IN THIS

]SSUE

ARCHITECTtJRAL DTSIGN

GUEST-TDITED

BY

JON GOODBtjN WITH JIREMY

SCARCITY: ARCHITICTURE

IN AN

TltL

AND

DEL]ANA lOSSIFOVA

AOE OF DEPLEIING RESOURCTS

Tt]ITORIAL

Helen Castle
ABOUT TilE 6UEST.EDITORS

Jon Goodbun uith Jeremy

and Deljana Iossifooa
INTRODUCTiOl,l

Till

Themes of Scarcity

Jon Goodbun, Jeremy Till and Deljana lossifova

Scarciry and Abundance: Urban

Agriculture in Cuba and the US

Andrd Viljoen and

Katrin Bobn

EOITORIAL BOARO \trrili Alsop IJenise Bratton Paul Brislin M*rk Burry

zz

Cities, Natures and the Political Imaginarv

Maria Kaika and Erik

Stoyngedouzo
Resources:

z8 Architecture and Relational

Andri

Clhaszar

Nigel Coato
Peter Crxrh Teddy Cruz

Towards a New Materialist Practice Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke

Mu liordharr ]l assimiliano !'uksris

Edrvin IJeathcote

34 38

Visualising Ecological Literrcy Jody Boebnert Invisible Agency Jeremy

Ilichrel

I{ensel

Anthonr. Hunt Chuies Jencks

Bob

Jlurveli
JJerkel

Till andThtjana

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Systemic Diagramming: Arr Approach to Decoding Urban Ecologies Ulyssu Sengupta and Deljana Iossifoaa

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The most immediate impact of scarcity on architecture is the insufficient suppiy of building materials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin "lasc[rke explain, this requires an engagement with more than the direct influences on the exhaustion of natural resources. Looking beyond the conventional capitalist modei of flows driven by 'the market', they look at how new ideas on materialism are demanding a radical revision of the relationship between matter and social, economic and political forces.
Construction site of heat lunnel, Arcosanti, Arizona, 2010 Araosanti remains a hybrid of building site, ecological architecture, urbanism school and experimental community. The material naiurelculture of the construction siie (maiter, tools. objects, etc) coexists in permanence with the compleied and working parts of the experimental site.

Aspects of thinking around scarcity and the built environment necessarily demand a consideration of building materials.

But thinking about building materials and scarcity is much more than a consideration of the availability or affordability of commodities. Rather, it demands an engagement with extended processes in space and time: from mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and plantations, via refineries, factories and
technologies ofinconceivable variety, to assemblages on building sites and, following periods ofuse and ongoing change through

they suggest that samething passive is being manipulated by samelne active; that inert matter is being handled by humans, or quasi-alive entities like'the market'. Against such politically and economically convenient dualisms, an emerging discourse broadly referred to as a 'new materialism' is demanding a rudical revision of how we conceive of matter and life. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, whose seminal 1985 book on Order Out of Cbaoshas become a landmark text in rethinking the nature of material process, proposed a theory ofmatter that calls for a study of 'the timing of space', and 'leads to a new view of matter in which matter is no longer the passive inert substance described in the mechanistic world view, but is associated with spontaneous activity. This change is so profound that ... we can really speak about a new dialogue of man with nature.'2 And indeed, disciplines as diverse as quanfum mechanics, the cognitive sciences, ecology, complexity and neo-cybernetics suggest that we need to find new paradigms for thinking about the unfolding dynamic reality of material processes, and our relationship to those processes. More recently, a more explicitly politicised discourse has built and expanded on these insights, including Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature, Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's collection of essays on Neu Materialisrzs.3 In these models we find attempts

occupation, on to abandonment, demolition and/or recycling. Clearly any consideration of buiiding materials necessarily entails thinking about both the natural and social relationships
and networks that architectural materials are entr,vined

with and

produced through.
occur when resource flows are

A basic systems-theory-based analysis suggests that scarcities in some way constrained or

exhausted.l The supposed ability of 'the market'to ensure optimal flow and distribution of material resources is a central

claim of the capitalist economy, but both the ideology of market efficiency, and the terminology of flows and cycles, with their connotations of linearity and smoothness, are equally misleading. Material flows are never smooth: rather, they are convoluted and complex, because matter quite 1itera1ly constifutes and emhodies
economic, political, social and even mental configurations. Moreover, notions of flow and throughput are misleading in that

Paolo $oleri, South Vault, Arcosanti, Arizana,1971-2 ln 1969, the itaiian-Amerian architect Paoio Scieri and his research practice, tlre Cosantl Foundaiion, bought a large deserl siie near Cordes Junction, AriTcna. ln 1970 work began on what they describe as an urban laboralory, an experimeniai siructure for 5,000 people called Arcosanti. Constructi0n v/ork has since c0ntinued thrcugh the labour cf volunteers, studenis and residents. Tlle South Vault was ihe first major compieted structure, involving an innovative siit'casting concrete process. The traking of the sudace motifs is an lntegral part oi the constructioil prOcess: pigment is layered cn the positive sili fonrl and absorbed by the corcrete vJhile ii cures. The sili is then relnoved to create an inhabitaLrle space below the concrete shell"

to theorise the fact that, far from human cognition being the in the wor1d, it is matter itse]f which seems to require some conception of performative agency. Other writers, such as spatial geographer Doreen Massey and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, have also paid attention to the different but interrelated temporalities and agencies ofsocial,
sole source of agency

of, and indeed well positioned to stage, a more fundamental political and ecological examination ofthe issues at stake in both relative and absolute material scarcity. This is not straightforward, however, and requires the exploration of new forms ofarchitectural practice and production situated within the actor networks of modern material economies

material and geological formations.a Bennett claims that'the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies ofconquest and consumptioris and there are concrete reasons why this matters to architecture. It is worth recalling the staggering numbers associated with the construction industry's consumption of materials: around 40
per cent ofglobal material and energy consumption is a direct

ofwhat are currently distinct practices of architectural historiography, critique and professional design services, together with other disciplines. If 'reality doesnt come with its boundaries already in place', as Bertell Ollman reminds us, then perhaps it is up to architectural researchers to trace new disciplinary boundaries in the world, practically and conceptually.5 And the choice of
and ecologies, through a hybridisation boundaries and systems which might define architecture and

result ofbuilding activity (and around 10 per cent ofthat is waste), while the vast majority of the remaining 60 per cent of the global economy is inevitably used within the context of the built environment. Of course, many of the real innovations that have occurred in recent years concerning the development ofmore iustainable design methods, materials and technologies,
and new way-s of sourcing, reusing and recycling them, provide some answers to problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation. But architecture as a distinctly social form ofmaterial practice and knowledge is both in need

its materiality, is political.

The recent emergence ofa new cross-disciplinary genre ofstudies broadly referred to as'urban political ecology' is an important example of this process of reflection and redefinition. The authors involvedT make the case for a comprehensive rethinking of notions of urban metabolism, a radical questioning of the dichotomy of 'natural' and'social' ecologies, 'natural' and 'man-made' environments and other
such binaries. Instead, urban processes are conceived as open and dynamic metabolisms spanning very different domains hydrological, food, transport, etc - mapping these systems as

Tailing pond of major open-cast mine, Bagdad, Arizona, 2010 The a(ificial landscape has its own geological time: successive expansiDn and iailjng levels can be read off semi-submerged flatural and man-made features in the landscape and the hybrid ecology that has formed over time.

Copper processing facility, Bagdad, Arizona, 2010 Buildlngs are just one node in an extended ecology of often hidden indusirial processes that continually transtorm the planet around us. The production of copper, for exainple, eniails the transformation of immense

landscaps.

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contested political spaces that necessarily include non-human actors and factors.

called natural disasters (Jordan in New Orleans), and the sheer

Underlying much of these new materialist and ecological

discourses are relational network conceptions of material, biological and social actors that can be found in the work of Manuel De Landa, Bruno Latour and a variety of texts inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari (and which typically feature more or less substantial references to Alfred North Whitehead, Baruch de Spinoza,

absurdity of late-capitalist material culture (Jordan's'Running the Numbers').8 Their images are aimed simultaneously at the shock ofmaterial excesses in late-capitalist society (the
correlate of consumerism and the economic growth paradigm)
and at a sense ofwonder and astonishment, a sense ofbeing immersed and part of but also lost in a torrent of matter, materials, things. Their work also indicates that this new perspective on matter includes (rather than, as is often argued, excludes) a significant ethical dimension. While we need to dismantle andlor transform the conceptual opposition between nature and culture (and indeed that between natural and

Gottfried Lelbniz and Karl Marx). In work by authors such Erik Swyngedouw and Matthew Gandy, what becomes evident is the increasingly complex condition ofcontemporary capitalism, and the fact that iftraditional distinctions such as 'nature'and'culture'can seem problematic to us today, this is precisely because capital itselfis penetrating the depths of
as

social science, and the humanities and sciences), we can in no

matter-

In different though related ways, Bennett, Coole, Frost and

Ingold all argue that we must develop the ability to imagine, empathise with and experience matter in new ways. This is perhaps also what photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan are trying to achieve, in their own particular ways, through their work: to capture the'vibrancy'and, one might say, the'vertigo of matter', in the vastness of mining
operations and manufacturing plants (Burqmsky), the hopeless entanglement ofmatter, in scenes ofurban devastation after so-

from our responsibilities towards the non-human world. Indeed, the enfolding (not levelling) of the ontological status ofhuman beings, things and assemblages (in Deleuzet sense), and the processual, relational, metabolic conception ofthe world confer more rather than less ethical responsibilities upon us. What might this mean in architectural terms, then? Perhaps the recent interest in the phenomenology ofhands-on making, and at the same time developments around digital manufacturing processes, where dematerialised and material processes seem to be nvo sides of the same coin, may be seen as signs of a new materialist sensitivity in architecture. New
sense absolve ourselves

Open-cast copper mine, Bagdad, Arizona, 2010 An area prepared for the blasting of rock by explosives.

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with hylozoic bio-materials like protocells suggest to develop notjust new technologies, but new ways of conceiving and perceiving the world as a dynamic, interrelated continuum of vibrant matter, bodies and minds.e And we can even begin to see new forms ofarchitectural practice emerging (albeit not necessarily direcdy engaged wirh the concerns of ecological urbanism) in Rem Koolhaast AMO, in the Crimson office ofarchitectural historians, and in the design activist research of muf or Damon Richt Centre for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and other work towards a'critical urban ecology'and an
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Though none ofthese innovations in modes ofarchitectural practice capture the firll combination ofquestions raised here concerning material ecologies, nonetlreless it seems that contemporary questions around different aspects of scarcity in the built environment mean that this is a good time for architecture to embrace a new, materialist mode of practice: one that is affirmative (rather than remedial or negative), critical (rather than dystopian) and new (rather than post'), and that lives up to the very vibrancy and vertigiaous nature of the matter that makes architecture. o

Hennaux abandoned quarry, near Viareggio, Tuscany, 2007

The Apuan Alps have been quarried for marble for use iil building siirce Roman times, producing a distinct landscape. Abandoned technoiogies are embedded within the landscape

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The landscape sutrounding the abandoned quarry is laced with the incisions of major mining operations. These produced iandscapes constitute a continuing architectural space, a sutreal siage-set for illicit teenage activity, touristic trespassing and motorcross riding. Local rivers are infused with more or less toxic effluent from these operations.

Contemp0rary q uestions a rou nd different aspects of sca rcity in the bu i lt environment mean that this is a good time for architecture to embrace a new, materialist mode of practice.

Ten O 2012 John Wiley & SorE Lnd. lmag6 o Karin J6.ike