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Which Would You Want?

snowmit

photo credit: slworking2

Impromptu guest post! I’m taking the liberty of reposting this comment about 3 by Jonah from still crapulent.

This cyborg-architecture tension relies on defining architecture as a discipline dealing only with static structures, however. I’m (clearly) not up on my architectural theory, speculative or otherwise, so I don’t know to what extent this definition has been problematized, but it seems to me to be deceptive.

Why must we restrict “architecture” only to stationary built environments? Why do we think of the camper van primarily as a vehicle, as opposed to a building? Are there other productive ways of thinking about architecture and mobility? It is certainly relevant to thinking about the architecture of temporary structures, or does it somehow cease to be a matter of architectural consideration when it becomes a collapsable, portable building?

On the flip side, walking houses, floating castles, fortresses on wheels (baba yaga’s chickenleg house, the castle in the sky, howl’s moving castle, etc.) abound in myth, fantasy and sci-fi, but what about modern cruise ships, themselves larger in size and occupancy than the majority of stationary buildings one encounters? Or a space station, which is necessarily mobile, or for that matter, any large (existing or projected) space cruiser? Vessel v. domicile? The Nostromo? The Death Star?

Obviously in -many- of these cases there is still the an imbalance in the issue of investment of effort/resources/capital at work, but it hardly applies across the board, or at least applies variably enough as to complicate the dichotomy being set up.

On a non-terrestrial, or further a non-resource-providing plane, need the homesteader not be nomadic?

Originally posted as a comment by stillcrapulent on Quiet Babylon using Disqus.

Quite right.

I still think there is still some room for me to make a parallel between the self-reliant cyborg and nomad v. the infrastructure reliant building-dweller and farmer. After all, most of Jonah’s examples are pretty fantastical. Sort of edge cases for the blurry line between self and environmental intervention.

But I can’t really have it both ways, can I? Not given that I spent 2 calling the extremely nomadic Apollo program an example of architectural thinking.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

snowmit

photo credit: estherase

As I conceive it, the conflict of cyborgs and architecture is the story of nomads and homesteaders, recast in very 21st century terms. Cyborgs are fundamentally mobile. They are individuals who can go anywhere and adapt easily. Architectural artifacts stay put. So to, the people who depend on and must maintain them.

There has been a deep distrust between these groups for as long as there has been agriculture, I imagine.

The morality story of the ants and the grasshopper is a lesson about the importance of an architectural kind of hard work. The ants, one of earth’s other infrastructural species, are cast as the hard-working foresightful protagonists. The grasshopper, failing to anticipate the future, dies in the snow.

Here are some alternate versions of the story: 1) When the winter comes, the grasshopper leaves for warmer climes, returning with the spring. 2) The grasshopper is actually a locust and a horde of them descends on the ant stores, stripping all the food before moving on to the next place. When winter comes, the ants starve in their empty corridors.

It’s Ranchers vs Indians, Romans vs Barbarians, Farmers vs Swarms, Europe vs Gypsies, Bees vs Bears, Ottomans vs Bedouins, Locals vs Tourists.

To built a home, to run a farm, this is a capitally intensive project. You invest an enormous amount of effort into moulding a stretch of territory to your particular plans. You have to wait quite some time between the sowing and the reaping. Ant-like patience and foresight are your watchwords.

To be a nomad requires a a different kind of watchword. You arrive at a patch of land, use it, and then leave it to regenerate. Foresight is the ability to know when to move, where to go, and when to come back.

Small wonder that sparks fly when there is an encounter between these approaches. Homesteaders don’t want the nomads exploiting all that investment in seeds, roads, sewers, policing. Nomads were planning to pass through and now there are fences, tunnels, and dudes with Tasers.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

snowmit

photo credit: KayVee.INC
In the 1960s NASA was still entertaining the idea that humans might actually go to space and, you know, stay. While they were designing and building rocket ships – little bubbles of earth to carry us up – they were pondering an alternative. Rocketships and moonbases are a fundamentally architectural approach to the problem of space travel. What if instead of making a human-friendly environment IN space, we adapted humans TO space? If you make the people more durable, you don’t need to build costly space craft, you don’t need to terraform planets and moons. You can stay as long as you want.

The cyborgs envisioned by NASA don’t look like the chrome gods and monsters of the 1980s. It’s the 1960s and the tools being investigated are plastics and drug regimens. Finding ways to make people breathe slower but think faster. Changing biochemistry to maximize efficiency throughout the organism. Forget food pills and DDT, this was true better living through chemistry.

Meanwhile, in the popular culture, super villains were busy building increasingly elaborate infrastructure to mirror their plans for world domination. Moon bases and volcano bases. Everything is very base-like. These are very cold-war fantasies. Very architectural. You will KNOW we were here because we will LEAVE MONUMENTS (and blow up yours).

Matt Jones points out (click on that link, you won’t be sorry) that this is changing. A lot of today’s villains get by without secret bases. They jump straight to blowing up our stuff without having the decency to build stuff of their own for us to hit.

Asymmetrical warfare is very cybernetic. Every guerrilla needs to be very mobile and adaptable. And what do they do when they strike? They blow up buildings and knock down monuments.

Sure, Al Qaeda has secret cave bases, but the bastards keep abandoning them. These are camp sites. The Nazis had official architecture.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.