Design Ecologies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013

I review the thematically-linked articles presented in the current issue, from the perspective of a naïve outsider with dual citizenship in the disciplines of fiction and biology. The parallels Nic Clear (‘Refreshingly Unconcerned With The Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity and Value Judgement: The Utopian Visions of Iain M Banks’ The Culture and Constant’s New Babylon’) draws between the scenarios of Iain Banks’ ‘Culture’ and Nieuwenhuys’s ‘New Babylon’ may highlight cognitive estrangement as a prerequisite (or perhaps, an inevitable side-effect) of Utopia. Nandita Mellamphy compares the biological ecology central to Frank Herbert’s Dune books with Laruelle’s ‘generic ecology’ in ‘Terra-&-Terror Ecology: Secrets from the Arrakeen Underground’; while I have misgivings about the misappropriation of biological terminology, I do not dispute the central assertion that the only path to success in an ecological context may be through surrender. Felix Robbins’ evolving architectural constructs (‘Unstable grounds: investigating ulterior spaces for practicing’) strongly echo – perhaps inadvertently – the ‘biomorphs’ created by Richard Dawkins to illustrate evolutionary principles. Ben Woodward’s ‘The new curses of tomb space’ – a rumination on subterranean aspects of both scientific exploration and the environmental consequences of nuclear technology along deep timescales – is, of all the papers presented, perhaps the most literally tied to the issue’s theme of ‘Chthonic Deluge’. However, all four works may be more tightly bound by evolutionary metaphors than by subterranean ones.

Utopia has been one of the dominant ideas for many of the avant-garde movements that, since the enlightenment, have sought to use architectural means as part of a strategy to create an ‘ideal’ social order. If the utopian has lost its significance within the architecture of late capitalism, this article looks at ways in which that tradition is being maintained within the discourse of Science Fiction, where utopian concepts are bound to speculative engagements with new and imagined technologies. One of the most sustained recent attempts to develop and explore utopian ideas can be found in the science fiction novels and stories by Iain M. Banks set in the Culture. The Culture is a space-dwelling society developed by Banks over a series of nine full-length novels and a collection of short stories. The Culture is a technologically advanced post-scarcity civilization supervised by powerful Artificial Intelligences (AIs) called Minds and comprising trillions of ‘humanoid’ subjects living together with various forms of machine ‘life’ forms. In these stories, Iain M. Banks shows himself to be one of the most innovative writers on a possible future; while his writing is clearly fiction, it explicitly draws upon scientific, philosophical and political ideas, as well as extensive use of nanotechnology, genetic engineering and augmentation, augmented and virtual realities, and numerous forms of AI.

The article starts by mapping out a definition of science fiction with respect to Darko Suvin’s ‘novum’ and the concept, developed by Frederic Jameson following Suvin, that the utopian is itself a sub-genre of science fiction, and goes on to suggest that some of the most significant speculative avant-garde architectures of the last 100 years should be considered ‘as’ full-blown works of science fiction. This argument is developed through an analysis of one of the most far-reaching and politically explicit utopian projects – Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, a society based on the concept of Homo Ludens and the use of automation that clearly shows the existence of a number of ‘novum’. The final section of the article is a detailed examination of Banks’ the Culture and shows how many of the themes of New Babylon reappear in Banks’ Culture novels. The purpose of looking at Banks in detail is to see how he is exploring, albeit through fiction, ambitious spatial and cultural models predicated on a post-scarcity civilization, as part of a direct lineage from New Babylon, and how this is a direct response to the very problems that are facing contemporary society. The article concludes by arguing that if architecture is to re-invigorate itself in the twenty-first century it needs to embrace its links to speculative discourses such as science fiction.

In this article, I use Frank Herbert’s Dune novels to exemplify a rather dark eco-vision of planetary ecology. The chthonic planetary eco-vision is necessarily terrifying, in that humanity is demoted from its role as ‘steward’ of a personified nature (mother nature), i.e., as caring intermediary between nature and culture, to a role in which the human is nothing more than fuel and fodder – bait and lure – for what could be called the ‘Great Ecology’ of planetary regeneration and desertification. Dune shows the dark side of the ‘Green’ will ecologize, which I argue involves the necessary violation of the stated values of eco-conservationist visions and ambitions.

This article investigates alternative ways of working. It is a reflection on the contradictions of architectural practice and the opportunities for design that acknowledges these contradictions productively. The article continues an investigation into the construction of an architectural project – the contradictory requirements for the ‘construction’ of architecture and the opportunities in dissolving these requirements by design. It develops as an enquiry into the possibilities of actively acknowledging the contradictions and ambiguities of the discipline as a means to go on, as well as design that operates within the slippages, translations and movements between the ‘construction of a project’ to tentatively speculate on alternative and temporary locations and spaces of practice. It elaborates on ongoing design work of a ‘dwelling’ and the explicit processes, choices and techniques that move between the construction of narrative, site, material and space/time. The article argues that the discipline of architecture is unavoidably ungrounded – with the relevance and approach to practising lying exposed within the wider context of cultural production and a ‘deluge’ of multiple and relative shifting landscapes of ‘project’. It argues, however, that this does not justify merely reconstructing the grounds of the discipline in other terms – whether that be nostalgic, technological or superficial. Instead, it argues that other spaces for practising must be inhabited – spaces that make use of the ‘deluge’ and the ambiguities of practice and suggest alternative approaches to understanding and creating a sufficiency and productivity of making architecture.

In the 1980s, the United States Department of Energy created The Human Interference Task Force, a group of semioticians, physicists, science-fiction writers and anthropologists tasked with creating an everlasting warning to prevent future beings from unintentionally disturbing nuclear waste repositories. The proposed systems ranged from warning orbital satellites to glowing radioactive cat companions, to setting up an atomic priest hood, to surrounding the site with giant black thorns. These paranoic strategies of radical closure can be further examined in comparison and contradiction to the openness of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in which massive quantities of pure water are housed in order to detect the passage of weakly interacting neutrinos. This site of inviting invasion is at the same time isolated and buried deep in the earth. These two examples demonstrate that the attempt to combat and the attempt to welcome contingency involve complex and twisted modes of closure and openness as demonstrated by the work of Reza Negarestani. By investigating these models, I hope to investigate how the intimacies of geological formation cross into and disrupt the purported stability of space (both as outer space and abstract space) in relation to chemistry, both inorganic and astrobiological.