Architecture readings and a 300-word comment

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CLOSED WORLDS, OR, WHAT IS THE POWER OF SHIT

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Sealed in a jar, Haus-Rucker-Co’s model A Piece of Nature (Ein Stuck Natur, 1971–1973) implies an architecture of unrootedness (Figure 1). The miniature hut, covered in moss and dirt and secured with twine like a laboratory sample, suggests an insulated, closed world, disconnected from the exterior environment, an excerpt of Earth, neither receiving any input nor discharging output. The contained microcosm is as much a sample of nature as it is a representation of the earth in its totality. In the context of the alarming environmental crisis in the early 1970s, the jar is an effort to preserve not only the fabricated sensation of domestic safety in a natural setting but also the very idea of nature as something worthy of conservation.

What is perhaps most enticing is how Haus-Rucker-Co’s encased domesticity marks the end of nature as an unbounded field and the beginning of its reconstitution or reengineering, as they advocate, in pieces. The jar is a powerful illustration of a period of intense environmental anxiety, precisely because it is an excerpt of our lost idea of the untamed land. It is like a fossil, marking the demise of nature as an indeterminate field of its own and its subsequent translation in terms of recourses and their exploitation (see Migayrou, 2003, p. 21). If one looks closer within this image of our vanished sense of domesticity in the meadows, one may imagine other things lurking in the darker depths of the jar. Pamela Popeson, of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, imagines a little beach, a cliff, some hidden buildings and people, or even some wild animals (see Popeson, 2011). Though independent of what one may or may not find in the jar, the contained primeval shelter, openly referencing Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut in his Essai sur l’architecture (1753), becomes a critique of not only our endangered earth but also of architecture as an endangered species (Forty, 2000, pp. 221–223), as a thing of the past. If the primitive hut served for Laugier as an object to trace architecture’s origins in nature and to argue for natural principles of construction and decoration as the closest analogy to reason, the enclosed hut now stands as a preserved sample of a lost empire of reason. Inside the sealed bubble, Walter Gropius’s Stunde Null (zero hour) had finally arrived and architecture had become a different animal; it was no more than a transparent membrane, following the famous “environmental bubble” of Reyner Banham (1965) and his call to literally forgo the envelope. In most cases, a closed world replaces architecture, as the field that shapes the use and form of the physical world, with a sensorial immersive environment that copies and simulates the metabolism and experiential aptitudes of the natural world. In many respects, it is like a death wish of the design object.

This closed world, and others like it, specifies an architecture of disappearance, as well as a desire to return to our earlier home, the earth, the Garden of Eden. Yet, this world is a conditioned and measured version of a simulated piece of nature; it is contented and luxurious, allowing one to camp out in an idealized, manufactured climate. As industrial designer George Nelson (1952) put it (before Banham), one could be alone with nature,

“but in a controlled, comfortable space, and integrated into contemporary society by technology” (p. 89). Similarly, Leo Marx (1964) discussed in his eminent book The Machine in the Garden our deeply rooted yearning to return to a simpler, harmonious existence in an undefiled land, one that might allow us, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, to pursue happiness. In the civilized world of postwar, mid-twentieth century culture, this premise was delivered, as Marx debated, through technological instrumentation and the delusion that machines that regulate climates and environments are the “spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree” (p. 8). Citing Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, Marx called this regression an international form of primitivism, with humans thinking that the civilization around them is the result of a spontaneous force. In his book The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gasset argued that in the depths of his soul, man is unaware of the artificial character of civilization and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles that make them possible. This curious state of mind has also been described by Sigmund Freud as a collective neurosis and the very epitome of fantasy-making (Marx, 1964, pp. 8–9, referencing Freud, 1920), a pathology that humans unsuspectingly embrace to regress to earlier life stages, as in the return of a primitive global era, when the relationship between the individual and the environment was structured in different terms.

In hindsight, the closed world of A Piece of Nature signals a significant shift to the formation of domesticity as a synthetic discipline and the construction of the house as a machine, which literally (not symbolically) fabricates its own synthetic environment through the recirculation of material and energy resources. The canned domestic cosmos depicts 13

a transformation in the field of ecology, from the purity of nature as a realm outside the human-made to a technologically mediated science of instrumentation. In his book The Closed World, Paul Edwards (1997) recalls the literature of Northrop Frye to argue for

“green worlds”—the unbounded natural setting of a forest, a meadow or a glade—as opposed to “closed worlds” (pp. 12, 310). The closed world of A Piece of Nature sequesters the green setting within its boundaries, reengineering nature in pieces of earth. Ultimately, it functions like an improvisatory sealed structure that regenerates new conditions out of what is available within its systemic borders. In a closed system, any modification occurs internally, affecting the organizational structure of the system alone.

The starting point to this story is the view of the whole Earth, which had been highly anticipated throughout the 1960s and eventually reached its apogee in the famous Earthrise series taken from Apollo 8 in 1968 (Figure 2). These images, portraying humankind entrapped in the finite space of a sphere, may be held accountable for a collective feeling of anxiety in cultural imagination, as well as for a broad literature projecting plans for our future survival within what Buckminster Fuller (1968) famously called our “spaceship Earth.” This immersive imagery might also be held accountable for a genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems, or smaller, highly engineered earth microcosms.

In 1976, A Piece of Nature was published on the cover of the March issue of Casabella. Like the finite, spherical Earth, the jar proved to be a recurrent obsession for the Haus-Rucker group of Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp, and Klaus Pinter, who proposed to use the bubble as an organization of containment to depict seclusion from a surrounding physical reality, as well as an existential separation of the individual from the urban fabric and the social sphere. This deliberate detachment—to uproot the individual or the house from its context—is also evident in the group’s earlier projects, such as Environment Transformer and Oase No. 7 (Figure 3). Both projects are objects encased in bubbles: the former, a piece of a person—a head—and the latter, pieces of nature—a plant. Nevertheless, by the time the jar appeared in Casabella it had become a response to Architectural Design magazine’s “Autonomous Houses” issue published two months earlier, in January 1976 (Figure 4).

In the “Autonomous Houses” special issue, edited by Martin Spring and Haig Beck, the architecture of unrootedness appears under the umbrella of “autonomy” both to popularize an ecological and libertarian way of living and acting and to herald “autonomy” or independence from the energy grid as a political statement against consumerism and capitalism. At the bottom left corner of Cliff Harper’s ink illustration, a label warns readers, “Autonomous Property. KEEP OUT.” Like the primitive hut of Haus-Rucker-Co, the closed world of the autonomous house harkened back to a grass-roots mentality and pastoral iconography (see Spring and Beck, 1976; Harper and Boyle 1976). It presented a recognizable domestic environment, removed from the urbanized landscape and thus seemingly peaceful and dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, as Marx would argue (1964, p. 6). This landscape, nevertheless, was now equipped with undercover machinery that guaranteed its blissful sustenance as autonomous and independent of the authoritative grid of supplies or tentacles of the power grid.

The special AD issue presented to a larger audience the development of the Alternative Technology movement in Britain between 1972 and 1976, which was already outdated by the time the autonomous house appeared on AD’s 1976 cover. Similar to the jar, which was a fossil of a lost idea of domesticity in nature, the autonomous house was an illustration of the difficulty of reconciling previous notions of environmentalism, including farming and localism, with the instrumentalized regeneration of

Haus-Rucker-Co’s A Piece of Nature (Stück Natur, 1971–1973). From Klotz 1985. 14

resources demonstrating, in many respects, technological supremacy. That same year, the authors of the “Autonomous Houses” AD special issue published the book Radical Technology, edited by Peter Harper (who later became director of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, UK), along with Godfrey Boyle and the editors of Undercurrents magazine (Harper & Boyle, 1976). The book compiled Clifford Harper’s Visions with drawings of collectivized gardens, community workshops, and autonomous terraces, which had been previously published in Undercurrents, providing a visual introduction to environmental autonomy as a tool for political liberation.

Following the oil crisis and a decade of intense environmental debates, the terms “self-sufficiency,” “self-reliance,” “life-support,” and “living autonomy” were already pervasive in the lexicon of alternative technologies that had preoccupied the British avant- garde scene for several years. Based on its biological definition, “autonomy” refers to a system’s organic independence and self-governance, a notion that was transferred to the domestic realm to advance the idea of the house as a closed system, unrooted from its urban context. The “autonomous house” was like a restored Garden of Eden and a real-time habitation experiment in which architecture, systems theory, and human biology could blend together in the hope of radical social reform.

However, this idea of a world safely guarded and managed is now neither a poetic metaphor nor a radical political proposition. It has become profitably real. Closed worlds might be reflecting a commitment to a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture producing nature, yet they are fully integrated within the very fabric of reality. In a way, all buildings and large chunks of cities are closed worlds—“atmospheric enclosures that define collectives” (Kim & Carver, 2015, p. 11). And this does not merely apply to Haus-Rucker- Co’s A Piece of Nature, Banham’s “environmental bubble,” or Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Dome under Manhattan in 1960. Our indoor environments today, such as corporate office buildings, are in fact politically charged spaces that reflect political agendas, social ideals, and culturally specific standards of taste and judgment. Because data and measurements in environmental control offer trustworthy and convincing media and illustrations, they have attained tremendous power and influence, which has been maintained and circulated even though in most cases such criteria do not make any sense and institutionalize absurd principles. The manipulation of organic and ecological processes confined within artificial enclosures has become a metaphor for enforcing cultural and biased standards of life by recalling the power of data and cultural capital.

Overall, the history of twentieth century architecture, design, and engineering has been strongly linked to the conceptualization and production of closed systems. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space, closed systems speak of the eerie transference of life using architecture as the medium and vessel to secure a compulsive cycling of matter, energy, and data. The projects documented in this book represent entirely antithetical political agendas, from military ideas to assure humankind’s sovereignty in new, uncharted territories to countercultural practices for autonomous living in the city, nostalgia for the homesteading movement, and ecological tourism and environmental capitalism. In every case these systems are real and invested in the strangeness of the real; they are experimentally implemented rather than based on speculation, ranging from computer models of the whole Earth, living experiments, artificial ecologies, robot prototypes, and synthetic test beds for animal interaction with machines.

Unlike an open system, which is part of an exterior world and linked to its surroundings, a closed system in this book implies an architecture of containment and detachment—

“the desire to shrink the world, to populate it” (Barthes, 1957, p. 66)—to alter it and condense it to a manageable territory, so that all bodies can be monitored and controlled within its borders. A closed system insulates itself from receiving any environmental input, as well as from discharging output. Ultimately, it functions like an improvisatory sealed structure that regenerates new conditions out of what is available within its systemic boundaries. Any modification occurs internally, affecting the organizational structure of the system alone. Closed worlds disclose a struggle to reconcile the utopian ideal of replicating Earth in its totality with the visceral and raw material reality of “stuff” unexpectedly generated from feedback loops. Somewhere between the idealization of Earth as a whole—as a complete and interconnected system—and the messy and fuzzy leftovers of human physiology lies an unexplored history of architecture dissolving into a reconstruction of natural systems.

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DIGESTION AND AUTODIGESTION

In surveying the closed worlds documented in this book, it is important to highlight the idea of recirculation projected on each of the living prototypes and the function of resource digestion, which is a prerequisite for sustaining environmental autonomy. Each living prototype is not only a sample of an endangered natural sample, like the primitive hut in the jar, but also a reengineered piece of nature—a regenerative machine, like a giant stomach. It is connected with its feeder with umbilical cords that cannot and should not be cut. The prototype, along with its inhabitant, becomes a singular digestive device of physiological substances that construct a new ecosystem model; all substances, fluids, and humeurs are ingested and excreted with the help of hidden machinery in a continuous process of material conversion.

At the commencement of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, the first ecological houses and communities were living experiments rather than measured objects. They heavily involved the architect or builder in powering the house, which needed constant maintenance. Like a natural system, the energy-resource systems of such living experiments were self-regulatory and structured to “demand” maintenance; failure to provide that upkeep would (naturally) result in component parts ceasing their functions and affecting many other energy and resource systems contingent upon them. For example, failure to properly sort organic and inorganic waste in a domestic living community could hinder the composting of the waste and result in poor compost mulch for the food and animal-feed garden crops; it would therefore negatively affect the subtle bond of circular productivity.

Therefore, the occupant of a closed world is its caretaker, steward, and feeder (Figure 5). As Buckminster Fuller (1983) suggested, this dweller is also a “Guinea Pig B,” with the B meaning Bucky; such occupants are not inanimate subjects that mentally speculate on possible outcomes but scientists purposefully inserting themselves into the living experiment and developing a visceral relationship to the living experiment. The closed world dweller, feeder, or caretaker closely monitors and safeguards its operation. Among the forward thinkers responsible for this archive of 37 living prototypes of closed worlds, inventor Auguste Piccard reached the stratosphere for the first time in human history in a hermetically sealed aluminum gondola that he designed; Russian researcher Evgenii Shepelev, at the Moscow Institute for Biomedical Problems, was the first human to remain in

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts— Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders—held a live broadcast from lunar orbit during which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” Courtesy of NASA. 16

a closed life system containing chlorella as the only bioregenerative component; Biosphere 2’s inventor and director, John Allen, enclosed himself for two days in the Biospheric Test Module to test the air quality of the airtight environment; architect Graham Caine was so busy feeding all the digesters of his fully functional Ecological House in London that he could barely ever leave the premises, because if he did leave, its biotechnical systems would degenerate and die.

In this sense, the recirculation of waste and resources is intricately enmeshed with the physiology of the body and is thus woven into the ecology of habitation. Although we tend to think of human waste as a phantom, relayed to the management of urban resources, our ejecta infiltrates the air and water we breathe. The body’s physiology, and the entirety of its metabolic loop, is historically a disenfranchised narrative, excluded from contemporary environmental concerns. While ecological systems of the postwar period portrayed the inhabitant as an indispensable part of building ecology, this image has been dismissed. Environmental concerns promote a conservationist ethic and a list of cautionary daily practices of scarcity. The narratives revealed through the living prototypes attest to the disobedience of machines, as well as the complexity of integrating the body’s dirty physiology in closed building systems.

The Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl disseminated throughout his writings a quote from his teacher that connected body physiology with ecology, war, and well-being: "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation" (Smith, 2013). In his best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning, written after his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl argued that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: their ability to find meaning in the most trivial, repetitive, and mechanical tasks of life. In his own words, “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue” (Frankl, 2006) and could in fact ensue from the meaning of sustaining life through a series of problem-solving challenges. And there is nothing more visceral as a participatory experience in a living experiment than the scientist’s voluntary containment inside its premises as a guinea pig.

The pursuit of happiness as a game of managing human physiology could not be more evident than in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film The Martian (2015). Happiness becomes, for the Martian, the regulation of his life-support systems and the problem-solving obsession of monitoring, capturing, and recycling human subsystems. Crucial to his survival are the human feedback loop diagrams, illustrating the body as a closed ecology. Ingestion and excretion cycles are strategically edited through the use of external apparatuses that are assigned the mission of recycling all corporal flows. The Martian launches a new biotechnological character, one in which human agency is delegated in terms of input and output, yet one that seeks comfort in a serial loop of daily patterns that enable him to conquer an unforeseeable and uninhabitable land (Figure 6).

All the work these explorers, feeders, caretakers, and stewards put into their closed worlds demonstrates that their recirculatory machines are no more robust than a fragile stomach, the operation of which, to efficiently convert input to output and leave no leftovers, is unstable at best. What remains a paradox is the manner in which this questionable model of total circular regeneration, imbued with the vitalism of a digesting stomach, has prevailed as the mainstream model of what we now call a sustainable, net-zero habitat, opposing energy loss. Perhaps what is most striking to witness, via cross-examination of the living prototypes documented in this book, is the reflection of a lurking anxiety for the future of habitation, as well as how little we know about regenerative systems that rely on the premise of productive cycles. And yet, this premise of healthy feedback is the foundation of what we loosely refer to as “sustainability.” In this light, the living prototypes cannot be seen as solutions but as involuntary images of loss, or as an open call to evolve our practice of habitation out of utter necessity for survival. At the same time, it is critical to question to what degree resource conservation strategies are sustainable forms of practice, as well as to recognize how impossible ideas become institutionalized through a series of bureaucratic mechanisms and are eventually labeled “eco-friendly” or, even worse, “green.”

Originating from the space program and later migrating to countercultural groups experimenting with autonomous living, closed living systems reflect our inability to mentally or physically cope with the vastness of Earth as a system, one that is seemingly finite and contained yet ultimately infinite. In the case of closed systems, the delineation of borders is at the same time a highly restrictive but also resourceful model of creative production. 17

In other words, the closed system speaks to the invention that might take place within the conceptual perimeter of a circle. The internal circulation and recirculation of matter and ideas within a defined radius and circumference was a theme with various cultural reflections of the 1960s and 1970s. It began with the enclosed, finite Earth, migrating from the enclosed spacecraft to our perception of domesticity as a self-reliant ecosystem.

Even though ecosystems are mostly portrayed in simulations as robust as circular systems, where waste equals food in an endless series of cycles and subcycles, the idea of self-sufficiency is compulsive and hysteric in the will to ceaselessly generate new life from all wasteful cycles of production. And this is how we structure our built environment. A closed world, along with its dwellers, is a new type of unbalanced ecosystemic model susceptible to the shortcomings of digestion; all substances, fluids, and humeurs are ingested and excreted with the help of hidden machinery in a continuous process of material conversion.

Although a digestive machine is tasked with performing specific conversions, feedback efficiency is not always the end goal. Digestive machines are sometimes disobedient. They are connected with their feeders by permanent umbilical cords. All substances, food, and fluids are ingested and excreted by digestive machines in a process of perpetual exchange. Sometimes these machines digest, while at others they vomit; they are systems of connecting vessels in which certain amounts of energy are channeled from one location to the other, yielding deformities, swallowed regions, and outgrowths. Sometimes a closed system becomes autodigestive and eats itself. If the idea of circular regeneration, the crown jewel of sustainable enterprises, is a type of utopia, then arguably any idea of utopia ends up eating its own roots, as suggested by the word “autodigestion.” As Manfredo Tafuri (1976) argued, there are no more utopias in the era of late capitalism. On the other hand, however, it is precisely this investment in the realm of impossibility, of redefining the reality of our built world and our disciplinary territories that allows architecture to reconstitute itself.

Debatably, buildings operating as ecosystems are no more resilient than a giant stomach, feeding off the anguish of connection or disconnection to life. Independently of their performance, their engagement with an utter necessity for survival makes them meaningful disciplinary exploratory vehicles, not because they illustrate solutions but possibly because they constitute involuntary images of loss, in the utter necessity for survival.

THE POWER OF SHIT

Both human and animal feces are useful; such material is technically powerful and valuable, as it can generate methane and energy if treated properly. But more than a material, a smelly, unwanted product of our own bodies, shit also indicates a stage of incoherency, one where information is so finely grained and scattered that it cannot form bonds in identifiable patterns. It is this state of indeterminacy and uncertainty that endows shit with an unparalleled power to transform and to provide something useful, even something with capital value. This cycle from shit to capital, which portrays a holistic and allegedly complete understanding of the world, is in stark opposition to Georges Bataille’s (1985) notion of excess and base materialism. Prior to World War II, Bataille consistently defied the utilitarian idealization of matter and human aspirations and conjectured the existence of a

“base materialism,” an attitude toward the construction of a “scientific” conceptual edifice that does not need to follow pragmatic or functionalist theories of materialism. He alleged that a materialism that generates abstract “‘laws’ is in complicity with idealism” (Stoekl, 1985, p. xv).

Historically, the affinity between dirt and profit is vital; it is visibly witnessed in the compulsive efforts of alchemists to convert shit to gold. As such, Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi (1950) argued that money might be dehydrated filth that has been made to shine (p. 327). The Roman emperor Vespasian taxed the usage of public urinals so as to expurgate the dishonorable act of defecation, and he capitalized on the logic of his levy with the famous saying that pecunia non olet, meaning “money does not smell” (Laporte, 2000). It is, however, with Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the anal-sadistic phase of psychosexual development that children’s passion and affection for their feces comes clearly into view; here is the first instance of the subject’s creation out of the materials in one’s own body. In this sense, the pleasure in the clean object becomes a cover for satisfaction of the most 18

primitive anal-eroticism. Shit and urine are ejected from the body and rejected by the psyche, whereas money is introjected by the body and accepted as a highly desired form.

If dirt and profit are of value, it is due to the fact that both states or entities allegedly derive from the same primary matter in an ongoing recycling process. Materials are not viewed as concrete objects, constituted out of, say, metal or paper, but as a disguise for a sequential set of other substances that brought them into existence; in other words, shit and urine undergo a serial transformation, assuming different material states all the way to becoming objects of value. The purpose thus is to discredit the significance of objects and to support the view that materials exist merely in stages, while they absorb qualities from their previous stages: mud is shit deodorized, sand is mud dehydrated, pebbles are sand hardened, and 3-D-printed beads are pebbles unearthed.

Material is then only a “vortex,” a “threshold,” or an “ideogram” that accumulates meaningful associations between things, as, for instance, mud absorbs the qualities of its previous feces stage and carries within it a fecal history. Each material “stage” is defined by a threshold of information bits and their interrelated bonds. As an example, in the stage of dirt, information is so finely grained and scattered that it cannot form bonds in identifiable patterns. Essentially dirt is information so unrefined and randomly grained that it is “interrelational loss” or incohesion between bits and particles that defines its degenerate condition.

Recycling shit into money is as much a subject of theoretical analysis as a factual constituent of capitalist production. Waste needs to go away, and this very process of purging, transporting, and carrying into oblivion all that is worthless is utterly profitable. Money is dehydrated filth made to shine. In recent history, new market “bubbles” have originated from environmental issues rather than consumerist desires. After the housing bubble, the latest market bubble grew from the exchange of carbon dioxide emission credits between countries in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Future market bubbles are predicted to arise from the trading of urban waste. Congested metropolitan environments produce massive amounts of solid waste and sewage that are then transported out of the city. The purging of this waste is invisible to our perception, yet it generates capital for those who manage and transfer the raw materials. Waste is a phantom material condition, but at the same time it is a product or, better stated, a by-product of social reality.

To write a counterhistory to optimized circular economies in material conversions, one perhaps needs to look at shit. Only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life be somehow useful. As Donna Haraway (2015) argues, “I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman- ist: we are all compost, not posthuman” (p. 161). We need to investigate, monitor, and document the strangeness of the real, to invent an architecture completely devoted to the problems of the real but not one that is unaware of its uncertainty and complexity. Closed Worlds is not about constructing fictions and fantasies but about closely observing, conducting forensic analysis, asking questions, and instrumentalizing our findings in a creative way.

Haus-Rucker-Co’s Environment Transformer, 1968. Courtesy of Haus-Rucker-Co.19

THE CLOSURE PARADOX

In 1986, the World Health Organization (WHO) coined the term “sick building syndrome.” Following on its committee report in 1984, WHO indicated that up to 30% of new and remodeled buildings worldwide may be the subject of complaints related to poor indoor air quality (US EPA, n.d.) As the historian Michelle Murphy (2006) suggests, office buildings became architecturally airtight in the 1970s for the sake of energy efficiency, while internally they were arranged in open floor plans. This typology allegedly led to sick building syndrome, which did not exist before 1980. “In order to become ‘sick,’” Murphy observes, “a certain kind of office building had to come into existence” (p. 2). WHO’s acknowledgment of a syndrome of acute health and discomfort effects that individuals experienced within enclosed built environments was significant, because it institutionalized the framework for examining health symptoms linked to the time people spent enclosed in buildings. Public concerns about indoor air quality have mounted rapidly since the 1980s, as large percentages of building occupants in heavily air-conditioned buildings have repeatedly experienced symptoms of breathlessness, exhaustion, headache, nausea, and unconsciousness. Air-conditioning systems are in several cases the main carriers of diseases, as they can quickly transfer and distribute pathogenic airborne bacteria, as in the case of legionellosis (Figure 7).

Cover of the Architectural Design (AD) special issue,

“Autonomous Houses” (January 1976). The cover was drawn in ink by Clifford Harper, a British underground illustrator who contributed to Undercurrents magazine and Radical Technology. 20

In the early and mid-1900s, building ventilation standards called for approximately 0.5 cubic meter per minute (cmm) of outside air for each building occupant, primarily to dilute and remove body odors. As a result of the 1973 oil embargo, however, national energy conservation measures called for a reduction in the amount of outdoor air provided for ventilation to 0.15 cmm per occupant. In many cases, these reduced outdoor air ventilation rates were found to be inadequate to maintain the health and comfort of building occupants (US EPA, 1991). Given the rise of sick building syndrome since the 1980s, it is significant to observe that the rigid conservation ethic that appeared in the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s substantially contributed to a series of unpredictable environmental problems detrimental to human health. In many respects, the sick building is a by-product of policies earnestly instituted against profligate energy consumption in buildings. These actions nevertheless resulted in heavily air-conditioned buildings that usually generate problematic air-quality conditions due to the lack of exchange between buildings and their surrounding environment.

In most sick buildings, there cannot be an identifiable cause for illness, as a causal effect of a specific deficiency. This condition of uncertainty is vividly analyzed by Murphy in her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, in which she argues that sick building syndrome was only recognized as a constellation of signs, not in a single underlying mechanism that produces ill health effects. The nonaetiological pattern, which was ostensibly “a phantasm of illness” (Murphy, 2006, p. 7) before 1980, is astonishing to watch, as it reveals the technical deficiencies of closure and sealing, as registered on humans. Accordingly, it weaves human and nonhuman subjects into the sensorial, chemical, and atmospheric environment of habitation in a complex mixture of parameters, which is precisely the topic of this book.

What remains a paradox is the fact that the airtight enclosure—the practice of sealing buildings and controlling the indoor atmosphere—has surfaced as a sustainable design practice, thus promoting buildings as regenerative and closed ecological systems capable of harnessing waste and providing their own energy. Insulated from the mechanics of the seasons and the flows of the natural world, buildings could, it was asserted, save significant amounts of energy and thus become environmentally sound. In light of this perhaps absurd conservationist ethic, protected, uterine-like environments have been consistently translated as conserved ecological milieus blocked from the effluence of the exterior world.

Decades after having sealed many buildings, we may consider the viability of closed ecological systems and the process of translating planetary ideals to environmental policies and consequently to a set of physical rules and artifacts in the building industry. The experiment of the closed world was most notably tested in Arizona, in the massive Biosphere 2 project, which was completed and sealed in 1991; after a period of time, fresh air had to be pumped in and food introduced into the sphere to assure the health of the sealed subjects. But beyond the Biosphere 2, closed worlds exist within thousands of sick buildings of corporate America.

The questions suggested by the 37 living prototypes described in this book are simple: How are sustainable terms developed and institutionalized? How do they become tropes to signal new political ideologies always expressing the left and the right simultaneously? Veiled under the ethics of environmentalism, a new agenda has become the norm; “net zero,”

“ecological footprint,” “minimizing energy loss through sealing,” “loop systems,” and other concepts have become a new form of capital.

EARTH HOLDING AND CIRCULAR FALLACIES

In 2002, the architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published a book that constituted their manifesto about replacing "cradle to grave" design—a linear production model in which materials are discarded when obsolescent—with “cradle to cradle” design—a circular production model in which materials can be repurposed and reused once they have fulfilled their original function. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things stemmed from work that Braungart conducted at the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency in Germany during the 1990s and his work on the technical Frameworks for Life-Cycle Assessment. Overall, the authors proposed a circular political economy within design fields, as opposed to a shortsighted linear economy, 21

arguing for circular causality as a means to achieving a diverse, safe, healthy and equitable world with clean air and water, soil, and power. Circular reasoning defies death, or the end of a material’s useful life, and promises that matter does not come to an end; it changes state.

Cradle to Cradle has been foundational in architects’ discussions on sustainability and in establishing the technical dimension, as well as the logic of efficiency, optimization, and evolutionary competition, in environmental debates. It resides in the libraries of most architecture students and has sold more than 400,000 copies. The book has also evolved into a production model implemented by a number of companies, organizations, and governments around the world, and it has become a registered trademark and a product certification, having begun as a proprietary system.

The problem with Cradle to Cradle and its widely circulated premise is that architecture and design are projected as neutral fields with little disciplinary intelligence of their own; the authors considered these fields ripe to institutionalize commonsense environmental principles. The idea of a world in which all resources are recirculated and never wasted was comforting to a broad, well-intentioned audience, yet it defies the complexities present in both environmental science and creative design. Moreover, it dwells on wishful thinking, on the idea of holism and the idealization of the world as a round field where all resources can be effortlessly regenerated.

What is particularly troubling in the assertion of Cradle to Cradle is the axiom that “waste equals food,” an axiom transferred from the operation of natural systems directly to artificial systems, production lines, materials, and manufacturing. In this logic, the life and metabolism of living creatures should be decoded, replicated via technological instrumentality, and directly transposed to industrial and design systems advocating for a full circle of life with no loss. This simplistic and, frankly, false sense of holism has been directly applied to building systems and cities under the umbrella of “integrated systems.” Moreover, circularity has fostered a perception of “Earth Holding,” prodigiously depicted in images of Earth held gently and affectionately by human hands, as if the earth is a wounded baby that needs care (Figure 8). The anthropomorphic perception of the earth as an endangered living species that is cute and sentient, as a being that needs to be petted by humans, its self-proclaimed conquerors, is delusional, as it positions our species at the center of all pivotal planetary developments.

Ideas of effortless circularity, manifest in many of the living prototypes presented in this book, also reveal a deeply rooted problem in the language of environmental representation, which is visualized almost exclusively with the use of arrows. Since the 1960s, ecologist Howard Odum’s Energese, or Energy Systems Language, has instrumentalized ecosystems,

The Martian (2015), directed by Ridley Scott, with Matt Damon as Mark Watney (United States: 20th Century Fox). Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

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as well as human agency, in terms of input and output. This representational language for ecological simulation models, derivative of electronic circuits, has become the primary tool architects use to visualize performance and energy flow. Nevertheless, as evident in the series of feedback drawings for each living prototype presented in this book, the language of environmental representation needs to illustrate loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres. Can alternative notation systems and fields effectively replace the reductionism of arrows, given that arrows can only point to the end goal of conversions but say very little about the process of recycling itself?

The use of arrows in circular formats reveals a larger problem of deduction in environmental representation. With the dissemination of these flow diagrams, environmental concerns have been normalized to a circular form of reasoning, obscuring the illustration of loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres, thus attempting to force the complex density of living systems into a simple mechanical flow paradigm. This type of information deduction was an ongoing anxiety of the Chilean biologist Francisco Varela, who with his coauthors Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch argued in The Embodied Mind (1991), following Varela’s work on autopoiesis with Humberto Maturana (1980), that cognitive systems cannot be understood explicitly on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The brain, Varela Thompson, and Rosch (1991) argue, uses processes that change themselves while operating and thus we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce (p. 139). Similarly, the language of environmental representation represents a process of interlinked threads, while these threads and their processes are trying to develop a relationship with themselves. In the environment, perception is seen as a cognitive process of hypothesis formation, not as a simple prescription or reflection of pregiven information.

In addition to reductionism of environmental representation, the studies also touch upon the problem of efficiency and optimization, which is also promoted by the promise of circular regeneration. In several of the living prototypes documented in this book, redundancy is favored as a means to help ecosystems become more resilient. The concept of species redundancy or ecological redundancy has recently been applied to community and conservation ecology. If an ecosystem has redundancy, it can continue to provide services after a disturbance has knocked out one or more species. Thus, having a large variety of species can provide a buffer for ecosystem fluctuations, changes, and perturbations. The idea of webbing alternate channels for energy and resources, the idea of excess and diversity of systems and species and of built-in redundancies, is a different

Earth in my hands. Created by Steven Guzzardi. Creative Commons license.

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concept than the notion of negative feedback, or teleological distribution of forces where all energies are accounted for.

Our perception of the earth as one interconnected world, as an image of the whole Earth that promotes unity and balance, is no longer relevant. Unilateral strategies for divergent problems, in the ideological belief that the metabolism of the planet may become the foundation for technology, culture, and design, are no longer applicable.

Conceivably, to write a counterhistory of the “cradle to cradle” view, one needs to look at shit. Only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life endow architecture with new disciplinary intelligence. As Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (2016) note in their recent book Are We Human?, in 1926 the Berlin critic Adolf Behne argued that those designers who care only about the mechanical logic of function and aim to make a building a “pure tool” actually end up with an inhumanely standardized architecture. Behne claimed that dehumanization is the very thing that leads to humanization (Colomina & Wigley, 2016, p. 82). The reversal of intentionality is thus critical to the architect’s agency. The immediate and easy assumption that once there is a problem, there is also a linear and causal response to this problem, is convoluted if not futile. When a phenomenon is so multidimensional and pervasive, woven into so many parameters of culture, it is not sufficient to address it at face value. One might first need to invent novel ways to engage with the problem itself and understand the diversity of its facets. This book is a regression, as well as a progression, used as a catalyst to approach contemporary questions of climate change, recycling, modern life, and the culture of making. Regressing into the examination of human nature, through a kind of spatial and material experience, might bring to the forefront a side road: a rerouting into the unconscious of the current political crisis of how little we understand ecological problems. Closed Worlds provides only questions, not answers or solutions to problems. Yet, forcing oneself to think and act in daily small diversions is what might constitute change. And, possibly, shit is our only way out.

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Illustration of the mechanical systems that sustain the natural replicas of the Closed World. Drawing by Temitope Olujobi, 2016.25

CLOSED WORLDS, BUBBLES, AND VOLUNTARY CONTAINMENT

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November 19, 2016: winter has suddenly arrived, and outside it snows. I am inside, though, airtight and connected to the world. I breathe my own exhalations while reading the news of dismay over the US elections and exhale to make patterns on my superinsulated window. Just seeing the condensation dripping along the glass surface assures me that I am unaffected by the piercing cold, as well as the political disarray in Washington. I see the city steadily freezing, yet my own sphere is warm, cozy, and equipped with power and high-speed WiFi. My synched apps and devices deliver all plausible scenarios about my schedule, as data refreshes. Synching might be more useful for survival than food, in fact. Looking behind the walls, where this synching happens, I recollect Reyner Banham’s (1965) words: my home is not a house. It is a labyrinth of noisy heated ductwork; pipes and wires sustain my voluntary detachment from the visceral, raw experience of urban wandering and forge my total immersion in electronic information trends. My atmosphere is fully recycled by heavyweight infrastructure that I cannot see, nor would I wish to see. If I could add plants in these pipes and soil rooted in my place, perhaps my hallucination that I am unaffected by climate change and fierce political ruptures around the world could be prolonged. Murmurations of water dripping through the foliage—Ikea’s homegrown garden program— offer some distraction from the ongoing newsfeed. Now anyone can grow a garden inside, and my plan is to grow vegetables and tomatoes, feeding them with my own shit. Inside my microcosm, my safe replica of an unsafe world, the living and the manufactured have been intertwined to secure a compound geochemical affinity between capital and excrement. The purpose of this supersystem, this “egosphere,” as Peter Sloterdijk (2007) has called it, is to nurture other complexities—me. Do I personify the contemporary human subject, which is almost never terrified by what is outside? This subject—me—is blissfully distant from all that matters, yet entirely immersed in a carefully curated replication, or reverberation, of the world. Life cannot get any denser inside my anodyne bubble.

Screenshot from Saturday Night Live’s sketch “The Bubble,” in which “life continues as if elections never happened.” Originally aired on November 19, 2016.

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The following day, a version of my inconsequential anecdote was featured in a sketch, “The Bubble: Established 2017,” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. In it, Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s famous Dome over Manhattan, from 1960, has now resurged above Brooklyn to seal and shield progressive, environmentally minded intellectual millennials. As the actors in the sketch proclaimed, in the Bubble “life continues for progressive Americans as if the election never happened” (SNL, 2016). And yet, the Bubble is as much a satire as it is a new social reality of what the news media now refer to as an “echo chamber:” a space of voluntary containment where you purposely hear the reverberation of your own voice. You receive only your own thoughts and witness the reconstruction of your customized version of the world. The NBC show’s sarcasm is strikingly real. The progressives contained in the Bubble are not only traumatized and disenfranchised while acknowledging the lurking powers of the other America, but they are also in denial; they never saw this coming. As one observer has noted, “Our digital social existence has turned into a huge echo-chamber, where we mostly discuss similar views with like-minded peers and miserably fail to penetrate other social bubbles” (El-Bermawy, 2016). The social bubbles that Facebook and Google have designed for us are shaping our reality (El-Bermawy, 2016).

This “world in a bottle” is nothing new to architects. In fact, architecture’s role in the reconstruction of idealized microcosms, as curated Earth replicas, is tied to the convoluted history of utopia. Fuller and Sadao’s Dome over Manhattan, Haus-Rucker-Co’s A Piece of Nature (Ein Stuck Natur), and Reyner Banham’s Environmental Bubble are iconic illustrations of a period of intense environmental anxiety precisely because they manifest, like jarred fossils, our lost idea of the untamed land (Kallipoliti, 2015). What is different, nevertheless, in the 2017 bubble is that the containment is not explicitly environmental; it is not simply a regulation of climate and air quality. Although the preservation of natural samples and botanical capital is part of the equation, the bubble assures a total preservation of civic interactions, lifestyle, and urbanity in an imagined, curated stage set extruded from reality. All animate and inanimate bodies are coded by networks of exchange and subsumed into urban production. Climate is directed, along with protocols of trade and civic interactions.

The bubble might be committed to a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture naturalizing and reproducing sections of the world, yet it is fully integrated within the very fabric of reality. The resulting socialization of the ecological idea seeks to transform urbanism into constellations of controlled enclosures, as verbatim replicates of larger Earth samples. This type of carefully constructed urban interiority, with climate, lifestyle, and spectacle being directed with the utmost care, is envisaged as inhabiting the world irrespective of geographic restrictions. According to Frederic Migayrou (2003), we now see the world becoming a “continuous environment with no hope of exteriority” (p. 26), characterized by an ever-increasing hacking and mining of our desires for data. If we look back, the experiment of the bubble is as much tied to the regulation of climate as it is to the regulation of lifestyle, spectacle, and enhanced entertainment. In fact, the reconstruction of certain environmental conditions is assumed to assure heightened levels of leisure and amusement.

In celebrating this kind of extreme interiority, reinforced by the allure of environmental performance, we are spectators of a new urban experience: the network has given way to the cloud, and the bubble is the incidental by-product of the cloud. The green bubble, albeit unwittingly, rises as a control mechanism that detaches us from civic engagement. The bubble also begs a simple question: What is the urban experience in this time of voluntary containment? A new breed of psychogeographic drifters is roaming on their customized itineraries as their phones instruct. In this new territory, where everything is hyper-connected, the subject becomes increasingly contained. Every echo becomes a world.

Our constant existence of being connected yet detached allows us to affirm ourselves by augmenting our containment as something simultaneously interiorizing and exteriorizing. Yet, our new communal existence with public space cannot exclusively be based on mediation of data and the comfort of plants. As citizens and creative thinkers, we need to think beyond the bubble. As a famous movie line suggests, “open your eyes” to the bubble inside which you are voluntarily contained. Then, develop an erotic, yet resistant relationship with your bubble. Then it might be possible to penetrate the bubble and imagine other ways of being, even to imagine some real grounds of hope beyond the market commodity of a digitally enhanced environmental euphoria. 282

The question I would like to leave you with is whether the material presented in this book is a deviant story of architectural history and environmental science; my belief is that it is not. Besides offering descriptive narratives of the cycling of material and informational resources, the book’s narrative also reflects on the construction of a modern human subject that is immersed in a carefully curated replication, or reverberation, of the world as a preengineered fantasy. Inside the unimaginable carcass of bits and fragments of information we encounter in our daily lives, the only way to navigate is relative to oneself, or as French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (2008) has put it, in a relational loss with context. Our need for embeddedness in the world and the ecosystem might already be obsolete. In psychoanalysis, this closure corresponds to an ontogenetic, and phylogenetic, stage of development (the stage of the “protopsyche”) at which the organism has control over nothing but itself, denying any environmental input, as well as discharging output. In some ways, it becomes a self-referential reality.

This subject has not suddenly emerged; it has been silently forming in the breeding of what sociologist and urbanist William H. Whyte (1956) termed the “organization man.” This term consolidates the calculated and efficient modern subject, which has now evolved to become the post-truth man. Post-truth was selected by Oxford Dictionaries as 2016’s international word, demonstrating not only a deep crisis of governance, and citizenship, but also that the power of narrative, metaphor, storytelling, and, most importantly, interiorization has debunked data and measurements that had attained and maintained their influence since the Enlightenment.

In this new world, we are possibly in dire need of a new kind of criticism, of new ways to fathom via interiorization, and of methods to move past barriers in the way we narrate stories through the design of our environments as well as the shaping of our reality. If every bit of fact is designed in the world of post-truth, the role of the architect has expanded, albeit unwittingly, to become more than shaping the physical world and the aesthetic and experiential aptitudes of our daily existence. In many ways, it has become of civilizational value. If the organization man represents the status quo, the mythic stories of closed worlds and their disobedience, burdened by their visceral flaws, might be a viable counterpart to an alternative, deviant future.

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