Bodies of Air
or Architecture of Air: Materiality, Ecology and Technoscience.
Purchase at: ACTAR
Foreword by Philip Ursprung; 768 pp. Assembles an interdisciplinary roster of philosophers, artists, and architects — including Santiago Sierra, Timothy Morton, Emanuele Coccia, Erik Conway, Astrida Neimanis, Dominic Boyer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and New Territories/R&Sie(n) among others. Bodies of Air opens with Santiago Sierra's 52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City's Air — a beige gradient recording a year of accumulated pollution — as evidence that air is not empty space but architecture's most neglected material, the medium through which what Daisy Hildyard calls our "second body" extends across the planet. Author Rafael B. Durán and invited co-editor Javier García-Germán trace how Guattari's ecosophy, Latour's actor-network theory, and Sloterdijk's atmospheric philosophy pushed them from the vague, infrastructural language of "atmosphere" toward the concrete materiality of "air" as a sharper critical instrument. Bracketed by philosophy and aesthetics, the book organizes contributions from Timothy Morton, Emanuele Coccia, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Olafur Eliasson, among others, across four further entry points — science, technology, body, and politics — testing whether reading architecture through air's materiality can ground a new, realist architectural criticism, working no longer from spatial coordinates but from within the material world itself. The volume ultimate aim is framing air as an under-theorized architectural material central to a “new ecological horizon” for the discipline.
Why do we advertise a topic with such a title, Bodies of Air, that holds no meaning in architectural design? A field where material solidity has traditionally championed all forms of knowledge? Why does air possess the intense materiality—rich and deep, small and large, ordinary and extraordinary—that we notice with every breath we take—yet Western culture has historically regarded it as empty space? Or, put differently: how can we work on architecture beyond the idea of space when we are clearly immersed in deep materiality? Air is a material, just like brick, steel, concrete, glass, and titanium. But with air, we are not outside it; we are inside it. This ecological shift within the very materiality of air sparks a series of dilemmas and contradictions, inviting new ways to question architecture, while its ecological articulations still rely more on stories than on facts. From a post-contemporary voice, this book becomes a critical glossary of essays and projects, through which a curated tableau of artists, philosophers, dancers, scientists, humanists, technicians, historians, politicians, and architects unfold around how to think and design architecture when the historical coordinates that once situated its discourses are lost, and how to discuss the world through architecture’s lens when the future seems more real than the present.
Contributors:
Philip Ursprung, Timothy Morton, Emanuele Coccia, New Territories/R&Sie(n)…, Diller & Scofidio + Renfro, Erik M. Conway, Rafael B. Durán, New Territories/M4, Ángel Borrego Cubero & Natalie Jeremijenko, OFICINAA, Salmaan Craig, Kiel Moe, HOME-OFFICE, Andrea Faraguna, Astrida Neimanis, Marie Bardet, Javier García-Germán, Dècostered & Rahm Associated, TAKK, Anna Orbanic, Cymene Howe & Dominic Boyer, AGENCY, Carlos Flick, Federico Soriano & Dolores Palacios Architects, Steven Connor, Victoria McReynolds, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Jay Zweig & Rafael B. Durán, Santiago Sierra, Francois Roche, S/he
