Architecture, Design, and the Anthropocene:
To what extent can design and architecture effectively address the requirements of the Anthropocene? In the face of an existential threat, designers are unsure whether to propose large or small design ideas, and their relation to power is a basic structural issue. With its threats of catastrophic environmental consequences, the Anthropocene can appear overwhelming and design seem helpless in the face of it. And yet, if a desirable future is to be imagined, paths in that direction need to be set out, and design imagination is urgently called for.
In its symbolic capacity, architectural design can propose monuments to the Anthropocene. The projects illustrated above extend a particular line of primarily symbolic architecture that runs from Boullée’s Architecture Parlante (eg. The Cenotaph for Newton) to Rem Koolhaas’ images of Delirious New York, with its individual projects on bases, much like an an exhition installation. With their heterogeneous content, they also share some of the motivating impulses of cabinets of wonder.
Obsidian Rain Cave Bureau Venice Biennale 2021
At 1:1 the Mbai Cave fitted perfectly, a small chamber where the Mau Mau freedom fighters contemplated the colonisers’ purgatory.
We consider the Anthropocene Museum to be an institution that is already present on a planetary scale, where humanity has embedded and continues to embed its imprint on the planet. It comes as no surprise that the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has been dominated by a Eurocentric interpretation, with little attention paid to African and Black perspectives regarding the basis of this newly proposed geological epoch and what it means for the generations to come. Reusing architectural spaces of slavery at the Shimoni caves in Kwale, Kenya, brings African and Black narratives of enslavement back to the surface in the Anthropocene
In their conclusion to The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke distinguish between the Anthropocene in earth’s history, and the Anthropocene in human history by pointing out that “The Earth is now in a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Human history, likewise, may be in a new period, the Anthropocene, but that is less clear.” The Anthropocene is already informally part of geological history, and it is in the process of formalization. Traces of the Anthropocene will endure for thousands of years, if not millions. On the other hand, whether the anarchic professional communities of human historians accept Anthropocene as a period in human history is more dependent on whether humankind will find ways to pursue its customary routines in the context of a more turbulent climate and biosphere. This is the political issue that divides the two dispensations and makes some geologists question the term. (McNeill, J. R.. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press.)
However long the geological era lasts, traces of the Anthropocene as a geological (or geo-historical) period will become an integral part of the earth’s physical record. Given the current conjunction between human activities and damage to the earth’s biosphere, the need to redirect or to move beyond the Anthropocene, and especially the great acceleration, is a pressing one. The architectural monuments presented above are symbolic objects, but more transformative ones are necessary. The very same arrogance that produced the Anthropocene, is part of the human tendency to believe in its own power, its problem-solving capacities, even as it has undertaken ruinous activity that imperils other forms of life. Is it only hubris that leads us to believe that if the human has polluted and nearly destroyed vast environments, it can somehow restore what it has destroyed? One priority for design would be to promote the great Decelaration instead.
In relation to material processes, these transformations must integrate human wastes into circular production economies in the same ways that waste = food in natural systems. (eg. the thinking behind Lithoplastics that treat waste products from industrial processes, as resources rather than as pollutants). This concept is not limited to recycling but also includes upcycling. Currently, some very significant sources of waste lie outside any circular framework, especially plastics and e-waste. The production of concrete accounts for some eight percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is partly due to chemistry: cement is made from calcium carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide in the process. The CO2 could be stored or captured — possibly injected into the concrete itself. The process also requires extremely high heat, usually produced by burning fossil fuels. The massive amounts of concrete that have been produced would also be a very likely candidate for integration into circular processing. (In The Ministry for the Future, “taxes on new concrete had become so high that the price on new concrete was astronomical, taxed to the point where anything else was cheaper, almost. Recycled concrete from decommissioned roads and old foundations of deconstructed buildings was a way to get rich, or at least do very well. p.439)
What lessons might architects derive from Weisman’s scenarios of The World Without Us? There is a romantic beauty in the inevitable encroachment of neglected human structures by non-human life forms, particularly plants and funghi. This is the aesthetic appeal of ruins. It is a beauty imbued with nostalgia and a sense of time’s passing, an aesthetic developed by landscape designers and painters that has often been carefully contrived . And while Weisman’s account reminds us that the world would go on without us, the more pressing issues for the Anthropocene are how it can go on with us.
Les Baux en Provence
The fortifications of the hill town of Les Baux predate the proposed beginings of the Anthropocene, but in their present state they evoke a future-past in which human settlement is practically indistinguishable from geological formations. This is partly due to the homogeneity of material — both the buildings and the rocks around them are limestone — as well as the intimations of deep time, with its long cycles of geological succession and upheaval, no vestige of a beginning, and no prospect of an end that both the stone ruins and rocky site convey. But geological time has been speeding up, due to global warming.
Abbot Pass Hut is a rustic cabin located nearly 10,000 feet above sea level on the border of Alberta and British Columbia in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. The hut was constructed by Swiss mountaineers in 1922 and for nearly a century was used as a refuge by mountain climbers scaling the challenging peaks that rise around it. Today, the slope supporting the hut is rapidly eroding, because snow and ice that had once permanently covered the rocky saddle is now melting in the summer. The hut is currently closed and will have to be demolished.
“The City in the age of Hyperobjects” Theisis project at the IAAC in Barcelona, Peter Trummer design critic
This view of an informal city project would seem a candidate for design in the Anthropocene. A favela / farmstead in Brazil covers extended an area of landscape today and will leave a thin sedimentary layer in the future. The traces it will leave behind will most likely consist of building material entangled with plant material, and it will hopefully identifiable to geologists in the future. Assuming this to be an area built and inhabited by a poor segment of the global population, one might still call it dwellings by and for the human species, in this case the settlement will be very vulnerable to storms and mudslides.
Some criteria for evaluating design in the Anthropocene:
What time scales are relevant to design in the Anthropocene? Is it important to slow down and extend the time design addresses? Given the vast differences between human time and geological time, how can design address geological time?
Should design thinking for the Anthropocene adopt the same point of view as the examples of geo-fiction described above : that of looking back from a distant future (The Earth After Us, Latour) usually after the extinction of humanity?
What impacts can Anthropocenic design have? Will it provide habitability during a period of climate change? Can it create “arks” to protect the web of life? Where might they be located?
What role would advanced technologies play in design? How might design address differences in wealth? Would sophisticated technologies only exacerbate inequalities?
Is design in the Anthropocene simply an extension of the “green” / sustainable ideas of today? What building materials would make sense? What energy / food systems? Would cities function differently?
Architecture at its best is about providing a constructed environment which, on the one hand, contributes as little as possible to further ecological destruction, and on the other produces spatial and aesthetic experiences that enable new forms of subjectivity and new forms of social engagement to emerge. An architecture for the Anthropocene would have to address Latour’s concept of “sensitivity”.
The End of the World
If the world as we know it has ended how can we even begin to think about how we might respond and be responsible in a future world? How do we give an account of the future if it depends on descriptions of a past that has not yet occurred? What does it mean to have developed materials, industries, technologies and activities that even once we are gone promise to be highly disruptive for a future far longer than all of human history? (Tyszczuk, R.A. (2016) Anthropocene Unconformities)
Thomas M. Disch’s 334 takes place in the 2020s and revolves around the residents of a public housing project on New York’s Lower East Side,“They talk about the end of the world,” Disch writes, “the bombs and all, or if not the bombs then about the oceans dying, and the fish, but have you ever looked at the ocean? I used to worry, I did, but now I say to myself—so what. So what if the world ends? … The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it’s been lovely. I mean it. Nobody tries to bother you. You can relax. You know what? I like the end of the world.”