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 thought of in relation to the body - more specifically, the athletic white male body, constantly redesigned, from Renaissance treatises to the manifestos of modern architecture, from Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier. This idealised body, immersed in geometric systems of proportions, is a fiction that excludes most of humanity.
The concept of ‘human-centred design’ sounds promising, but it has proved disastrous for humans, the planet and other species. Humans are not a homogeneous entity but a complex, perpetual and constantly evolving cross-species collaboration. Humans are nothing more than receptacles for bacteria - bacteria that have been around for billions of years, whereas humans are a recent apparition that could already be on the wane. We are nothing without these ‘strangers’; we live in them much more than they live in us.
What form might a probiotic architecture take? It would probably resemble our intestines: more porous, as opposed to the prophylactic attitude of modern architecture.
We used to live in close intimacy with all the bacteria in the soil, plants and other animals.
Shouldn't we be reconnecting with this bacterial diversity in the interests of necessary hospitality?

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.