Sellotaping demonstration and critique – a scrapbook reflection on Ackbar Abbas’s lecture ‘Junk Space, Dogville and Poor Theory’

In her response to Ackbar Abbas's lecture, Ashleigh Harris brilliantly evokes underlying themes of destruction in Rem Koolhaas's architecture, and attempts to reinsert crticism into demonstration through a play on the etymology of 'sellotape'.

Source: www.chinese-architecture.info/A-HIST2.htm 

Ackbar Abbas begins his illustration of Rem Koolhaas’s notion of Junk Space (see ‘Junkspace’, Obsolescence Vol. 100, Spring, 2002, pp 175-90) via a discussion of the above building, the CCTV (Chinese Central Television) Building in Beijing. The building is designed by Koolhaas, in collaboration with Ola Scheeren. The architectural sketch above captures some of the urban exhilaration that Abbas speaks of, emerging from the ‘man made experience which allows people to live inside fantasy and not be apologetic about it’. He states that ‘cities don’t need character, because the action is taking place in cyberspace’ – and what better building to illustrate this point than the Chinese Central Television building, an architectural monument to the importance of fantasy and the cyber-lives that the building itself is a portal to. 

For participants of the JWTC, the building may have evoked Jane Guyer’s discussion of the Möbius strip,[1] in her elaboration of confusion as a form. After Guyer’s address, Ackbar Abbas made an insightful point: in explaining the logic of the Möbius strip, he reminded us that the confusion evoked by the Möbius form lies in its dimensional shift from the second to the third dimension. It cannot exist in two-dimensional space. It is in that transposition of dimensions in which confusion arises. In the case of the CCTV building, the design cannot itself traverse the materiality of its construction (or the laws of gravity) that would allow it to become truly möbian. Yet, as Abbas points out, the aesthetics of the building is surrealistic; where bricks, glass and mortar fail to produce a true möbius, the building’s grandiose contortion around its vacant core nevertheless evokes a sense, in the eye of the onlooker, of the distortion of those materialities, of the gravitational impossibility of the building’s massive overhang.

Source:http://timgriffithphotographer.com/wp/architecture/must-see-cctv/

It is the television and media work framed by and framing the building that opens another dimensionality in this design, and it is here that the building achieves its true Möbius aesthetic. The surface of the real undergoes a dimensional shift as it segues into the life and work in and of the building. Yet, there is a second möbian dimensionality to the building. We are reminded (and Abbas occasionally prompts us to recall) Walter Benjamin’s notion of ruin: “In the ruins of great buildings, the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.” (Benjamin, Walter The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Transl. John Osborne, Introduced by George Steiner. Verso 1998: 235. Emphasis mine).

The resplendent shine of the virtual architectural sketch is echoed in the almost Cathedral-like vertical aspiration of the building under construction; the cranes reaching even higher than the construction itself, as though in an attitude of rapture. Note, at this stage the second building under construction in the background: as part of the CCTV’s construction, this origami-like structure (a hotel, as it happens, the ultimate site of life in junk space?) seems to fold awkwardly under the sheer magnitude of its sister building.

Keeping Benjamin’s ruins in mind, (and also Ato Quayson’s observation on Tuesday morning, in his talk ‘Urban Theory and Performative Streetscapes: Oxford Street, Accra’ that city spaces are produced relatively), it is worth noting that in February 2009, CCTV hosted a firework display that set fire to the (as yet unfinished) hotel, turning it into a ruin before it was completed.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/10/china-beijing-hotel-blaze-fireworks

The above image is reminiscent not only of the countless destruction scenes we have seen in films such as The Dark Knight Returns, (is Beijing replacing New York as the archetype of Gotham city?), but also of Slavoj Žižek’s analysis in ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’ (see http://lacan.com/reflections.htm). He writes:

It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.

Source: http://www.meiguoxing.com/Hotels/Mandarin_Oriental_Beijing.html 

The catastrophe of ruin in the unfinished building: the ruin is always already here: a mobiüs surface twisting together the times and spaces of construction and destruction, forming and deforming, a creation and a ruin. In the above image the structure of the burnt out hotel appears precariously balanced on the fold that runs in an oblique line across the building, suggesting immanent collapse, suggesting the frailty of paper. (I recall Josh Comaroff’s statement about the short life-spans of buildings and wonder if in Junkspace the life-span of the building is over before it is built?)

This relates to what Abbas calls the monstrous life of urban forms; not the monstrosity of the ruin, but the catastrophe already written into the virtually composed image of the architectural sketch, the catastrophe that is the generic city. As Žižek’s reminds us “the question we should have asked ourselves when we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: WHERE DID WE ALREADY SEE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN?” (Original emphasis). It is this return of the ruin before the completion of the building, that evokes the möbian contours of these two building’s awkward dance of construction and destruction.

The möbius strip denies us the comfort of theoretical understandings of the seam or the stitch (see, for example, Leon de Kock’s theorisation of the seam in ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary: an introduction’ Poetics today 22: 2, 2001: 263-298). Yet, it is here that we hit up against a formal problem: where do we draw the line of distinction between what Abbas calls ‘demonstration’ and ‘critique’? The möbius logic of Koolhaas’s paper ‘Junkspace’ demonstratively insists in its very form and style that theory is awkwardly[2] poised behind the life of the city, unable to get critical purchase on the speed with which it reformulates itself and the lives within it. Thus, critique is engulfed by demonstration. In the Junkspace of modern life, where we have gorged ourselves to capacity on filling every orifice, every space, with the junk and excess offered by the generic city, we end up melancholic and without political and critical purchase.

This is possibly why, for Abbas, “Manifestos are always wrong”. Yet he (melancholically?) returns to them for his own critical purchase: in his lecture he refers to his own Manifesto, written with David Theo Goldberg, on Poor theory;[3] Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dogma 95 manifesto’ and ‘Vow of Chastity’; by implication André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. He raises these manifestos only to dismiss them: Von Trier ‘breaks almost every rule of his own vows of chastity’; Urban change outpaces urban theory, including poor theory; the city, Abbas claims, is invisible to urban theory. As Abbas fell back on Breton’s fascination with Lautréamont’s aesthetic of the incommensurability (what Breton saw as convulsive art) in the poet’s famous quip about the beauty in “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” I wondered: are we caught in a return to the paradox of politics within surrealism, where incommensurability inevitably devours the aims and politics of critique? Convulsive beauty, incommensurability, as drawn up in Breton’s manifestos of surrealism must also, surely, have had their ruin, their ‘wrongness’ written into them from the outset.

But, if manifestos are always wrong, we are caught in the inevitable twist (a mobiüs twist, perhaps) of vainly attempting to politicise that which we ruin before it is constructed: theory itself. Koolhaas’s lucid display of how theory is undone in its attempt to capture the complexities of junkspace, turns into ‘demonstration’ rather than ‘critique’. Abbas insists that Von Trier’s films, too, demonstrate rather than offer critique. In the discussion following Abbas’s lecture, Helena Chavez MacGregor reminded us of the ambiguity of the term ‘demonstration’: the word operates as both resistance and illustration. But perhaps the political potential of the term is diffused (confused even) in Koolhas’s written style and in Von Trier’s articulation of space and affect: a confusion perhaps best articulated in Von Trier’s infamous, highly confused, Nazi-sympathy statement (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayW8aq4GLw).

If we do not actively produce critical purchase on the demonstration of the world (demonstrate against the world, not just demonstrate it), we risk a möbian confusion wherein every form of representation stands only in mimetic relation to the world. When I read Koolhaas’s paper (manifesto?) on Junkspace, the absence of the critics accountability looms large in the contortions of the paper’s style: much like the empty space carved out by the CCTV building, framing the ruins of an unfinished hotel.

***

Sellotape [ˈsɛləˌteɪp] n. The proprietary name of a cellulose or plastic self-adhesive tape, freq. dispensed from reels for domestic use. Also gen. sellotape   v. trans. to fasten with Sellotape. sellotaped adj. sellotaping   n.

Sellotape is a proprietary noun, a word that evokes a late capitalist production of language, the junkification (if you will) of language itself (the product is made of cellophane, the spelling was changed to create the proprietary noun). The product is a weak connector, taping together only paper (it is too weak for other forms cohesion) and only for a short amount of time (the yellowed, frayed edges of old tape, gone brittle, declares the tapes loss of its adhesive). It has its own ruin built into it. Sellotape is useless material in and of itself, its use emerges in relation to other objects. It is easily made waste, it creates waste. It is leaves no seam, because it does not convincingly join substances together, it merely places them next to or on top of one another. It is an inappropriate material to think of alongside architecture, and the internet (though the structure of blogging reminds us of the notice boards of old, with torn and messy messages taped onto the ever shifting landscape of the board. The notice board must be cleared to make space, the junk is removed, whereas the junk of blogs remain as the virtual space expands to make room for new notes, messages, discarded information). Sellotape is invented post-second world war. It is anachronistic. It nostalgically returns us to the montage, the scrapbook, the collage: it is a substance from postmodernism’s kindergarten. It has no place in the era of 3D printers and drone warfare. Yet it is precisely because of its cheap, trashy, old-fashioned, materiality that I bring it into this blog (a nod to the material trace, perhaps): In a digitised world, materiality is more tenuous than digital cutting and pasting. I open a document from 2007 and cut and paste and print a section of it today, while the sellotape holding a postcard to my notice board in my office, frays and peels away from the board. If we ‘trope’ the word, allowing it to enter a critical frame of reference, it is these properties that I am trying to capture: I wish to tape criticism back onto demonstration. It is a tentative (and somewhat old fashioned) gesture. It will fall apart in some near future. It will be subsumed within much grander swathes of digitised information. But I allow myself this tentative act of connecting, because it refuses the dimensional shift that the möbius turns into confusion. It is hopelessly, and unapologetically, two-dimensional. It asks us to read demonstration and critique in the same dimension.

What better way to illustrate this than to look at what art can do with the poor materiality of Sellotape. I leave the blog with this ‘Tape Installation’, created with over 45km of tape, by the Croatian design collective foruse/numen, at Tempelhof Airport, Berlin 2010. (All images available on http://www.designboom.com/design/dmy-2010-award-winner-forusenumen/).

Source:designboom

(Webbed, organic, transparent, smooth)

Source:designboom

(Uterine, sensual, alien, frail, membrane)

Source: designboom

(Constructed, alienating, shadowed, light, celluloid)

Source:designboom

(Cathedral, sacred, womb, stomach, cave, ocean, air, melancholy)

Source:designboom

(Adhesive. Empty. Junk. Space.)

Ashleigh Harris is senior lecturer in English at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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[1] Koolhaas’s more overt use of the möbius form can be seen in his design of the ‘Möbius hi shoe’. See http://leibal.com/products/mbius-united-nude/) where he is cited describing the shoe as an attempt to “down[size] architecture to its smallest and most vulnerable scale…of a woman’s foot.”

[2] Again, I’m reminded of Josh Comaroff’s discussion of awkward architecture.

[3] http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/poortheory.pdf

Commoditising Architecture

Aditi Surie Von Czechowski critiques the sublimation of architectural form by capital in her discussion of Joshua Comaroff's lecture, "Poor Form". 

Josh Comaroff’s talk on “Poor Form” asks us: “what do we learn about the life of forms, when form itself appears to be challenged?” Comaroff started by foregrounding the oft-incommensurable relationship between architectural practice and the requirements of capital. What does it mean when architectural form fails? In other words, moments in which architecture is awkward, comical, menacing, or tragic; when architects fail to unify the elements of function or scale with design, or when the values to which they are committed are at loggerheads with the logic of rentierism embodied by the buildings themselves.

Comaroff picks moments of “articulate” failures: failures of form that emerge under specific historical circumstances and tell us something significant about their genesis. For an architect, form means something quite specific: the transformation of the functional and technical requirements into a coherent aesthetic form using architectural vocabulary. Most architects see form as inseparable from function, but understand it as a medium for molding all parts of the building in harmony. This holistic idea of form, according to Comaroff, is what is under pressure today, when the relationship between the form of a building and its interior contents often seems arbitrary and contingent. Architecture like this, where there is no notion of form as following function, is emerging globally, particularly in places like China. The building as commodity begins to exert continual pressure on form, as seen in the example of the protean blob with its vast and highly profitable interior, aestheticized as a signifier of high design, but nevertheless vulgar; or in the cases of buildings that exemplify the tensions of tailoring size, density and repetition to high real-estate value and the requirements of investment. The picture below - Thames Town in China, a reproduction of an entire English style town close to Shanghai -  for instance, shows the end result of the logic of repetition and reproduction; a spectacle of architectural mimicry, it embodies the unheimlich:

Comaroff draws on a dazzling array of architectural examples across a spatial and temporal spread, from the Chicago loop to semi-detached houses in Singapore to point to the effects of commodification on the built environment. Architecture, as a commercial enterprise, can no longer use form to subordinate the technical and economic core of a building, or its relationship within a larger context. An example of formal failure might be novelty architecture, or a building of such sheer scale and numbers that an architect cannot express anything but quantity. These awkward forms, then, show the effect of market logic on formal proposition. They show, in Comaroff’s words: “the violence that value asserts on the built environment” – whether thought in the purely rentier terms of maximizing profit at the expense of dead space, or in terms of the maximization of value and the corresponding scales of density in the production of affordable housing.

The title, “Poor Form” is perhaps more adequate than Comaroff originally imagined: it points to both the poverty of forms as well as the both the economic and aesthetic poverty engendered by the move away from architectural formalism – the “drift in which architecture, under the sway of its evolution as an economic substance, floats away even from architecture itself.” Indeed, within the architectural profession, some have espoused the idea that the responsibility and centrality of the architectural profession has suddenly moved away from form.

Like Massimo Cacciari, Comaroff demands that we become aware of what is incommensurable in advanced capitalist societies – that we recognize, rather than sublate, the tragic and farcical elements of modern culture, that we treat these moments as a sort of analytical technique. But whereas for Cacciari, negative thought resides in the “Metropolis,” Comaroff’s architectural examples, though determinedly of the modern city, seem to float somehow above or outside of it as forms in and of themselves. In fact, buildings come to resemble cities in boxes – what he terms “potted urbanism.” Recalling Arjun Appadurai’s opening talk at JWTC, can we connect our understanding of the functioning of financial capitalism and real-estate speculation to the very real problems of architectural form? That is, rather than removing the C from Marx’s M-C-M, can we put it back in with a renewed force?

Comaroff described his intellectual enterprise as a kind of sleight-of-hand – but we can also see the crisis of form in the sleight-of-hand performed by terms like “sustainable architecture” or “architectural renewal” – that is, times when forms do not quite fail, but become entirely beholden to the logic of making capital(ism/s), rather than anything else, sustainable. Here, forms appear adequate, even perfect, but their appropriateness conceals their intended purpose. I am thinking of places like the High Line Park in New York, a gorgeous, once-abandoned railway track that has been rehabilitated into a lovely mid-city-level park. It now draws in hordes of tourists, pushing up real-estate values in the neighbourhood, and “revitalizing” formerly uncared-for areas near the West Side Highway and undesirable parts close to midtown transport hubs. Similarly, parts of East London, the construction of sporting, travel and accommodation infrastructure for the Olympics has brought in a surge in real estate investment and a corresponding exodus of large numbers of working class Londoners who can no longer afford to live there. How are we, then, also to approach the innovation of forms as those which are welcome, but disguise something menacing in the promise of a better-designed, functional-yet-prettier future?

Aditi Surie Von Czechowski is a PhD Candidate in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University

JWTC seen from Pakistan

This year, the JWTC July Workshop hosted its first participant from Pakistan. Zahra Hussein studied architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, with Eyal Weizman. She went back to Pakistan where she is conducting a research on drone attacks, architecture and the law. She speaks to The Blog.

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

I met Professor Achille Mbembe last year in London where he came to deliver a lecture at Birbeck College. I introduced myself and told him about my work. I was then conducting research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. He showed great interest in my research and, after further intellectual exchange, I learnt about his and his colleagues work especially regarding the JWTC. Learning more about the JWTC, it immediately became clear to me which to me that this

platform presented an alternative intellectual position removed from the ordinary East-West dichotomy that is so dominant in South Asia.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

I really liked how the art shows were made part of the intellectual rationale of the workshop and curated. They were not conceived of as an illustration of theory. They were themselves instances of theory, modes of discourse and argumentation in their own right. They also made for lively viewing and constituted a powerful counterpoint to the entire experience. The first morning, we were taken for a tour of Johannesburg. The introduction to this major Southern Hemispheric city laid out information in a particular sequence and connected the historical strands to form a complete picture for the audience.

You were coming to Johannesburg for the first time. What are the features of the city that have been the most striking for you?

Johannesburg is, in a word, awesome. It is unlike many cities in Pakistan and yet, here and there, there are so many parallels. The fast evolution of the city and the social energy it generates - all of this is quite simply astounding. Of very particular interest is the fact that this peculiar city is very much constituted by what lies beneath its soil. The various forms of spatial segregations, whether based on class, race or otherwise, can still be mapped out easily. I was particularly interested in how segregation and security now morph into each other.

You just completed an important research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. What does the theme "Futures of Nature" may add to your topic?

Natural and climatic disasters present an intriguing parallel to (counter) insurgencies. They both affect and are themselves affected by space. They are both forms of agency. So while the titles of both topics might seem somewhat unrelated, there are actually many interweaving threads of inquiry linking them.

What are you currently working on and why?

I am currently involved with the Centre for Research Architecture. This is a fully-funded European Research Council project. We are doing research on the ways in which human rights are played out in the realm of architecture and the law. Alongside other things, we are currently looking at the drone attacks in Northwest Pakistan. Typically we examine situations (human rights violations) in which there is a high degree of spatial complexity due to a variety of factors (access to the space geographically, complex micro-infrastructures, diffusion of munitions used in perpetrating the violation etc.). We then map and model these situations in order to re-create a chain of events in relationship to a set of legal questions.

Architectural confrontations with landscape

Belmont House with tropical planting invading doorways at garden level

JWTC interviews Joshua Comaroff, architect and critic, director of lekkerdesign, Singapore. http://www.lekkerdesign.com/

What relation, if any, do you see between architecture and the domains of nature?

This relationship is complex, historically contingent, and--at least in the past hundred and fifty years--a space of anxious renegotiation. In our essay on Insurgent Natures, Shing and I have suggested that the vegetal has always presented a kind of useful threat to the hygienic self-image of architecture, to its rectitudes and its conceit of being "autonomous" with respect to the world. In fact, a kind of scandalous back-alley conversation has been taking place, in buildings where the natural has provided a kind of liberating, corporealizing spirit. We see this in works linking Giulio Romano to Bernard Maybeck, to Schindler and Wright. It is thus very amusing to us that "green" architecture is now sold as something new, an invention that might be attributed to the likes of Norman Foster and Ken Yeang.

In some of the most interesting architectures--and even in some of the most modern--we have seen how natures serve to open up the boundaries of architectural possibilities. This was certainly the case, for example, in the masques of Stuart England. We trace the same line of thought to the Palazzo del Te, to the Miami hotels of Morris Lapidus, to the Trevi Fountain or the grotto at the Playboy Mansion (which follows a very similar cultural logic).

Since Modernism, the conceit of architecture is that it is drawing ever closer to the domains of the natural. Or at least, that a certain transparency--both "literal and phenomenal," as Colin Rowe put it--allows the outside to approach the quotidian of modern life. However machine-like its image, the modern building always seems to draw on the natural as mirror or necessary foil. This is why, perhaps, so many of the most iconic avant-garde buildings have been figured in a field or clearing (The Villa Savoye, the Farnsworth House, etc) and not in an urban context. This "drawing near" seems ambivalent to us, at once making nature visible and keeping it at bay. This is particularly relevant in an age where the "markets of nature" seem to propose, ingenuously or otherwise, that architecture begin to naturalize itself.

To what extent have 'markets of nature' transformed the fields of architecture and design in a place such as Singapore?

These markets of nature have transformed the production of architecture in Singapore, certainly. What is interesting is how uninterestingly they have done so. During a very brief period, the codification of "sustainable" design has led to an ossification of exciting potentials in the relationship between architecture and the natural. Facile "solutions" have transformed the contemporary building from a wildly destructive, anti-natural force to a mildly destructive, anti-natural force.

What is yet more distressing, for us, is that public expectations of "green" architecture have been even less imaginative, more fearlessly literal than even those of technocrats and developers. It is enough, in most cases, that a building look green--never mind the fact that some of the most environmentally advanced buildings are not festooned with vines to prove their good intentions. The expense of money and of energy to grow trees and shrubs precisely where they do not thrive--blown to pieces on roof decks and "sky gardens," for example--shows very clearly the performative nature required by the market of new solutions. The resulting "integration" of landscape and building is, in every sense, superficial: plants are added around the building's surfaces, where they are most conspicuous. And in many cases, this is enough.

While some improvement is better than none, this remains disappointing for those who saw in the rise of the environmental challenge an impetus to new accommodations between buildings and landscape. This would include ways in which, for example, energy-efficiency might force forms and functions to reinvent themselves. In the case of greenery, it might allow a less comfortable, less distanced role of natural elements within the building, in which softscape would be allowed to re-occupy the very centre of the architectural object.

That is, the spectre of an ecological crisis might have served to force a kind of anxious reconciliation between natures and architectures, one more productive of new objects and ideas.

Is the idea of 'natural architecture' an entirely crazy idea?

House design with earth mounds at center, spliting house into four

The idea of natural architecture is crazy, yes. But it is currently a very popular form of madness, a kind of mass hysteria among designers. It is quite common, for example, to hear about buildings that claim to be "bio-mimetic," or "self-replicating," whatever this might mean.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these architectures of the "natural" have tended to rely heavily upon digital means of production--scripts, codes, three-dimensional modeling and visualization technologies. So-called "parametric design", in which software generates proto-natural assemblages of units, is only possible in light of recent breakthroughs in processing and design applications. In this way, the free-form character of the organic seems to recognize itself in the euphoric visions of the internet age. The resulting buildings seem to embody a certain neo-liberal social vision: a market of parts; quasi-independent; related without congealing into something so dull as society. Some of these architectures are startlingly complex, alarming, or beautiful. But they are rarely meaningful. At the end of the day, their "point" is a rejection of architecture. They are the latest in a long series of architectural "naturalisms" that gleefully reject authorship or intention.

For precisely this reason, the notion of "natural architecture" is not very desirable for us. It is precisely the conceptual problems of the building, its overtly human articulations and ambiguities, that are of interest. And the confrontation with landscape--which has, in many ways, a very different set of rules and environmental and aesthetic considerations--is compelling precisely in that the latter throws architectural conventions into sort of heightened relief.

In this confrontation between architecture and nature we prefer a middle ground, which stands somewhere between the two extremes mentioned above. It is neither the superficiality of plants hung from a facade--as in, say, Jean Nouvel's Musee Quai Branly--or in the total collapse of architecture into the bio-mimetic. It would seem more interesting to play the rules of and hierarchies of the buildings against the rather different expectations of the designed landscape. This was the case with our Stain House, where the action of weathering over time became the source of a new ornamental vocabulary. Or in a recent design for a mosque, where the envelope of the prayer hall was as much a grove of trees as a building in any conventional sense. This was a kind of archi-natural ruin, but one in which the fragments were allowed meaning and dignity as human products.  

To many a critic, the futures of nature will depend on the outcomes of the on-going struggles around what constitutes the "artificial" and what distinguishes the "artificial" from its opposite...

In Singapore, we do not see a "struggle," so much as an eclipse or reordering, in ecological or biological terms, of the artificial and its opposite.

For example: it is a peculiarity of Singaporean natures that the fake often precedes the real. How does this happen? Possibly like this: an infrastructural canal is excavated to relieve the flooding of a new neighborhood. The canal serves an urban area, and the latter likely suffers the hydrological problems that attend large impervious surfaces, compacted soils, and so forth. Some time later, well-intentioned greenies will militate--with absolutely no reflection or irony--for the removal of the concrete surfaces, for the planting of ecotopic species, and for the "naturalization" of the drain's relationship to tide and ground water. The authentic drain becomes a fake river. It joins the natural environment, via a procedure that recalls Maurice Sendak.

Many of the island's other ecological aspects follow a similar logic. Artificially introduced species join the ecosystem, and begin to play roles within it (good or bad). New coastline is "reclaimed," and offers a substrate for natural systems. A myriad of experimental ecologies emerge, half accidentally--while some fail utterly, others become the basis for new natural accommodations.

Stain house, Singapore

The radically anthropogenic character of the Singaporean landscape, the monstrous legacy of its colonial (mis)management, has rendered the restitution of the "natural"--the non-artificial--virtually impossible. For a "native" ecosystem to be restored, in most cases, it would need to still exist; the contemporary Singaporean environment would have to be largely destroyed, in order to foster the fraught re-instatement of species that were extirpated in the mid-19th century. Paradoxically, the destruction of the artificial would require an almost total ecocide, in all but a few of the island's most recessive enclaves.

For this reason, the equatorial city has been proposed--for example, by Richard Corlett--as a site where new ecosystems must be imagined, curated, cultivated. As landscape designers, we have ourselves been forced to reject the distinction between the genuine and the artificial. It is not that such a distinction does not exist, nor that it is unmeaningful. It is, however, unhelpful in Asian contexts where the genuine and the artificial are so promiscuous, so inter-digitated, as to become the progenitors of new synthetic entities. Singapore is florid with a kind of third being, a hybrid condition that spans human and natural, artifice and authenticity.

Its products are "nurtural"--for the lack of a more elegant term. These rely in large part on the workings of the non-human, and, at the same time, upon their continued cultivation by people. Some very quickly achieve self-reliance. Others are "sustainable" only in that they need to be sustained, or can be sustained, by us. However, what such phenomena have in common is their intricate admixtures of biological performance and the intentionalities of design.

Whatever it may be, the future of nature has limited place for the genuine. For those of us who are sentimental lovers of nature, however, it may be a comfort that the artificial seems to be a similarly endangered species.