TBT: envelope
D/A: explicative
While theorists such as Mark Whigley asks us to rethink ecological cocepts of the House (i.e. prosthetics), Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical ideas on space perhaps has an answer. If Sloterdijk were to respond to Whigley’s call he would claim that, “we are simply not capable of continuing the old wolrd cosmology of ancient Europe that rested on equating the house and the home with the world.” Instead of deep ecological undersrtanding of a human world constituting a shared house for all living creatures, Sloterdijk believes the universe is “made up of millions of closely demarcated soap bubbles that overlap and intersect everywhere.”
While one might think of Bucky Fuller’s geodesic strutures, Sloterdijk spherical spaces is more of an metaphor for how humans have sought to create specific kinds of protecive inwards looking enviorments that inevitably interact with one another. In his Sphere Trilogy he further explores this endeavor taken up by humans:
“The Spharen project is about the creation of a specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of existential space around themselves. Urban spaces are a humanoied enviornment where nature is completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within cities that you might normally expleect to feel in nature. In the 3rd volume o Spharen, in a long chapter titled ‘The Foam City’, I try to describe these multiplicites of modern life in terms of foam-making - all inidivuals live in a specific bubble within a communicating foam.”
Critical to Sloterdijk’s conception of space is modernity’s obessesion with explication. This is the process whereby something which has been taken for granted is brought to the fore, made manifest, and open and fully described. Science and technology work in tandem, which may appear to be a progressive tool for modernity to free itself from its own background of anxiety. However, modernity remains trapped in a continual reliance on “innovative” technology for its explications. This reliance in turn creates more anxiety and urgency to justify experiments though violent means that are euphemestically termed research and innovation- in other words, atmoterroism.
In Air/Condition, Solterdijk shows the parrallism between these atmoterroist explications of culture and technology. Critical moments in modern aesthetic are Dali and the Surrealists, Kasimir Malevich’s art works, and Elias Caneti’s remarks on Herman Broch.
“Aesthetic modernity is a procedure of applying force not against people or things, but against unexplained cultural relations. It organizes waves of attackes against all encompassing attitudes such as faith, love, and moral rectitude, as well as pseudo-evident categories such as form, content, image, work and art (79).”
Meanwhile, technological explications appear in the form of the 1915 gas wars of Germany. Warfare is no longer targeted to combatants but also to non-combatants and their enviornment. Atmoterroism makes no distinction betwen people, plants, animals but instead compromises a form of violence against the very human ambient enviornemnt (air, water, temperature) without which people cannot exist! Extensions of this explication would later follow in beningn forms such as the chemical sprays for agro-industiral purposes but would later be militarized into nuclear weapons and Pentagon papers proposals for weather warfare. Even more sublte examples of explication have infiltrated our lives such as weather reports, interior “air design” techniques (i.e., airconditioning, refridgerators, cooling fans), and global greenhouse effects. Air conditions have now been made explicit in order to directly modfiy the mood of its airspace users.
What does all this talk of creatings interiors for spheres, atmoterroist explications, and air have to do with architecture? Sloterdijk would likely claim that modernity renders the issue of the house explicit. If there was a difinitive moment of this kind of space making, he would point to Benjimin’s description of the rise of bougeoise culture in his arcades proejct. The bourgeoise in their salons wanting to absorb everything that was exterior into their interiors. Their aim was to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an inteior that contains their total world. This is analogous to the way Sloterdijk talks of humans creating their own immunologies of bubbles, foams, and spheres that all inevitably interact with one another. Humans are always trying to create and find a protective yet connective enviornment. Thus, the evolution of explicative spaces starting from the the salons of the Flanuer, the primitive arcades of Paris, Paxton’s Cystal Palance, the Shopping Mall, to the Stadium.
What does all this seemingly inward looking space making mean for the future of the traditional house and its relation to the city? First, the apartment maybe the latest stage of sphere making evolution as everything is drawn into the apartment: the world and household blend. If a one-person existence can succeed at all, it is only because of an architectural support that turns the apartment itself into an entire world prosthetic. Perhaps more intimate and confined types of spaces are likely to arise in say cryogenic freezig pods, coffins, of even space stations.
Second, the exodus of humans to the city will continue, as they move from its rural niches of natural air-envelope houses and re-settlement into cramped climate controlled apartments of the city. The proces of explication with regard to housing has lead to concerns of the quality of the built envionrment which is all very usefull and beneficial. However, the result has been an self-consciousness and attendent unease with our immediate physcial enviornment. Inevitably, the people living in these apartments also begin to feel very strongly that their own protecitve spheres are endangerd by the prescence of too many other spheres which are pressed against each other and destroy each other. At an extreme, explication can lead to alienation and a feeling of homelessness in the world.
Questions arising....
Other questions arise however over the nature of Sloterdijk’s explict. Should we really be afraid of modernity’s obsession with explication if we are just as well a part of the process? Even if modernity attempts explication, what if is not understood, not agreed upon, or simply wrong? What if there are multiple and perhaps competeing or contradictory explications?
Are these series of quetsions then where the realm of polictics steps into support Sloterdijk’s other spherical realms? Certainly Sloterdijk’s study points to previous readings with concerns of totalitairan regimes taking over the humanity of the individual. If we are to be pessimistic, power is benignly given up by the individual for the service of transparency in many of the aging post-industrial democratic states of the world. If we are to be optimistic, explication can lead to a more robust and participatory state.
As architects, are we drop the whole notion on in-out dichotomy and soley focus on the interior? Isn’t there a similar profession that has corned the market on this area?
Finally, is it possible to make something implicit?
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