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. 

Mining the Dumps

This post is a response to Daniel le Roux’s paper in the ‘Things of Nature, the Nature of Things’ panel. Like Daniel’s, my childhood was spent in the shadow of the mines. Like him, my most exciting school trips involved being ferried out to Gold Reef City or Santarama Miniland to be told about the glories of the South African mining industry while a conga line of voiceless black men in overalls and hard hats performed a gumboot dance; a stunted ethnography, one of the most exotic things I ever saw despite its proximity to the suburbs I rarely strayed from.

I was born in Randfontein, a dry little mining town to the west of Joburg, where my father and grandfather ran a hardware store. After my parents’ divorce my mother moved us to the city, and every second weekend of my childhood involved being shuttled between our home in Parkhurst and my father’s new family, a drive that I’m assured takes less than 50 minutes but to my pre-adolescent mind felt like hours. The road between Joburg and Randfontein is banked on both sides by dumps from the then-prolific mining areas of Westonaria and Carletonville, and these looming piles of waste are a critical part of my personal topography of the city. When the mines began to die, the town died with them. The hardware shop was sold and I forgot about Johannes the driver, Petrus who always answered the phone with the cheery portmanteau ‘Alphapaint’, and the other kind men I had known there, who had treated me like a pet and my brother like a little king.

I think I have always knows the term ‘mine dumps’, but I doubt it was ever explained to me that these miniature mountains were actually not real, or that they had been dug out of the resistant earth by thousands of people over the course of decades in the process of making other people rich. No one told me that my house and my school were on some level the result of those mine dumps, or that the thoughtless privilege most white children lived with was consequent upon a racialised hierarchy that drew a large part of its power from the blood and the sweat that were mixed in with that dirt. As Keith Breckenridge pointed out last Sunday from the rarefied vantage point of the Carlton Centre, apartheid developed as a system to regulate mine labour. The suburbs I grew up in, their wide empty streets, their swimming pools and their trees, were balanced precariously on the mines.

Daniel spoke about the way whites turned the mines and the dumps into spectacle. The theme park-ification of these industrial wastelands was a constant feature of all our childhoods. We grew up on stories of Barney Barnato. Early Joburg was sold to us as South Africa’s Wild West, with all the attendant glamour. But the mine dumps, spectacularised though they might have been, were still visible. White people could pretend that they belonged to the landscape. We could reinvent them as indigenous, scatter them with scrub and underdeveloped trees, camouflage them with herbiage, but nonetheless there they were, great hulking metaphors for the city’s unnatural wealth. We could convince ourselves that the dumps meant anything we wanted them to but there was no avoiding the fact that they were there, and all the careful design of the northern suburbs’ famous ‘mad-made forest’ could not detract from their secret life as markers of apartheid’s violent avarice.

It’s been 16 years since I lived in Joburg, more than half of my life. The city has changed in startling ways. The teenage rebel hub of Rockey Street is a now no go area for white people but hipsters with sleeve tattoos and trucker caps have colonised Braamfontein. Multiracial teenage couples exercise their parents’ credit cards in a Sandton City that keeps growing like a malignant tumour, fed by middle class South Africans’ insatiable urge to shop. Streets in town are like miniature maps of the continent, with Ghanaian phone shops crammed alongside Senegalese tailors, Nigerian spaza shops and barbers from Mozambique. Suburban parks are full of nannies looking after other people’s children, although now those children are black as well as white. Callers to the Metro FM advice hotline bemoan the fact that their boyfriends don’t have enough education to give them the lifestyles they deserve. There’s a Virgin Active in Soweto. Joburg Fashion Week is populated by weirdly beautiful black girls who look like giraffes and float around the Rosebank Hotel avoiding canapés. South Africans read heat and Grazia and valorise local celebrities alongside the standard Hollywood stars. The aspirant is everywhere. From the cramped, censored backwater of apartheid, we have blossomed into a proud member of the global community. We are Brand South Africa, and we’re looking fine.

But the mine dumps, as Daniel pointed out, are slowly vanishing.

I wonder what this means for the brave new Joburg I have returned to, this Egoli, this Jozi (a word that my emigrant tongue finds impossible to say without awkwardness), this new city where everyone can mix, if they can afford to. The dumps, for all that their squat, ugly nuisance selves were repeatedly overwritten with apartheid’s narrative of nationalist pride, could never quite shake their association with labour, the back-breaking, often murderous work that was performed by desperate migrants trying to survive in an impossible situation of legislated inequality. But they are vanishing and I cannot see any other coherent signs appearing of the labour that underpins the city. Physical work is invisible to those who do not do it because there are no physical signs of its occurrence. Who builds this city, this urban maze, this mini-Africa, this first world third world? Where do they live? Where are they from? What are the effects of this plague of shopping malls and Tuscan housing developments on the people who are permanently banned from them?

The Karoo landscapes threatened by fracking and the waste sites in south Durban that Patrick Bond spoke of are undeniable material manifestations of the consequences of South Africa’s enthusiastic entry into the global networks of late capitalism. In Joburg, though, it’s remarkably easy to see only signs of progress and no signs of labour. The mine dumps were our visual conscience. What will replace them?

Nicky Falkof

University of Johannesburg

The Code of Life

Bregtje van der Haak, a Board member of the Prince Claus Fund and a renowned cultural analyst and film-maker speaks to The Blog about her forthcoming documentary The Code of Life.

Why the title "The Code of Life"?

The Code of Life refers to the fact that biology and information technology are merging into one huge, new field of analysis. With the latest generation of DNA scanners and super computers, any organic material (blood, skin, saliva, flowers, flies, bacteria etc) can now be cheaply 'sequenced', transformed into code and processed as digital information. Once life is viewed as a code, it can be analyzed and improved using the language of mathematics and algorithms. The young scientists working on genomics in China believe that the secret of life itself is embedded in the genetic information contained in each living cell. They are inspired and fascinated by the fact that they are uncovering previously inaccessible layers of information about the essence of life. At the same time, their own lives are also clearly affected by things that can not be so easily understood in mathematical terms, such as falling in love, loneliness and family expectations. This widening gap between life as information and life as a messy and unruly bag of feelings, family ties and cultural influences, interests me. It is clearly reductive to see life in mathematical terms only, but it is also unwise to ignore the major shifts in techno-science, because they will unavoidably have a major impact on culture, society and politics and eventually affect all of us. My hope is that the advances in techno science will be accompanied by informed public debate, new theory and empirical research by social scientists.

Can you give us the reasons that led you to explore the topic for this documentary film?

When I was working at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong last year, I was struck by the strong future orientation and optimism of my Chinese students. They embrace new technology in playful ways and seem to believe that they can improve everything, including themselves, just by trying, working hard, and then trying again. They are very supportive of each other and do not give up easily on anything. This is very different from my recent experience in Europe. When I read about a genomics institute in Shenzhen, which had become the leading DNA sequencing facility in the world in only two years time, I was fascinated. When I read that an 18-year old boy was leading the research team to uncover the genes for human intelligence, I wanted to make a film about it. My interest as a filmmaker is in showing how the world is changing. Technology itself does not interest me, but I am drawn to it intuitively when it starts to intersect with society and lived experience. There is also a strong visual drive. When I first visited BGI, the pale colors struck me as very beautiful and I felt dwarfed by the scale of the building, an old shoe factory at the outskirts of Shenzhen. Cinematically, it resonated, because it felt like Blade Runner, science fiction. But ultimately, I think the reason to make this documentary is that my personal experience in Hong Kong raised many questions for me and made me want to understand this new world more deeply. BGI seemed a place where a lot of 'newness' was concentrated, not only the super computers, DNA sequencers and cloning labs, but also Chinese family ties, the framework of a market economy ruled by an authoritarian state, and the focus on very young talent. BGI employs 3000 very young bio-informaticians, a profession that did not exist ten years ago. Altogether, it provides a new model that forced me to rethink a lot of things and I hope it will have that effect on viewers as well.

Why is China so hooked up on these types of almost post-human experiments?

The advance in genomics is by no means an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. Genetic researchers from all major research institutions in the West are collaborating with BGI in Shenzhen and paying for sequencing services. Shenzhen is one of the Special Economic Zones in China where the market economy is thriving. Because China has a planned economy, it can shift resources to new fields quite easily. Biotechnology and information technology have been identified by the Shenzhen government as growth industries and BGI has received a rent free building and a 1.5 billion USD interest free loan to buy up the best technology in the world. When I started working on the film, I thought that ethical guidelines would be less strict for cloning and DNA research in China, but in fact they are quite similar. Cloning human beings is strictly forbidden in China, as it is in the rest of the world. 

However, there are cultural differences. When you have been raised in a Christian culture, you would probably not say in front of a camera that the cloned micro pigs are ‘life that I have created under my microscope'. In Europe and America, the idea that we can 'create life', bypassing God as the exclusive creator is still very controversial, also among non-believers. That's why stem cell research and animal cloning are difficult. The cloning department at BGI in Shenzhen has been founded by a Danish professor, who could not get sufficient funding to bring his research to the next level in Denmark. His best Phd. students were Chinese and he was happy to go to China with them to establish the largest cloning facility in the world under his leadership.

What do cases such as those you examine in this film tell us about the future of nature?

The future of nature is artificial and man-made. The convenient separation of the world in 'nature' on the one hand and 'culture' on the other hand can no longer be maintained. Technology is human and therefore 'natural'. It is not outside us, but part of us. It is also inseparable from our landscapes now. Once we accept that technology is part of us, we can we start to talk about how we want to use it. If the scientists in Shenzhen will find the genes for IQ, pharmaceutical companies will get involved. They will try to make drugs that improve cognition and design tools to select embryos with genes for high IQ. In the future, babies might be born smarter because of these technologies. Of course, new technologies are expensive and most people will not have access to them. New inequalities and discrimination will arise and new battles will result from them. The political philosopher Michael Sandel has tried to draw a line between technology that is meant to cure nature's mistakes and technology that aims to improve on nature's work. He proposes to allow the first category and to limit the second. Although I tend to agree with his ambition, I think reality will be different. Once technology is available, people will find ways to buy it whenever they can afford it and feel they need it. Animal cloning is already thriving in China, Australia, Brazil and India, because it allows farmers to breed better meat at lower prices. We are living in a global market place and regulation for new technologies is always behind and usually too late to be effective. The global financial crisis has demonstrated this once again. We are heading into an increasingly chaotic global capitalist mining field, where everything of value will be extracted and the rest will be left behind. There are currently no powers or institutions capable of changing or regulating this. We can only do it ourselves.

The Drama of Oil Production in the Niger Delta: An Obsession with the Spectacular

Philip Aghoghovwia responds to the The catalogue Last Rites Niger Delta. The Drama of Oil Production in Contemporary Photographs from the exhibition on which Delta Remix was based. The catalogue was edited by Christine Stelzig, Eva Ursprung and Stefan Eisenhofer; English ISBN 9 783927 270657

As one leafs through the pages of the catalogue, it is curious to note that the first sixteen pictures do not capture the major concerns of environmental pollution which provoke those instances of violence and scavenging that these pictures depict. It seems to me that the catalogue, while artistically telling the story of the oil encounter in a reverse manner, subtly sets out to mislead, if not misinform, the reader. I thought the catalogue should be able to tell the reader, in a chronological order, possibly, how the Delta has come to find itself in that atmosphere of commoditised violence and brazen criminality. 

What hits the eyes in the first page is a captured white man in the midst of gun-toting young black men. This picture no doubt, prejudices the reader’s judgement, for it invokes the now familiar (image) critique of Africa by the West: a crises-redden outback of filth, violence, sickness, hunger, insurgents, war and death. The Niger Delta embodies all these! From which perspective might we tell the story of the Oil Encounter in the Niger Delta? What happened to the polluted landscape, the farmlands, and the spilled-oil floating on the rivers, sea and the water bodies? Are these not compelling enough to be captured in the first pages of this catalogue? Why the obsession with the spectacle of survivalist fervour — which verges on the ridiculous — with which the poor people, the very wretched scramble to help themselves to the crumbs from burst petro-pipes? What’s with this obsession with the dramatic images of youth violence, which Michael Watts has described as “the masked militant armed with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, the typewriter of the illiterate”? The catalogue confirms this romance with the spectacular by its laconic caption: “The Drama of Oil Production”.   

The picture which depicts the signpost that describes the first oil well in the region is captured without the weight of its significance. One notices the sorry state of the signpost: the fast-fading inscriptions, the rusty white board, which describes a supposedly significant beginning of oil exploration in Nigeria, and the bush growing around this signpost, that makes the board increasingly invincible. Isn’t this symptomatic of the invincibility of Oloibri — and perhaps the entire Niger Delta — in the context of social development, even when it [this village] bore the first fruits of the oil wealth for the Nigerian state?

It is hard not to notice the visible absence of the over 12, 000 gas flares that light up the Delta landscape; flares that burn off more than 70 million cubic meters of gas per day in this region that is so richly blessed, yet cursed, with fossil-fuel.

The picture I find most fascinating in this catalogue is that which juxtaposes a dilapidated, decrepit major ‘expressway’ that connects Lagos with the Niger Delta, and the well paved route of the pipelines in the heart of the delta. Ironically, that well-demarcated pipeline route now serves as a footpath for the villagers.

Philip Aghoghovwia is from the Niger Delta, and is a PhD student at the English Department, University of Stellenbosch