prior to that, Robin Evans, author of Translations from Drawing to Building, introduced in his thesis at the Architectural Association in London in 1969, “anarchitecture” or the “tectonics of non-control,”98 in which he focused on programming piezoelectric materials to respond to a city’s changing energy needs. [ FIGURE III.34 ] As energyfed structures, piezoelectric systems were for Evans strange mechanical life-forms, alarmingly lively or full of vitality, that sometimes responded to actual needs, and sometimes to random and unexpected events. His project did not aim at obedience and teleology,

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Title: Histories of Ecological Design Subtitle: An Unfinished Cyclopedia Published by Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona www.actar.com Author: Lydia Kallipoliti Research Assistants: Foivos Geralis, Emily Klein Graphic Design: Post-Spectacular Office With illustrations by: Youngbin Shin Copy editing: Irina Oryshkevich Proofreading: Angela Kay Bunning Printing and binding: Grafiques Jou, Barcelona All rights reserved © edition: Actar Publishers, editors © texts: the author © design, drawings, illustrations, and photographs: their authors This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, on all or part of the material, specifically translation rights, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or other media, and storage in databases. For use of any kind, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

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