Paradigms of the Post Natural

from Architecture Portfolio 2023

by Charlotte Bascombe

The Agricultural Shed; Redefined

Critiquing Environmental Destruction

06 2022 / Academic

Architectural Thesis Prep

Advisors:

Jean Francois Bedard

Britt Eversole

Julie Larsen

In Collaboration With:

Andrea De Haro

Within the anthropocene we have commodified everything from natural resources to organisms for our own pleasure and success. It is within this tendency to control and manipulate that we begin to critique humans’ aesthetic relationship with the environment. This thesis seeks to exemplify the aesthetic value inherent within these newly defined environments Colomina and Wigley, Authors of “Are We Human”, make it evident that ‘The human is permanently suspended between being the cause and the effect, between designing living systems and being designed by them.’ Emphasizing the anthropocene is in fact a system that we designed but we are also designed by. Nature is a source for human consumption, and as such it has developed into a commodity. By now it should be made evident that humanity’s presence is everywhere, there is no ecosystem left unturned by human manipulation. We use artificial intelligence to begin generating the unimaginable environments that destruction could cause. By using text to-image AI generators, specifically mid journey, we begin to design what these radically transformed environments can be perceived as.

We begin to understand the interrelationships between human beings, animals and the environment. Species are being radically altered in their biology to inhabit and co-live within these extreme ecological conditions. Deforested sites of oil fracking leave mile long toxic ponds highlighting the destructive pursuits that capitalism creates. Chernobyl showcases how human errors in design can lead to catastrophic changes to an ecosystem, changing the way animals and humans inhabit these spaces for decades to come. Monocultures and factory farms exploit nature, and with technological advancements, have taken over, creating a loss of biodiversity that upsets the ecological balance. This exploitation is also evident within our treatment of the non-human, going so far as to design animals for human pleasure and economic gain.