When Bacteria Rule the World: Notes Toward a Trans-species Architecture.

mardi 28 janvier 2025
à 19:00
Conférence
Leçon du mardi
Hors les murs

Closing conference of the Monstrum cycle coordinated by Emmanuelle Raoul-Duval and Jacques-Marie Ligot, in partnership with the Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard (Paris 8e).
Registration required (see opposite).

Western architecture has always been understood in terms of the body - specifically, the athletic body of the white man, endlessly redesigned from Renaissance treatises to modern architectural manifestos, from Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier - a perfected body immersed in geometric systems of proportions - a fiction that excludes most of humanity.
Human-centered design sounds good, but it has been terrible for humans, other species and the planet. The human is not a thing but an infinitely complex, constantly evolving trans-species collaboration. Humans are just a bag of bacteria, and bacteria have been around for billions of years, while humans have arrived very recently and may already be disappearing. We are nothing without all these foreign bodies. We live in them more than they live in us.
What would a probiotic architecture be like ? It would probably be like our intestine, more porous than the prophylactic attitude of modern architecture. We used to live intimately with all the bacteria in the soil, plants and other animals. And we might want to reconnect with this diversity of bacteria, embracing them.

Biographies
Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on issues of architecture, art, technology, sexuality and media. She is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture and founding director of Princeton University’s interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010), Are We Human ? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016), X-Ray Architecture (2019) and Radical Pedagogies (2022). Her exhibitions include Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012), Radical Pedagogies (2014) and Sick Architecture (2022). In 2016, she co-curated the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennale. She holds an honorary doctorate from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 2020, she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her contributions to the field of architecture.

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. He is a historian, theorist and critic who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture and technology. Recent books include Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions; Passing Through Architecture: 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark; Cutting Matta-Clark: Investigating Anarchitecture; Are We Human ? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina); and Buckminster Fuller Inc: Architecture in the Radio Age. He has organized exhibitions at MoMA, the Drawing Center, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Shanghai’s Power Station of Art.

Cycle
Proposed by Emmanuelle Raoul-Duval and Jacques-Marie Ligot, the Tuesday cycle of lessons entitled Monstrum is an opportunity to reflect on how to replace them in our architectural corpus, what rites of acceptance to propose to re-engage bodies, how to intervene to repair-augment architecture and tame our monstrosity. Through this cycle, it seems important to take a fresh look at what monsters can teach us, by studying their impact on the city and architecture, and by observing certain restorative practices, certain symbolic displacements and thinking of architectural intervention as a prosthesis on a body in the throes of transformation.