Ecologies of Excess: An Excerpt from a 22nd-Century Architecture History Class

摘要

During the 21st century, the 20th-century architectural principle of'machines for living' was replaced by 'organisms for living'. Self-sufficient, sustainable prototypes that interacted and interchanged resources with the built environment were produced. A logic of 'multiscalar dynamics' replaced the formal and programmatically stagnating relationship of architecture to the city and to the world. There were no more cities inside houses, nor cities as houses. Space became a continuous membrane with a multiplicity of'new natures'. Maps were drawn, new resources were mapped and, with them, architects and buildings became absorbers of all quantifiable and verifiable data. However, the struggle for the control of the new resources perpetuated the same social, political and environmental problems of the century prior.