Design Ecologies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012

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Ground begins with the provisional premise that our environments are composed of a multiplicity of grounds, but are generally unforeseen since they arise with the emergence of the species that forms them. Ground and species are one. Through an understanding that objects cannot be fully explained in terms of their material constituents and the energy within them, objects seem to be something over and above the material components that make them up, but at the same time this can be expressed only through the organization of matter and energy. We can also distinguish that different participants have different umvelten, even though they share the same environment. This paradox enables architecture practices to go beyond shaping geometry, to shaping the internal structure of material. Two abandoned jetties, in the River Thames in London, are used as the context for this investigation. This enquiry considers the jetties as a harbinger for a more meaningful ecology we can somehow tune into through our manual, digital and biological technologies.

This is not a ruin fetish. At present, an Internet search of ‘architecture’ and ‘decay’ will return splendidly glossed up images of a dying Detroit Motor City, abandoned asylums or moulding bunkers. Looking closely, these photographs fetishize architecture’s ageing process, exalting the material degradation as symbolic portents of our own mortality while a ghosted humanity lurks in empty doorways and windows in place of human figures. Here is the building in ruins, the object of architecture in limbo. Except – what if the ruin was not an end to the life of a building but with a shift in perspective suggested a potential for reanimation? Long after the building is abandoned, its materials continue to transmute in an active cycle, until all that remains is dust. It is within this active cycle that there is an opportunity to rethink our definition of ruin and engage with decay at the cellular level as both a trace and register of an empty building.

Architecture is made to support certain activities. This article looks at ways in which questions of the uncertain or the indeterminate might be considered in the design process. The architectural drawing is a rehearsal of the architecture it represents. The discussion here is about how the maker and the tools search for ways of drawing to rehearse the sorts of engagement we might have with architecture that could nurture an indeterminate condition. This is studied through the invention of seven types of drawing instrument. The early versions represent an indeterminate relationship with architecture while the later instruments nurture an indeterminate engagement through the act of drawing. Indeterminacy is a condition of uncertainty. At first the instruments concentrate on working with the sublime, an existential uncertainty. In order to understand the spatial potential of picturing there is extended research into the natural history diorama. In parallel to lessons on projective geometry, the dioramas provide a convincing case for the power of the uncanny, an intellectual uncertainty. The lessons from these studies, embodied in Instruments Two and Three, achieved what had been set out in the initial question but also provided new questions, especially about the experience of making the drawing. The later instruments project paint rather than light and provide an engagement with the person who is drawing that is analogous to the condition that is being drawn. The process of drawing becomes a rehearsal for inhabiting the architecture.

A number of 'ecological' theories of cinema have emerged in recent years, many of which remain bound by antiquated models of figure and ground. These models typically belong to a pre-cinematic aesthetics of nature, sustaining an image of humanity uninformed by the recent prospect of species self-extinction. We hereby propose a new model for conceiving of this relation, one based upon Nick Land's post-psychoanalytic notion of geotrauma, and which suggests that the earth as ground gives rise not just to territories but moreover to processes of ungrounding. These processes are recapitulated in the human history of a traumatic relation to this (non)ground, suggesting a properly geophilosophical understanding of cinema that observes catastrophism as a genetic principle. Of consequence for any attempt to theorize human artifice and design under the present 'environmental' moment, such an understanding presupposes a thoroughgoing revaluation of creative practice and process. We hereby provide a reading of three recent films in which the figures or iconography of the natural environment reflect this 'revolt' against ecological fixity. Visions of catastrophic environmental change force us to reconceive of the very concept of nature as something fundamentally at odds with our perception of what is natural. We thus combine Land's theory of geotrauma with Deleuze's conception of cinema to argue that the cinematic image testifies to a 'pantraumatic self-movement', one by which the relations between parts forming the conditioned or ecological whole are subjected to a universal ungrounding, and therefore by which something necessarily unconditioned escapes its 'natural' conditions. This geophilosophical emphasis upon escape, flight or deterritorialization should replace the ecological aesthetics of figure and ground with a perceptual catastrophism, disrupting every naturalizing appeal to an harmonic relationship between the human and non-human, cultural and natural worlds.