Urban Scotoecologies II

There is something positive about it. While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is ‘filled’, it touches the individual directly…

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny2

Darkness this good was hard to come by, and so much darkness in one place lit up the sky.

Richard Powers, Bewilderment3

Urban Scotoecologies is born out of the necessity and the will to study the possibilities and impact of darkness in the daytime city. The neologism Scotoecology3 derives from Scotobiology , the branch of biology dedicated to the study of living organisms in darkness and the biological need for periods of darkness. We extend this notion not only to living organisms but also to inert matter, thus allowing architecture to play an active role in the chain of metabolic exchanges. When the lights are off, environments, including all entities/actors/specimens etc., confuse and interact.

A series of case studies, developed in the first half of this year-long design studio, gave us first insights into a complex phenomenon: darkness as a medium and design tool. Partial aspects and activities of life in a city, like production, transportation, dwelling, recreation, healing, cultivation and socializing, were individually situated and tested in dark situations generated during daytime.

In most cases, it turned out that architecture imploded, and what was thought of and perceived a priori as negative space - because of its darkness - contracted and transformed into boundary-less interior spaces. Not because of infiniteness, but because of the merging of the subjects with their immediate environment.

Darkness has shown itself to be of a less mouldable and malleable nature than light. It has neither a source nor a surface for projection. It won’t be absorbed, and it won’t be emitted. Darkness is neither fluid nor static. It is easier to perceive than to grasp. In darkness, sharp edges become blunt, space is diluted and expands or contracts, our senses sharpen. Temperature descends.

In this regard, darkness has become a twofold program for our studio and research: on the one hand, it is our object of study, and on the other, a speculative design tool to generate and implement Urban Scotoecologies - ecologies whose aim is to explore new ways of dealing with overheated cities. Whether the city is partially submerged in darkness only during the night, tempered by many illumination sources and light pollution, or darkness only dwells in the city’s underground constructions and infrastructures, with the upcoming second part of our Scotostudio, we will pursue questions of how to live together in darkness in broad daylight.

Luciano Parodi Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri Series, Plate XIV. Etching on white laid paper, 1745

14.00–18.00

With light, we know, comes darkness.

Lebbeus Woods, The Light, the Dark Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi

7 ESC

ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE

You have heard the stories. Stories of rising waters, of crumbling towers in intertidal zones that have advanced from former seashores into the midtowns of capitals of once unlimited prospects4. Stories of heavily falling waters that can no longer be swallowed by relentlessly exploited grounds. Stories about airborne toxic events that not only tell us about the impact of consumer culture and fear of death on the forms of social cohabitation in Western technological civilizations, but satirically depict the function of academia in the skidding course of the world5. Further, stories of silent springs6, of practices of vast deforestation for centuries7, of the inconceivable extent of desertification not only in the Global South; reports of a recent major tornado in the Czech-Austrian borderlands, etc.

For many, the regular occurrence of such phenomena, caused by environmental imbalances on a vast scale, seems to be becoming the new normal. In contrast, for millions of terrestrials such a reality is not so new at all. The resultant increase in environmental migration will unavoidably lead to super-densified urban areas also in the Global North. And yet, there is hardly any sign that architectural practice and planning is willing to establish an urgently needed new relationship with drastically changed environmental conditions and alternative forms of living together.

Out of the 18,716 residential buildings that were newly erected in Austria in 2020, 15,964 (or 85.3%) contain only one or two apartments8 . In Switzerland, out of the 1.77 million residential buildings counted at the end of 2020, more than a million were single-family houses – 47% of which were inhabited by only one or two persons9 . These numbers bear witness to pure ignorance and cynicism, and to a general will to prolong the destructive current epoch of frivolity.

We call for a radically new and different approach to building design10 through a proposal for Vienna’s deepest, most populated, most dense, most diverse, and most vibrant future urban area, where the dark is also the new light.

Hannes Stiefel

1 See also the first introduction to ESC’s annual theme: Urban Scotoecologies, IKA Preview Winter 2021, ESC MArch Design Studio Winter 2021/22, pp. 12-13 2 Vidler (The Architectural Uncanny, MIT, London 1992, p. 175) is quoting Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. 3 The term Scotobiology was coined by Roger Grafton Shelford Bidwell, a botanist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 2003. 4 See e.g. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140, Orbit, London 2017 5 See e.g. Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking Press, New York NY 1985 6 See e.g. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA 1962 7 See e.g. Annie Proulx, Barkskins, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York NY 2016 8 Source: Statistics Austria 9 Source: Swiss Confederation, Federal Statistical Office 10 Frederick Kiesler, On Correalism and Biotechnique – Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design, in: Architectural Record, 86/3, September 1939