When Bacteria Rule the World: Notes Toward a Trans-species Architecture
Closing lecture in the Monstrum series coordinated by Emmanuelle Raoul-Duval and Jacques-Marie Ligot and organised by Ensa Paris-Est
Western architecture has always been understood in terms of the body - specifically, the athletic body of the white man, endlessly redesigned from Renaissance treatises to modern architectural manifestos, from Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier - a perfected body immersed in geometric systems of proportions - a fiction that excludes most of humanity.
Human-centered design sounds good, but it has been terrible for humans, other species and the planet. The human is not a thing but an infinitely complex, constantly evolving trans-species collaboration. Humans are just a bag of bacteria, and bacteria have been around for billions of years, while humans have arrived very recently and may already be disappearing. We are nothing without all these foreign bodies. We live in them more than they live in us.
What would a probiotic architecture be like ? It would probably be like our intestine, more porous than the prophylactic attitude of modern architecture. We used to live intimately with all the bacteria in the soil, plants and other animals. And we might want to reconnect with this diversity of bacteria, embracing them.
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