Urban Scotoecologies

Darkness is not shadow. Shadow is cast. Darkness is not black. Black absorbs light. Darkness is a change of state. We stop seeing and start sensing. We cease to perceive light. We cease to perceive with our eyes, but perceive with all other senses. – it’s much harder to shoot someone when it’s completely dark! In the Twilight Hour. To define darkness beyond the semantics of An Interview with Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Snøhetta, by Rob Wilson. In: Uncube 29. negation, of lack of light, When our vision is comprowe need to think outside a deeprooted cultural tradition of seeing light as a source of benefit. Light is good – darkness is bad. mised, our imaginations run wild and we become more aware of things that cannot be seen directly, merely sensed. Light is safe – darkness is dangerous. The onset Sigri Sandberg, An Ode to Darkness of climate change and the subsequent overheating of our environment compel us to reconsider the positive connotation of light and daylight. It goes without saying that for human life, a lack of sunlight would possibly cause our bodies to deteriorate (although it wouldn’t kill us). It’s not about that. It’s about recalibrating the way we live in sunlight. And most probably, it’s not even about sunlight, but about reduction of heat. Darkness is a necessary source of regeneration for our bodies and for the planet. Darkness is also a medium in which we can establish an exchange with other entities (alive or not) on a basis beyond visual perception. What, therefore, is the nature of darkness?1 What is the ecological function of darkness? How can architecture benefit from it? With these questions in mind, we postulate that in darkness may lie an opportunity to reinvent our built environment, and a rich source for speculation about postgood weather societies. In darkness, entities radiate heat and cool down. In darkness, visibility blurs but sensitivity sharpens. Luciano Parodi

14.00–18.00

Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi

13 ESC

ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE

The work of astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, caught my attention when I heard that he had suggested looking for urban lights on the night side of Proxima b, an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Proxima b and c are the closest known exoplanets to the solar system, only about four light years away from Earth. ‘Night is also a sun’, and the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only

On his mission to true myth. establish a space archaeology, Loeb and his team are working on the technology for Georges Bataille: The Absence of Myth, in André Breton, Marcel Duchamp: Le Surréalisme en 1947, Maeght, Paris 1947 (translated from English by Michael Richardson). By ‘Night is also a sun,’ Bataille a lightweight sail and is quoting Friedrich Nietzsche (Also sprach Zarathustra, a very powerful laser vol. 4, Leipzig 1891). that would allow an ultrafast, lightdriven spacecraft consisting of the sail (weighing about one gram) and its payload (camera, navigation and communication devices – weighing about another gram) to travel outside the Earth’s atmosphere at onefifth the speed of light. Proxima b would thus be reached within 20 years2 .

We know that Proxima b is tidally bound to its star, so there is a temperature contrast between its day side, which constantly faces the star, and its permanently dark side. “If a civilization existed there,” Prof. Loeb conjectures, “it might potentially transfer electricity generated by photovoltaics from the day side to the night side”.3 – Is it maybe just too hot to settle on the sunny side? Terrestrial building code regulations on the direct incidence of natural light are among the most powerful and decisive instruments shaping our cities – the ‘right to light’ has seemed sacrosanct in European cities since modernism. And yet, it might be worth considering the ecological function of darkness in architecture and planning in times of the new climatic regime. A regime that will inevitably lead us towards another architecture, towards new, surely surprising forms of cities. Current conditions in the world require us to go beyond established thresholds. Avi Loeb’s breach of a taboo – the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and civilizations, existing or extinct – has been met with deep scepticism in the field of astrophysics, while he asserts that if we are unprepared to find exceptional things, we never will. This is true everywhere, and even more so in the dark.

Hannes Stiefel

1 The phenomenon of darkness and its positive impact on an overheated city was first introduced on the ESC Platform as a consequence of the research design project Raumpark Wien (201920), an as yet speculative design and planning proposal for an ecological megastructure spanning the city of Vienna as a response to climate change.